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Memorial for David Johnson of the San Quentin 6
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A Trial Date Is Set on August 26 for Alejandro Orellana, Join the Call for National Protests to Drop the Charges!
https://stopfbi.org/news/a-trial-date-is-set-on-august-26-for-alejandro-orellana-join-the-call-for-national-protests-to-drop-the-charges/
A trial date of August 26 was set for immigrant rights activist Alejandro Orellana at his July 3 court appearance in front of a room packed with supporters. Orellana was arrested by the FBI on June 12 for protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. He faces up to 5 years in prison for two bogus federal charges: conspiracy to commit civil disorder, and aiding and abetting civil disorder.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is calling for a national day of protests on the first day of Orellana's trial, August 26th, to demand that the charges be dropped. To everyone who believes in the right to free speech, to protest ICE, and to say no to deportations, we urge you to organize a local protest on that day at the nearest federal courthouse.
Orellana has spent much of his adult life fighting for justice for Chicanos, Latinos, and many others. He has opposed the killings of Chicanos and Latinos by the LAPD, such as 14-year-old Jesse Romero, stood against US wars, protested in defense of others targeted by political repression, and has been a longtime member of the activist group, Centro CSO, based out of East LA. His life is full of examples of courage, integrity, and a dedication to justice.
In contrast, the US Attorney who charged him, Bilal Essayli, believes in Trump's racist MAGA vision and does a lot to carry it out. He defended Trump's decision to defy the state of California and deploy the California National Guard to put down anti-ICE protests. Essayli has charged other protesters, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was held on a $50,000 bond.
Another Centro CSO immigrants rights activist, Verita Topete, was ambushed by the FBI on June 26. They served her a warrant and seized her phone. Orellana and his fellow organizers like Topete stand for the community that protested Trump last month. Essayli represents Trump’s attempts to crush that movement.
This case against Orellana is political repression, meant to stop the growth of the national immigrants rights movement. The basis for his arrest was the claim that he drove a truck carrying face shields for protesters, as police geared up to put down protests with rubber bullets. People of conscience are standing with Orellana. because nothing he did or is accused of doing is wrong. There is no crime in protesting Trump, deportations, and ICE. To protest is his - and our - First Amendment right. It’s up to us to make sure that Essayli and Trump fail to repress this movement and silence Orellana's supporters.
Just as he stood up for immigrants last month, we call on everyone to stand up for Orellana on August 26 and demand the charges be dropped. On the June 27 National Day of Action for Alejandro Orellana, at least 16 cities held protests or press conferences in front of their federal courthouses. We’ll make sure there are even more on August 26. In addition to planning local protests, we ask that organizations submit statements of support and to join in the call to drop the charges.
You can find protest organizing materials on our website, stopfbi.org. Please send information about your local protests and any statements of support to stopfbi@gmail.com. We will see you in the streets!
On August 26, Protest at Your Federal Courthouse for Alejandro Orellana!
Drop the Charges Now!
Protesting ICE Is Not a Crime!
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Israeli Critics Say Netanyahu Plan to Capture Gaza City Lacks Clear Aims
There have been vague statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but there is little clarity over the operation.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 11, 2025
The scene on Monday after an Israeli strike killed several Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Since its announcement on Friday, Israel’s plan to capture Gaza City has been roundly criticized inside and outside Israel. Palestinians and foreign leaders say the plan will prolong the war and the suffering of Palestinian civilians. The Israeli left says it will likely endanger hostages still held by Hamas. The Israeli right says it will not do enough to defeat the Palestinian armed group.
Now, a new criticism is emerging within Israel: There is little clarity over what exactly this operation would involve.
While there have been vague proclamations by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s military has yet to complete the tactical battle plan. There has been no public confirmation of how long any occupation of the city will last — or when it will begin, and how it will differ from Israel’s capture of Gaza City in the opening months of the war in 2023.
Intense Israeli strikes continued overnight into Monday, killing several Al Jazeera journalists and forcing the displacement of civilians in some Gaza City neighborhoods. But the Army has not yet mobilized the tens of thousands of military reservists who will most likely be needed to carry out the broader operation. And while Israel has threatened to force out the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still living in Gaza City, it has yet to order their expulsion.
Over the weekend, Mr. Netanyahu doubled down on the threat to capture Gaza City, saying at a press briefing that Israel had “no choice” but to proceed because Hamas had not surrendered.
Yet he gave little further detail about the plan.
“What does Netanyahu want? Does he want a hostage deal or to conquer Gaza?” asked Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s best-known columnists, in an analysis published on Monday in Yediot Ahronot, a centrist broadsheet.
“I don’t understand what the military meaning of ‘seizing control’ is,” Mr. Barnea added. “I’m not sure that anyone in the military does either.”
Regardless of its meaning, Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to continue any kind of war has enraged foreign leaders, some of whom are pushing for Israel to hand over power in Gaza to an international force backed by the United Nations.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a statement on Monday that the expansion of the war constituted “a disaster of unprecedented gravity and a headlong rush into permanent war. “Israeli hostages and the people of Gaza will continue to be the first victims of this strategy.”
Mr. Macron added: “To this end, we propose a U.N.-mandated stabilization mission to secure the Gaza Strip, protect the civilian population, and support Palestinian governance. That alone, Mr. Macron said, “can meet the needs of the people of Gaza and carry out operations to disarm and demilitarize Hamas.”
Mediators are still trying to bring about a truce between Israel and Hamas. Some Israeli officials say that by announcing a major escalation in the conflict while delaying its enactment, Mr. Netanyahu may simply be trying to pressure Hamas into making greater concessions in those negotiations.
The decision to seek control of Gaza City has angered all sides — including Palestinians, Israeli critics of Mr. Netanyahu who say it should never have been made at all and Israeli right-wingers who say the plan does not go far enough.
“The only tangible idea is to protract the war. The details do not matter to Netanyahu,” said Alon Pinkas, an Israeli political commentator and former ambassador.
“The war never had clear political objectives aligned with military operations. There was never an endgame, never a political vision of postwar Gaza,” Mr. Pinkas said in an interview, adding that the latest Israeli proposal “evinces this to its highest and most dangerous form.”
Those at the other end of the political spectrum also decried the lack of detail provided, saying that it showed Mr. Netanyahu was not serious about defeating Hamas.
“The plan is only ‘more of the same,’” said Hallel Biton Rosen, writing for the website of the far-right Channel 14 news network. “We must not stop. We must continue with full force until total victory.”
The gap between Mr. Netanyahu’s ambitions and his actions is a familiar one: It extends a pattern of behavior that he has displayed since the war began in October 2023.
From the earliest weeks of the war, Mr. Netanyahu avoided making detailed plans for the war’s endgame, according to an investigation published last month by The New York Times. Officials in Israel and the U.S. say that decision has made it harder to steer the war toward a denouement.
Throughout the war, the prime minister often made bold claims about the damage he hoped to wreak on Hamas, and he has often been unable to make good on those promises. While decimating Gaza, ruining the lives of Palestinian civilians, the Israeli military has failed to dislodge Hamas’s remaining fighters.
In March, Mr. Netanyahu broke a cease-fire with Hamas to begin a military operation that he said would destroy the group. When it failed to do so, he expanded the campaign in May, again on the pretext that extra aggression would finally force Hamas to either surrender on the battlefield or make compromises at the negotiating table.
Three months later, that expanded operation had failed to either defeat Hamas or secure the release of the remaining hostages — leading Mr. Netanyahu to announce the even grander plan to capture Gaza City.
The decision to do so marks a return to a tactic that Mr. Netanyahu tried at the start of the war, when he first ordered the Israeli Army to capture Gaza City. Back then, the Israeli military took control of most of the city, but relinquished it to avoid getting bogged down in an attritional war, which allowed Hamas to retake control.
It is still unclear how, second time around, Israel intends to prevent a similar outcome.
Myra Noveck, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
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2) Israeli Strike Kills 4 Al Jazeera Journalists, Network Says
Anas al-Sharif, a well-known correspondent, was among those killed. Israel said it had targeted Mr. al-Sharif, claiming he worked for Hamas, which he had denied.
By Ephrat Livni, Published Aug. 10, 2025, Updated Aug. 11, 2025
Mr. al-Sharif in Gaza City last year. The Committee to Protect Journalists said last month that it was “gravely worried” about his safety. AFPTV, via Agence France-Presse
An Israeli strike near a hospital in Gaza City on Sunday night killed four Al Jazeera journalists, the network said, and Gazan health officials reported at least one additional fatality.
The Israeli military confirmed that it had conducted a strike targeting one of the men killed, whom it accused of being a Hamas fighter posing as a reporter, an allegation that he and the network had rejected.
The Government Media Office in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, said in a statement that a strike on a “journalists’ tent near Al-Shifa Hospital” killed two reporters — Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh — and three photographers — Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed Noufal — and called the attack “deliberate and premeditated.”
The director of Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, told The New York Times that an Israeli drone strike on a tent in front of Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City, which was housing journalists, killed seven people, including five journalists and two others, and wounded eight.
Al Jazeera reported that four of the five journalists who were killed in the strike worked for its network. In a statement, the network condemned what it called “the premeditated assassination" of correspondents and photographers, calling the attack “a desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza.”
The Israeli military in a statement on Sunday said that it had struck in Gaza City without specifying where, and said that it had targeted “the terrorist Anas al-Sharif, who posed as a journalist for the Al Jazeera network,” and had taken steps “to mitigate harm to civilians.”
The military accused Mr. al-Sharif of being “the head of a terrorist cell” that was “responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians” and soldiers. The Israeli statement said that it had previously “disclosed intelligence information and many documents found in the Gaza Strip, confirming his military affiliation to Hamas.”
Mr. al-Sharif, a well-known correspondent for Al Jazeera, was among six of the network’s reporters based in Gaza whom Israel accused in October 2024 of being fighters for Hamas and Palestinian Jihad. At the time, the Israel military distributed what it said were documents seized from Gaza that showed membership lists, phone directories and salary slips for members of the Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wings of the two groups. The lists included names matching those reporters.
But Al Jazeera and Mr. al-Sharif denied the accusation, with the network saying the allegations were “fabricated.”
Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists said it was “gravely worried” about Mr. al-Sharif’s safety, accusing the Israeli military of targeting him with a “smear campaign, which he believes is a precursor to his assassination.” The organization said that the Israeli military had “stepped up” its campaign to discredit Mr. al-Sharif “since the journalist cried on air while reporting on starvation in Gaza.”
Israel has long had an antagonistic relationship with Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based broadcaster, and the tensions have only escalated during the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
While other major media outlets have been blocked from entering the enclave by Israel and Egypt, Al Jazeera has managed to position numerous reporters on the ground, providing a steady stream of stories about the harrowing conditions for civilians amid mass privation and hunger.
More than 61,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to local health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Al Jazeera has accused Israel of trying to conceal the brutality of the war. Israel says that the outlet supports Hamas and that some of its journalists are themselves militants, an allegation the broadcaster has strongly rejected.
Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have long called the network a “mouthpiece” for Hamas. Last year, Israel shut down Al Jazeera in the country and shuttered its offices on security grounds, and Israeli forces later raided the channel’s offices in the West Bank.
The Israeli military last summer killed Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera reporter in Gaza, in an airstrike that also took the life of another reporter. The Israeli military claimed Mr. al-Ghoul was a member of Hamas’s military wing.
Mr. al-Sharif was posting on social media until shortly before he died. “Relentless bombardment,” he wrote on X in what would be one of his final messages. “For two hours, the Israeli aggression has intensified on Gaza City.”
The strike on Mr. al-Sharif and the others in Gaza City came after Israel’s security cabinet on Friday voted to intensify its military operations in the area and to take over the city, where much of Gaza’s population has been sheltering after repeated displacement orders since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people in Israel, led to the abduction of about 250 and set off the war in Gaza.
Foreign journalists have not been allowed to enter Gaza to report independently from the enclave, so most of the reporting emerging from the war has come from Palestinian reporters. In recent weeks, as a hunger crisis has gripped Gaza, and reporters on the ground have talked about losing the strength to work, news organizations have called on Israel to let in more aid and reporters.
Mr. al-Sharif described himself as “drowning in hunger” late last month.
Ameera Harouda, Fatima AbdulKarim, and Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.
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3) The Palestinian Who Led a Militia, a Theater and a Jailbreak
Zakaria Zubeidi inspired Palestinians and horrified Israelis. Freed from jail during a recent truce, he questions what his many lives have achieved.
By Patrick Kingsley and Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, Aug. 12, 2025
When Zakaria Zubeidi was suddenly freed from an Israeli prison in February, it was a rare and fleeting moment of joy for Palestinians.
Hundreds turned out in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to celebrate Mr. Zubeidi’s arrival from jail, cheering him as a returning hero. They chanted his name as he took his first steps of freedom, some of them hoisting him on their shoulders. A child clutched a tin of hair gel that Mr. Zubeidi had given him six years ago, before he was jailed. “I want to show Uncle Zakaria that I kept it,” said Watan Abu Al Rob, 11, “and I’ll only use it now that he is free.”
Mr. Zubeidi, 49, is the best-known of the Palestinian prisoners swapped for Israeli hostages during a brief truce in Gaza earlier this year. In the early 2000s, he inspired Palestinians — and terrified Israelis — by leading a militant group affiliated with Fatah, Hamas’s secular rival.
He drew international attention when, several years later, he stopped fighting and helped set up a theater. Jailed a decade later, he cemented his legend when he briefly escaped prison through a tunnel, before being recaptured days later.
Now, months after his release, Mr. Zubeidi has become emblematic of something else: a sense of hopelessness that imbues Palestinian life. In a recent conversation with The New York Times — his first major interview as a free man — Mr. Zubeidi said he felt that his life as a militant, a theater leader and a prisoner had ultimately proved futile. None of it had helped forge a Palestinian state, he said, and it may never do so.
“We have to reconsider our tools,” Mr. Zubeidi said in an interview in Ramallah. “We founded a theater, and we tried cultural resistance — what did that do?” he asked. “We tried the rifle, we tried shooting. There’s no solution.”
As if to illustrate his point, Mr. Zubeidi removed several dentures from his jaw — revealing an entirely toothless mouth. His teeth and jaw had been broken, Mr. Zubeidi said, during his recent incarceration. He was already in custody during Hamas’s raid on Israel in October 2023; in the weeks that followed, the prison guards repeatedly beat him, he said. The descriptions of his treatment echoed testimonies from at least 10 other prisoners jailed in Israel since the start of the war who were interviewed by The Times.
In a statement, the Israel Prison Service said it was “not aware of the claims you described, and as far as we know, no such events have occurred.”
Cut off from the news media in jail, Mr. Zubeidi emerged after 16 months of war to discover that Gaza had been decimated by Israel’s counterattack. He found large parts of Jenin, his hometown in the northern West Bank, destroyed and depopulated by Israeli raids. His own home — in an area sealed off by the Israeli military — was unreachable. His 21-year-old son, also a militant, had been killed in an Israeli strike. On every front, Palestinian strategies seemed to be failing.
“But what is the solution?” Mr. Zubeidi asked. “I’m asking that question myself.”
As a young militant, Mr. Zubeidi had a clearer sense of mission.
In the early 2000s, following the collapse of peace talks, he joined a militia in Jenin in the belief that it was the best way of achieving Palestinian sovereignty. The immediate spur was a provocative visit by an Israeli leader, accompanied by hundreds of police officers, to a major mosque complex in Jerusalem that is built on the site of an ancient Jewish temple. Protests and unrest broke out in Arab areas of Israel, prompting a deadly Israeli crackdown that horrified Mr. Zubeidi.
As the protests escalated into an armed uprising, known as the second intifada, Mr. Zubeidi joined the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a major Fatah-affiliated armed group in Jenin, swiftly rising in the ranks to become its leader.
To Israelis, Mr. Zubeidi was a terrorist. Palestinians killed roughly 1,000 Israelis during the five-year intifada, as the uprising morphed from protests to bombing and shooting attacks on Israeli buses, nightclubs, hotels and cafes. Mr. Zubeidi denies involvement in any murder, but he was accused of ordering several of these attacks, including a shooting at the offices of a political party that killed several people. He was eventually charged with 24 offenses, mostly related to violence, but no verdict was reached before his release.
“His release is dangerous,” Bella Avraham, the wife of a victim of that attack, told the Israeli news media after Mr. Zubeidi was freed in February. “I expect the state to hunt him down until his last day.”
To Palestinians, however, Mr. Zubeidi was a freedom fighter who led the defense of Palestinian land against an occupying army. Israelis killed about 3,000 Palestinians during the second intifada. When the Israeli military raided Jenin in 2002, destroying much of Mr. Zubeidi’s neighborhood, he led a squad of gunmen that tried to repel the attack. He drew international attention after featuring in a documentary, “Arna’s Children,” that chronicled some of this paramilitary activity.
In one memorable scene, the filmmakers documented an argument about guerrilla tactics between Mr. Zubeidi and a fellow fighter, Ala Sabbagh. Mr. Zubeidi survived the Israeli raid by hiding in the ruins, and disapproved of Mr. Sabbagh’s decision to survive by surrendering to the soldiers.
“I’d never give myself up,” Mr. Zubeidi boasted to his friend. “Never!”
“I’d rather die,” Mr. Zubeidi added later.
In time, Mr. Zubeidi took a more nuanced approach to battling Israel. As the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships tried to restore calm, Israel offered an amnesty in 2007 to hundreds of militants, including Mr. Zubeidi, on the condition that they give up their arms.
Mr. Zubeidi accepted, telling interviewers at that time that the intifada had failed. He shifted his focus to a theater he had recently founded with a leftist Israeli actor and a Swedish activist. The Freedom Theater in Jenin organized drama workshops for young people in the city — a program that continues — and staged adaptations of works like “Waiting for Godot” and “Animal Farm.”
Mr. Zubeidi did not direct any plays, but his involvement in the theater’s administration helped insulate it from the opposition of Jenin’s conservative residents.
Mr. Zubeidi’s ultimate goal was still to end the Israeli occupation, he said. But his involvement in the theater reflected an evolving approach to achieving that goal. His aim was not to replace or renounce armed Palestinian activity, but to provide it with an intellectual and cultural ballast.
“The media said Zakaria moved from armed struggle to cultural struggle,” Mr. Zubeidi told us, referring to himself in the third person. “But it’s not about being one thing or another,” he added. “How did I open the theater door? I broke it with my rifle.”
Accusing him of breaking the terms of his amnesty, Israel rearrested him in 2019, setting the stage for his most memorable exploits yet. As he awaited trial in 2021, Mr. Zubeidi escaped his prison cell through a 32-yard tunnel that a group of fellow inmates had dug from their cell’s bathroom.
Though all six escapees were rearrested within days, and Mr. Zubeidi was convicted for the jailbreak, their quest for freedom captivated and galvanized Palestinians, enshrining Mr. Zubeidi’s cult status. Until Israel’s bombardment devastated the territory, murals commemorating the escape could be found on walls as far away as Gaza City.
Yet Mr. Zubeidi looks back on the escape with characteristic ambivalence, viewing it as both necessary and counterproductive.
“It was impossible for me to be imprisoned and not seek freedom,” he said. “The prisoner who does not think about escaping prison does not deserve freedom.”
He got stuck in the tunnel for 10 minutes and had to be dislodged by a fellow escapee, he said. When he finally felt the warm night air on his skin, he said, it was like “freedom flooding into my veins.”
Yet the escape ultimately achieved little, he said.
He always knew it would end in death or recapture, he said, and sure enough, Israeli policeman found Mr. Zubeidi days later, hiding in a truck.
The episode prompted the Israeli prison service to impose harsher conditions on Palestinian prisoners, and Mr. Zubeidi himself was placed in solitary confinement.
For Mr. Zubeidi, it is an outcome that exemplifies the bind faced by all Palestinians, whether they oppose Israel through peaceful or violent means.
The intifada failed to dislodge Israel. But the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that cooperates with Israel to administer Palestinian cities in the West Bank, has failed to achieve statehood with its peaceful approach.
For many Israelis, that is because the P.A. is too insincere, too incompetent and too weak to be trusted with a state.
But Mr. Zubeidi says it is Israel that is the obstacle — too strong to be defeated with violence, and too selfish to reward genuine Palestinian partnership with statehood.
“There is no peaceful solution and there is no military solution,” he said. “Why? Because the Israelis don’t want to give us anything.”
“It’s impossible to uproot us from here,” Mr. Zubeidi concluded. “And we don’t have any tools to uproot them.”
Still, Mr. Zubeidi has not given up the search for an answer. Since his release, he said, he has begun studying for a Ph.D. at Birzeit University, a leading Palestinian college, that he hopes will help him better understand the complexities of the conflict.
The subject?
Israel studies.
Lia Lapidot contributed reporting from Tel Aviv and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.
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4) Strike That Killed 5 Journalists Was Aimed at One of Them, Israel Says
Officials accused Anas al-Sharif of being a Hamas operative posing as a reporter. Al Jazeera says he and the other four victims all worked for the network.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Aug. 11, 2025
Al Jazeera staff members gathering at the network’s studios in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, to remember their colleagues killed in Gaza. Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Palestinians in Gaza held a funeral procession on Monday for journalists for the Al Jazeera network who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Sunday that has been condemned by the United Nations and media watchdog organizations.
Israel’s military said it carried out the attack on the tent where the men had worked near a hospital in Gaza City. Al Jazeera said five of its journalists were killed. A hospital official said that in total, seven people were killed.
Here’s a brief look at the journalists:
Anas al-Sharif
A correspondent with the Qatar-based network, Mr. al-Sharif had delivered many live on-air reports, often from the scene of recent bombardments in Gaza. With news organizations generally barred by Israel from entering the territory, he and other Al Jazeera reporters have become symbols of the determination to broadcast reports about the war and conditions in that enclave to the Arab world.
Israel’s military said on social media on Sunday that it had conducted a targeted strike on Mr. al-Sharif, whom it accused of being a Hamas fighter posing as a reporter. In a statement, it called him “the head of a terrorist cell” and said it had taken steps to mitigate civilian harm.
Al Jazeera refuted that charge, and in a statement called the killing “a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza.”
Israel’s government has accused Al Jazeera reporters of serving the interests of Hamas by presenting an exaggerated and distorted picture of conditions in Gaza.
Mr. al-Sharif, a 28-year-old father of two, was born in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza and graduated from Al-Aqsa University’s Faculty of Media, Al Jazeera said on its website. His father was killed by Israel in an airstrike on the family home in December 2023, the network said.
Mohammed Qreiqeh
Al Jazeera said that Mr. Qreiqeh, 33, a correspondent, had made his final live report shortly before he was killed. He was born in Gaza City and lived in the city’s Shujayea neighborhood, it said, adding that he held a degree in journalism and media from the Islamic University of Gaza. His brother had been killed in an airstrike on Gaza City earlier this year, the website said.
Ibrahim Zaher
A cameraman with the network, Mr. Zaher, 25, was from the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza, Al Jazeera said.
Mohammed Noufal
The network described Mr. Noufal, 29, as an assistant. Its website said he too was from Jabaliya. It said that his mother and brother had been killed in earlier Israeli attacks and that his brother, Ibrahim, worked as a cameraman for the network.
Moamen Aliwa
Al Jazeera identified Mr. Aliwa, 23, as a cameraman, but gave no further biographical information about him. The network has not responded to a request for more detail about Mr. Aliwa and the other journalists killed.
Reuters news agency reported that a freelance reporter, Mohammad Al-Khaldi, also died in the attack, citing medics at al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza. The hospital director said the attack killed seven people in all, and wounded a number of others.
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5) Trump’s Show of Force Begins to Take Shape as Guard Troops Deploy in D.C.
Troops appeared near the Washington Monument on Tuesday evening. But it remained unclear whether the eventual show of force would match the president’s apocalyptic rhetoric.
By Tyler Pager and Devlin Barrett, Reporting from Washington, Published Aug. 12, 2025, Updated Aug. 13, 2025
National Guard troops talking to tourists on the National Mall. Alex Kent for The New York Times
National Guard troops began to deploy in Washington on Tuesday evening as President Trump’s plan to use the federal government to crack down on crime in the city started taking shape.
About a dozen members of the National Guard appeared in five military vehicles near the Washington Monument as the sun set, a stark juxtaposition to a peaceful evening scene of people jogging by with headphones and walking their dogs. An Army official said troops were continuing to gather at the D.C. Armory and were expected to deploy around national monuments, and near a U.S. Park Police facility in the Anacostia neighborhood of southeast Washington.
Mr. Trump on Monday described the nation’s capital in apocalyptic terms as a crime-infested wasteland — a description that ignores the extent to which crime has been falling in the city over the last two years. But it remains unclear whether the eventual show of force will match the president’s rhetoric.
The initial deployment near the Washington Monument, at least, often resembled something less fearsome, with troops snapping photos of themselves with visitors. They left roughly two hours after they arrived.
“We just did a presence patrol to be amongst the people, to be seen,” Master Sgt. Cory Boroff said as he stood near a Humvee. “Of the people, for the people in D.C.,” he added. He said he did not know where they would be headed next.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that the administration’s campaign was just beginning. “Over the course of the next month, the Trump administration will relentlessly pursue and arrest every violent criminal in the District who breaks the law, undermines public safety and endangers law-abiding Americans,” she said.
Ms. Leavitt boasted that a federal task force, which includes some local officers, made 23 arrests on Monday evening in connection with a range of crimes. Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, said in a post on X Tuesday evening that the F.B.I. had participated in 10 arrests in “the first big push” of Mr. Trump’s crackdown. In Washington, a city of roughly 700,000 people, the Metropolitan Police Department makes an average of 68 arrests a day, officials said.
Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, and Pamela A. Smith, her police chief, met Tuesday morning with Attorney General Pam Bondi and other administration officials. City officials emerged from the meeting saying they were focused on how to make the most of the federal support, and Ms. Bowser said she wanted to make sure the federal force was “being well used, and all in an effort to drive down crime.”
Ms. Bondi, in a post on X, called the meeting “productive,” and said the Justice Department would work closely with the city and its police department to “make Washington, D.C. safe again.”
But Ms. Bowser struck a far more forceful tone by Tuesday night, calling Mr. Trump’s actions an “authoritarian push” and an “intrusion on our autonomy.” In a live town hall on social media, she denounced the frightening characterization of Washington that Mr. Trump has promoted, saying that seeing homeless encampments “triggers something in him that has him believing that our very beautiful city is dirty, which it is not.”
“We are not 700,000 scumbags and punks,” she said. “We don’t have neighborhoods that should be bulldozed. We have to be clear about our story, who we are and what we want for our city.”
Ms. Bowser urged parents to make sure that their children do not engage in large group activity on the streets. “This is the type of thing that makes for good TV,” she said. “To be candid, that’s part of the motivation, I think — is to get some good TV and arrests in D.C.”
But Chief Smith said that the federalization of the local police would “make our city even better,” and that city officials would “look at the locations around our city where we believe there are areas of pockets of crime that we would like to address.”
Residents would see local police officers “working side by side with our federal partners in order to enforce the efforts that we need around the city,” she added.
The law Mr. Trump invoked allows the president to take control of the city’s police force for up to 30 days. Officials have said that 800 National Guard members and roughly 500 federal law enforcement agents were also being deployed to city streets to help curb crime. Some of those agents began conducting foot patrols over the weekend. City officials have said the National Guard troops would not have the authority to make arrests.
As the officials work out the specifics of the takeover, it is still unclear how any disagreements would be resolved in the new command structure decreed by the president. Ms. Leavitt said that Mr. Trump sits at the top of the chain of command, and that Terry Cole, the D.E.A. administrator, would oversee the city’s police department.
Ms. Bowser said the president “has the authority, by virtue of the statute, to request services.” But she said city officials retained the authority to hire and fire people in the police department. She said the police chief would work “hand in hand with the people that the president has designated.”
Ms. Leavitt also said D.C. officials would use their authority to clean up homeless encampments, after Mr. Trump posted on social media last weekend that “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.” She said homeless people would be offered mental health and addiction services, and space in shelters. If they refuse, she said, they could be subject to fines or jail time.
Federal officials also demanded the city change its laws related to punishing juveniles for violent crime. Standing next to photos of young murder victims at a news conference Tuesday, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, denounced local laws limiting sentences for teenagers who commit violent crime.
“I don’t need any more statistics. All I need are people to recognize that these were vibrant human beings cut down because of illegal guns,” she said. “I am here today to tell you that on behalf of all of these victims, all of these families, that they are going to be accountable, that we are going to make a difference.”
Across Washington, crime-prevention advocates braced for an increased police presence and warned of the consequences of Mr. Trump’s federal takeover.
“This is not about preventing crime,” said Clinique Chapman, the chief executive of DC Justice Lab. “It’s about political theater and federal control.”
She added: “What we do know and worry about is the unintended consequences, the collateral consequences, of this takeover. Young Black boys will bear the brunt of this, as they are the most likely to be stopped, to be questioned, to just really encounter the police interactions.”
Ms. Chapman warned that “we are going to see this damage done for years to come, beyond the time they are actually occupying the city right now.”
Mr. Trump’s federal crackdown on Washington could be both an optics play and a powder keg. When Mr. Trump last flooded the streets of Washington with federal agents, in 2020, he said it was meant to crack down on racial justice demonstrations. It did not immediately quell vandalism in the city.
It did, however, inflame tensions between protesters and law enforcement. Mr. Trump deployed an alphabet soup of federal agencies, and some agents violently cleared protesters from Lafayette Park before Mr. Trump posed with the Bible at a nearby church. Lines of federal agents would later stand guard outside Lafayette Park facing off for days with counterprotesters.
While the demonstrations were overwhelmingly peaceful, some in the crowds did vandalize property and break windows as protests went on after dark. But the federal agents did little to de-escalate tensions.
One night, as the protesters moved to downtown Washington, the administration dispatched military helicopters to conduct low-altitude maneuvers typically reserved for combat zones. The force of the helicopters tore tree branches and sent protesters scurrying around the corner, only to find rows of federal agents marching toward them armed with nonlethal weapons.
The Justice Department inspector general later criticized the deployment of the federal agents.
Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Ashley Ahn and Eric Schmitt.
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6) Trump Deploys National Guard for D.C. Crime but Called Jan. 6 Rioters ‘Very Special’
President Trump said he needed to send in the Guard to secure the nation’s capital. But on Jan. 6, 2021 — the most lawless day in recent Washington history — he had a very different reaction.
By Luke Broadwater, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 12, 2025
National Guard soldiers at the Capitol on the night of Jan. 6, 2021. President Trump has sought to rewrite the history of the riot and called those arrested “hostages.” Kenny Holston for The New York Times
The heart of D.C. was in a state of lawlessness.
Roving mobs of wild men smashed windows, threatened murder and attacked the police.
One rioter struck an officer in the face with a baton. Another threw a chair at police officers and pepper-sprayed them. Others beat and used a stun gun on an officer, nearly killing him.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob committed a month’s worth of crime in the span of about three hours.
The F.B.I. has estimated that around 2,000 people took part in criminal acts that day, and more than 600 people were charged with assaulting, resisting or interfering with the police. (Citywide, Washington currently averages about 70 crimes a day.)
But President Trump’s handling of the most lawless day in recent Washington history stands in sharp contrast to his announcement on Monday that he needed to use the full force of the federal government to crack down on “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” in the nation’s capital.
After a prominent member of the Department of Government Efficiency, known by his online pseudonym, “Big Balls,” was assaulted this month, the president took federal control of Washington’s police force and mobilized National Guard troops. His team passed out a packet of mug shots, and Mr. Trump described “roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
That was nothing like the message he delivered to the mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, when he told them, as tear gas filled the hallways of the Capitol: “We love you. You’re very special.”
“If we want to look at marauding mobs, look at Jan. 6,” said Mary McCord, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law and a former federal prosecutor. “If you want to look at criminal mobs, we had a criminal mob and he called them peaceful protesters.”
In one of his first actions upon retaking the presidency, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack. The president issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
He has sought to rewrite the history of the riot and called those arrested “hostages.”
He has selected a passionate defender of Jan. 6 rioters to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, and his administration even hired a former F.B.I. agent who was charged with encouraging the mob to kill police officers.
The agent, Jared L. Wise, has been named as an adviser to the Justice Department task force established to seek retribution against Mr. Trump’s political enemies.
“He is showing one-sided support for violence that supports his political agenda,” said Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied the Jan. 6 defendants for more than four years.
Mr. Pape said the hiring of Mr. Wise only underscored the message sent by the pardoning of the rioters.
“What he is doing, of course,” Mr. Pape said, “is sending the signal to everybody that you will not just be pardoned, he will not just give you moral support, but he will reward you with high-level positions and opportunities.”
Mr. Trump has also shifted his position on police officers who used deadly force, based on the circumstances involved.
Casting himself as a champion of the police, Mr. Trump issued full and unconditional pardons this year to two D.C. police officers who were convicted after a chase that killed a young Black man in 2020.
But Mr. Trump took the opposite view of the use of deadly force during the Capitol riot, condemning the police officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt and calling the officer, who is Black, a “thug.”
The president’s crackdown on Washington was put in motion by an assault against 19-year-old Edward Coristine, who was part of Elon Musk’s job-slashing effort.
Mr. Trump shared a photograph that appeared to show Mr. Coristine sitting in the street around 3 a.m., bleeding and shirtless. Two teenagers have been arrested in the case.
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City,” Mr. Trump said.
Crime in Washington is declining, a point many Democrats have made as they railed against Mr. Trump’s actions as federal overreach. Last year, violent crime hit a 30-year low.
“Donald Trump delayed deploying the National Guard on January 6th when our Capitol was under violent attack and lives were at stake,” Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, wrote on X. “Now, he’s activating the DC Guard to distract from his incompetent mishandling of tariffs, health care, education and immigration — just to name a few blunders.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that Mr. Trump’s takeover of Washington’s police force was unjustified.
“As you listen to an unhinged Trump try to justify deploying the National Guard in DC, here’s reality: Violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low,” she wrote on social media.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, hit back at critics of the president’s crackdown.
“I think it’s despicable that Democrats cannot agree that we need more law and order in a city that has been ravaged by violence, crime, murders, property theft,” Ms. Leavitt said.
Mr. Pape said that while Mr. Coristine’s injuries were troubling, they were similar to those suffered by police officers on Jan. 6.
The indictments against Jan. 6 defendants, Mr. Pape said, were full of photos of “cops getting beaten up unbelievably with metal poles and all kinds of things, and they’re being beaten pretty severely.”
Ms. McCord said she believed Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Washington police would most likely be “performative” and not make a lot of difference functionally on crime.
“This feels like very much a way to send a message: I have control. I can use it, and I will use it,” she said.
But the move also reeks of hypocrisy, Ms. McCord said.
“It’s the hypocrisy of saying essentially that he supports our police, our law enforcement across the country, and wants to enact policies that support the police,” she said, “yet that didn’t apply when it came to all of the law enforcement officers on Jan. 6.”
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7) Israel Hasn’t Prosecuted a Single Suspect for the Oct. 7 Attack
Israel has extensively documented the 2023 Hamas-led assault and is believed to be holding at least 200 Palestinians suspected of involvement. Not one has been charged or put on trial.
By Johnatan Reiss, Aug. 13, 2025
Johnatan Reiss spoke to former prosecutors, lawyers, lawmakers and rights groups about Palestinian detainees suspected of links to the Oct. 7 attack.
Damage at kibbutz Be’eri, which was a target during the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, the deadliest in Israel’s history. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
It has been almost two years since the Palestinian militant group Hamas led the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history.
Not a single person has been charged or prosecuted for it and the entire subject is shrouded in secrecy.
Several hundred Palestinians have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement, and at least 200 of them remain in custody, according to public records. Israeli military officials have said that at least several dozen Palestinians were arrested in or near Israeli territory around the time of the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
In addition to those detainees, Israel is holding roughly 2,700 other Palestinians who were rounded up in the Gaza Strip over the 21 months since the attack, according to government data. They are suspected of affiliation with Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza, but not necessarily of direct involvement in the Oct. 7 attack.
Israel has killed many of the senior Hamas figures from Gaza who were seen as masterminds of the attack. But some in the country worry that the extensive delays in prosecuting the suspects in custody will allow some perpetrators to escape justice.
Palestinians and rights groups have other concerns.
They say Israel has systematically violated the detainees’ rights by holding them without charge or trial in harsh conditions, with limited access to legal counsel. Sweeping gag orders keep most details of their cases under wraps and for most of these detainees, there is no trace of them in any public records.
The way Israel detains those prisoners “effectively erases these individuals from public awareness and strips them of fundamental rights,” said Nadine Abu Arafeh, a lawyer who has represented detainees from Gaza in other cases in Israeli courts. “Families in Gaza live with questions: Are their loved ones alive?”
Israel’s Justice Ministry declined to comment.
The delays in moving the Oct. 7 cases forward are at least partly because of the chaotic way that law enforcement agents, stretched beyond capacity, collected evidence right after the attack, according to Moran Gez, a former senior prosecutor who oversaw cases of detainees suspected of involvement in the attack, and Yulia Malinovsky, an opposition lawmaker briefed on the issue. The regular criminal justice system was ill-suited to handle the sheer volume of evidence and the compromised state of some of it, they said. Ms. Gez said she retired to open up a private practice.
Israel has extensively documented the atrocities of Oct. 7, in some cases based on footage recorded by the attackers themselves. Several thousand Palestinian militants from Gaza took part in the assault, according to the Israeli military. They stormed more than a dozen communities, a music festival attended by thousands of people, and several military bases in southern Israel.
They killed about 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostages back to Gaza, in an attack that, according to the United Nations, involved war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.
Amid upheaval and shock across Israel in the aftermath, investigators skipped many steps in the collection of evidence, according to Ms. Gez and Ms. Malinovsky.
Some bodies were swiftly buried before forensic examination. The volume of killings made it nearly impossible for ballistic experts to trace bullets to specific weapons. Survivors who witnessed the events often did not immediately report their experiences to the legal authorities, and they quickly scattered across the country before the authorities could contact them, said Ms. Gez.
Simcha Rothman, a lawmaker from Israel’s governing coalition, blamed state prosecutors for failing to find ways to adapt legal proceedings to the unusual scale and nature of the attack.
Other considerations may have contributed to the delay in prosecutions.
Israeli security agencies objected to having the cases of attack suspects move forward earlier in the Gaza war, according to Mr. Rothman. But they have since dropped that objection, he said in an interview.
Ms. Malinovsky, the opposition lawmaker, said she believes that senior Israeli officials feared that pursuing the cases could intensify public scrutiny of the failures by the government and military or undermine negotiations to exchange Palestinian detainees for Israeli hostages.
“They don’t want that discourse,” she said of the government.
The prime minister’s office declined to comment on the reasons for the delay in prosecutions. The prison service and Justice Ministry would not provide any information on the detainees.
Lawmakers in Israel recently took a first step toward putting some of those suspected of direct involvement on trial. The Knesset, or parliament, passed an initial vote in late May to establish a dedicated tribunal to try suspects in the attack.
But the bill requires several more votes, and it will likely be months before the first detainees go to court.
Mr. Rothman and Ms. Malinovsky were co-authors of the bill, which was meant to bypass legal hurdles to prosecutions by establishing a special tribunal of 15 judges with some capacity to override the ordinary criminal system. The bill proposes charging participants in the attack with offenses of genocide, which are punishable by death under Israeli law.
Other countries have created similar tribunals in response to war or mass atrocities, said Yuval Shany, a senior researcher with the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. For example, U.S. military commissions were set up to prosecute Al Qaeda suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, he said.
Mr. Shany said international law experts are generally critical of such special courts as they often lead to an erosion of legal standards.
All of the roughly 2,700 Palestinians detainees who were rounded up in Gaza over the course of the war are designated as “unlawful combatants,” which, according to Israeli law, means they can be held without charge or trial.
Under the terms of a cease-fire earlier this year, Israel released about 1,000 of the “unlawful combatants” to Gaza, in addition to women and minors detained in Gaza over the course of the war.
If negotiations between Israel and Hamas over a new cease-fire progress to a deal, some of the remaining detainees could potentially be exchanged for the remaining hostages in Gaza.
The lengthy detention of so many people without trial “risks becoming a life sentence without the usual protections of the criminal process,” said Monica Hakimi, a Columbia Law School professor and an expert on international law.
At least 48 of these Palestinian detainees have died in custody, according to data from the military and prison service provided in response to freedom of information requests filed by Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, a rights group.
Former detainees told The New York Times last year that they were punched, kicked and beaten with batons, rifle butts and a hand-held metal detector while in custody. Two said their bones were broken and three said they had received electric shocks during their interrogations.
The Israeli military denied that “systemic abuse” had happened in a base where thousands of Gazan detainees had been held earlier in the war. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, said that all of its interrogations were “conducted in accordance with the law.”
In February, the Israeli military charged at least five soldiers who served in that base with abuse of a detainee.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security who oversees the country’s prison service, posted two videos in January of a facility where some Gazan detainees suspected of involvement in the Oct. 7 were held. The videos showed a subterranean prison ward in Ramla, a town in central Israel.
“I won’t forget the murders and horrors,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said in one of the videos, suggesting that the prisoners were connected to the attack. He then pointed at three handcuffed men kneeling in brown uniforms, their heads bowed. “Look at them now, how cowardly they are.”
In late July, Israeli lawmakers extended emergency provisions that allow the ongoing detentions of prisoners suspected of involvement in the attack in detention awaiting prosecution through January 2026 — an indication that they may not face charges for at least six more months.
“This is a problem,” Mr. Rothman told lawmakers before the extensions. “It’s a malfunction.”
Patrick Kingsley, Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
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8) How the Military Became Another Instrument of Trump’s Power
By Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, Aug. 13, 2025
Mr. Simon held senior positions in the State Department and at the National Security Council. Mr. Stevenson served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration.
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous “test case.” This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of the its deportation efforts.
Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to heed a lawless order, taking inspiration from the generals — Mark Milley and James Mattis — who resisted the uprooting of established military standards in the first Trump term.
But today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order.
It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities. Recent changes to the terms of the military’s employment by the Pentagon and its members’ incentives to career advancement will ultimately overcome any constitutional and moral qualms about their conduct.
Democratic civilian control and the apolitical professionalism of military officers have long been bulwarks against authoritarianism. This framework proved stable through the 20th century, even when tested by the Vietnam War, in significant part because American presidents and their civilian advisers could be trusted not to imperil the political integrity of the Republic.
Mr. Trump, however, has challenged this civil-military calculus. Since the military resisted his efforts to use active-duty personnel against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, liberals have put their faith in the military as a last line of defense against a rogue executive branch.
But Mr. Trump and his allies have incentivized loyalty over legality and professional competence in administering military promotions. Mr. Trump has dismissed top military personnel without cause and promoted supporters (like former National Guard three-star Gen. Dan Caine) to leadership positions. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the military’s top Judge Advocates General, even though Pentagon lawyers see their job as facilitating policy objectives, not impeding them.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump has insidiously militarized domestic law enforcement by bureaucratic means. In July, the Pentagon re-designated a change of duty status of military personnel from Title 10 to Title 32 to facilitate their “direct interaction with individuals in ICE custody.” And ICE may now utilize the National Guard in 20 states for “alien processing.”
There are structural as well as ad hoc components to Mr. Trump’s mobilization. He is effectively fusing Northern Command, or Northcom, and the Department of Homeland Security into a cooperative internal security body. Both were established after the Sept. 11 attacks to secure U.S. territory against external terrorist threats.
Broader military culture favors the administration’s position. History shows that reinforced by the principle of civilian control, military officers will generally adapt to new missions even if they depart from tried-and-true practices. From World War II to the war on terror, new missions have required pragmatic go-getters, and the system has ensured their promotion over peers who remain dedicated to outdated ways. A truly disturbing precedent was the Army’s internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, carried out by officers of the Western Defense Command, a wartime precursor of the now peacetime Northcom. These officers were well aware that there was no serious security rationale to justify corralling these Americans into camps.
If the highest-ranked officers taking their cue from the White House decide that military operations on American soil are necessary, career officers will get the message. Some may entertain and even express reservations about employing American forces for domestic law enforcement, but few would act on them.
This is what we are seeing now. Top officers have registered no public objection to the dismissals of certain officers or the elevation of others whose main qualification appears to be loyalty to the president. Nor have they appeared to meaningfully question the dispatch of the Marines to California, Florida and elsewhere or of the National Guard to Washington.
In the 1950s, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed that American military officers had evolved into a disciplined, technically competent, conservative group removed from the maelstrom of American politics.
But in the context of domestic theaters, the military cannot be a politically neutral tool. The Marines in Los Angeles and National Guard troops in Washington will not be wearing blue helmets and thinking of themselves as a United Nations peacekeeping force. The Trump administration has cast immigration and political forces “from within” as threats.
Northern Command is fundamentally no different than Central Command. Its commander’s job is to use U.S. air, ground and naval forces in combined operations to defeat enemies within their area of responsibility — even if those “enemies” are U.S. citizens.
Extending military operations piecemeal to internal law enforcement stealthily routinizes the fusion of executive and military power. Huge new funding for ICE under Mr. Trump’s big tax and spending law will substantially increase the scope and pace of the agency’s efforts nationwide and is likely to prompt commensurately greater military support. The fact that some California National Guard troops are reportedly disaffected with the ICE support mission they were given may well persuade the Trump administration to move more regular, active-duty troops into American cities.
The danger of escalation is real. Soldiers and Marines are trained for combat, not constabulary duty and riot control. Expecting military personnel to shift seamlessly from destroying an enemy on the battlefield to law enforcement is asking for trouble. And the deployment of troops to urban areas may provoke clashes with citizens who may be motivated to pick up a gun. Once shots are fired at military personnel, no matter where the shots come from, the administration will have the pretext it requires to tighten its grip using instruments of state control. This might sound far-fetched, but it can spin out of control.
It may be left to the Supreme Court to enforce constitutional discipline on the U.S. armed forces. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California’s lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops is working its way through the federal judicial system. The District Court initially ruled in California’s favor, but the Court of Appeals quickly ruled for the federal government.
But the Supreme Court, which has shown scant enthusiasm for curbing presidential power, could just as easily rule for the Trump administration. The military would be unlikely to challenge the president, and his power would become that much more entrenched. The last best hope may be a broadly applicable unanimous decision upholding the District Court’s ruling that even Mr. Trump would feel compelled to respect.
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9) If Haiti Has Become More Violent, Why End Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status in the US?
By Nathalye Cotrino, Senior Researcher, Americas Division, August 5, 2025
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced last month that temporary protected status for about 500,000 Haitians would end Sept. 2, five months earlier than planned. The Trump administration has cited flawed and contradictory assessments of conditions in Haiti — which, make no mistake, remains unsafe.
Although a US district court halted the action — at least temporarily — and reinstated the original termination date of Feb. 3, the administration is likely to challenge the ruling. The outcome of such a challenge could hinge on whether the courts receive and believe an accurate representation of current events in Haiti.
The administration asserts that “overall, country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But few outsiders are entering and leaving the country lately, so the truth can be hard to ascertain.
In late April and early May, as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, I traveled to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. For the first time in the several years I have been working in Haiti, violence kept me from reaching the capital, Port-au-Prince, where the airport remains under a Federal Aviation Administration ban since November when gangs shot Spirit, JetBlue and American Airlines passenger jets in flight.
In Cap-Haïtien, I spoke with dozens of people who fled the capital and other towns in recent months. Many shared accounts of killings, injuries from stray bullets and gang rapes by criminal group members.
“We were walking toward school when we saw the bandits shooting at houses, at people, at everything that moved,” a 27-year-old woman, a student from Port-au-Prince, told me. “We started to run back, but that’s when [my sister] Guerline fell face down. She was shot in the back of the head, then I saw [my cousin] Alice shot in the chest.” The student crawled under a car, where she hid for hours. She fled the capital in early January.
This rampant violence is precisely the sort of conditions Congress had in mind when it passed the temporary protected status law in 1990. It recognized a gap in protection for situations in which a person might not be able to establish that they have been targeted for persecution on the basis of their beliefs or identity — the standard for permanent asylum claims — but rather when a person’s life is at real risk because of high levels of generalized violence that make it too dangerous for anyone to be returned to the place.
When an administration grants this designation, it does so for a defined period, which can be extended based on conditions in the recipients’ home country. For instance, protected status for people from Somalia was first designated in 1991 and has been extended repeatedly, most recently through March 17, 2026.
Almost 1.3 million people are internally displaced in Haiti. They flee increasing violence by criminal groups that killed more than 5,600 people in 2024 — 23% more than in 2023. Some analysts say the country has the highest homicide rate in the world. Criminal groups control nearly 90% of the capital and have expanded into other places.
Perversely, the Department of Homeland Security publicly concedes this reality, citing in a Federal Register notification “widespread gang violence” as a reason for terminating temporary protected status. The government argues that a “breakdown in governance” makes Haiti unable to control migration, and so a continued designation to protect people from there would not be in the “national interests” of the United States.
Even judging on that criterion alone, revoking the legal status of Haitians in the US is a bad idea. Sending half a million people into Haiti would be highly destabilizing and counter to US interests — not to mention that their lives would be at risk.
The Trump administration has taken no meaningful action to improve Haiti’s situation. The Kenya-led multinational security support mission, authorized by the UN Security Council and initially backed by the United States, has been on the ground for a year. Yet because of severe shortages of personnel, resources and funding, it has failed to provide the support the Haitian police desperately need. In late February, UN Secretary-General António Guterres recommended steps to strengthen the mission, but the Security Council has yet to act.
The humanitarian situation in Haiti continues to deteriorate. An estimated 6 million people need humanitarian assistance. Nearly 5.7 million face acute hunger.
On June 26, just one day before Homeland Security’s attempt to end Haitians’ protected status prematurely, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau described the ongoing crisis in Haiti as “disheartening.” He said that “public order has all but collapsed” as “Haiti descends into chaos.” Two days earlier, the US Embassy in Haiti issued a security alert urging US citizens in the country to “depart as soon as possible.” These are not indications that “country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety,” as Homeland Security claimed on June 27.
The decision to prematurely end temporary protected status is utterly disconnected from reality. The Trump administration itself has warned that Haiti remains dangerous — and if anything has become more so in recent months. The US government should continue to protect Haitians now living in the United States from being thrown into the brutal violence unfolding in their home country.
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10) With Arson and Land Grabs, Israeli Settler Attacks in West Bank Hit Record High
Extremists are carrying out one of the most violent campaigns against Palestinian villages since the U.N. began keeping records.
By Patrick Kingsley, Fatima AbdulKarim and Natan Odenheimer, Aug. 14, 2025
The journalists reported from several villages in the central valleys of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including Burqa, Beitin and Taybeh.
Burned out cars in Burqa, in the West Bank, last month. Mohamad Torokman/Reuters
It was well past midnight when the masked arsonists sneaked into the hilltop Palestinian village of Burqa. Arriving from the direction of a nearby Israeli settlement, they crept inside a junkyard on the edge of the village.
They sprayed liquid on several cars, security footage showed, and set the vehicles alight. One sprayed graffiti on a barn wall, tagging the name of a nearby settlement, as well as the Hebrew word for “Revenge.”
It was the third attack that July night in this central pocket of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the seventh attack on this particular junkyard since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, according to its owner.
“Before the war they harassed us, but not like this,” said Muhammad Sabr Asalaya, 56, the junkyard owner. “Now, they’re trying to expel as many people as they can and annex as much land as they can.”
Such attacks were on the rise before Hamas led a deadly raid on Israel in 2023, setting off the war in Gaza, and they have since become the new normal across much of the West Bank. With the world’s attention on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent and effective campaigns of intimidation and land grabbing since Israel occupied the territory during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
Settlers carried out more than 750 attacks on Palestinians and their property during the first half of this year, an average of nearly 130 assaults a month, according to records compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That is the highest monthly average since the U.N. started compiling such records in 2006.
The Israeli military has recorded a similar surge in settler violence, though it has documented only 440 attacks in the same period, according to unpublished internal records reviewed by The New York Times. The military, which is the sovereign power in the occupied territory, says it tries to prevent the attacks, but a Times investigation last year found that the Israeli authorities have for decades failed to impose meaningful restraints on criminal settlers. While Israel usually prosecutes Palestinians under military law, settlers are typically charged under civil law, if they are prosecuted at all.
For this article, reporters for The Times visited five villages recently attacked by settlers, reviewed security footage of several episodes and cellphone footage of others, and spoke with residents of the afflicted villages, as well as Israeli military officers and settler leaders.
Our reporting found that masked settlers typically sneak into Palestinian villages in the dead of night, setting fire to vehicles and buildings. In some cases, they enter during the daylight hours, leading to confrontations with residents. Sometimes the clashes have involved the Israel military, leading to the killings of several Palestinians, including a Palestinian American. In one daytime attack, settlers threw a firebomb into a child’s bedroom, the child’s family said.
The vast majority of the 700,000 Jewish Israelis who have settled since 1967 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — in settlements considered illegal by most of the international community — are not involved in such violence. Mainstream settler leaders say they have a right to the land but oppose attacking Palestinians.
Hard-line settler leaders acknowledge that their aim is to intimidate Palestinians into leaving strategic tracts of territory that many Palestinians hope may one day form the spine of a state.
“It’s not the nicest thing to evacuate a population,” Ariel Danino, a prominent settler activist, said in an interview with The Times in 2023. “But we’re talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.” In a recent call, Mr. Danino said he stood by the comments but declined a second interview.
For several years, the settlers had focused their intimidation on tiny, seminomadic herding communities along a remote chain of hilltops northeast of Ramallah, the main Palestinian city in the West Bank. That campaign has largely succeeded, forcing at least 38 communities to leave their hamlets and encampments since 2023, according to records compiled by B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group.
That has eroded the Palestinian presence there and ceded the surrounding slopes to settlers who have seized the chance to build more small settlement outposts, or encampments.
After members of one Palestinian community fled en masse in May, a settler leader, Elisha Yered, wrote on social media that their departure was “thanks to the campaign waged against it by the Jewish settlement outposts in the area.”
“With God’s help, one day we will expel you to your natural place in Iraq and Saudi Arabia,” added Mr. Yered.
Since the start of 2023, settlers have built more than 130 outposts, mostly in rural areas of the West Bank, that are technically unauthorized but often tolerated by the Israeli government. That is more than they had built in the previous two decades combined, according to research by Peace Now, an Israeli group that backs the creation of a Palestinian state.
Now, settlers have expanded their scope. They are increasingly targeting a cluster of wealthier, larger and better connected Palestinian villages closer to Ramallah — villages like Burqa and its neighbor, Beitin.
Before the junkyard attack in Burqa, masked settlers had, in fact, begun to rampage in Beitin. Just after 1 a.m., Abdallah Abbas, a retired teacher in that village, woke to find his sedan on fire and a Star of David sprayed on the wall of his garden.
Roughly an hour later, security footage showed, two masked arsonists stole into the yard of Leila Jaraba’s house, a few hundred yards away on the edge of the village. One sprayed the hood of Ms. Jaraba’s car with something flammable, and his accomplice set the car on fire.
“We knew our turn would come,” said Ms. Jaraba, 28, who was cowering inside with her husband and two sons, ages 2 and 4 months. “They want to take this land; they want to kick us out.”
About an hour later, masked settlers entered Burqa and attacked Mr. Sabr Asalaya’s junkyard. Villagers said in interviews that they suspected the same group of settlers might have moved from place to place, wreaking havoc. This sequence of attacks was just a snapshot of a broader pattern of violence in the area.
In the first half of 2025, there were an average of 17 attacks a month in this approximately 40- square-mile area, according to the U.N. That was nearly twice the monthly rate in 2024, and roughly five times as many as in 2022.
The attacks have occurred against the backdrop of intensifying efforts by the Israeli government, which is partly led by longtime settler activists, to entrench its grip on the West Bank.
Since entering office in late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have authorized more than 30 settlements, some of which were previously built without government permission and have been granted retroactive authorization. It is the largest wave of government-led settlement activity since before the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
Simultaneously, the Israeli military has captured and demolished key urban neighborhoods in the northern West Bank that are technically administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous institution that oversees civil governance in Palestinian cities. The military has also installed hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints across the territory.
The Israeli military defends its actions as a means of containing Palestinian militant groups that launch terrorist attacks on Israelis. But it has further complicated the lives of most Palestinians in the West Bank, stifled the economy, left tens of thousands of people homeless and made it even harder for most Palestinians to journey to nearby cities.
In villages like Burqa, settlers’ attacks make life especially untenable. Repeated arson attacks have damaged scores of used cars that Mr. Sabr Asalaya, the junkyard owner, said he had bought from dealers in Israel. He planned to retool their engines and spare parts and sell them for a profit. The attacks have lost him stock worth tens of thousands of dollars, making his business — and his ability to survive in this village — much less viable, he said.
Life is “not slowly turning untenable — it is already untenable,” Mr. Sabr Asalaya said. “We are encircled. We can’t even herd our cattle. We’re locked in.”
The problem has been made worse by the Israeli military’s failure to prevent either the attacks or the settlers’ construction of unauthorized encampments across the territory. A Times investigation last year found that the Israeli authorities had for decades shown substantial leniency to Jews involved in terrorist attacks against Arabs, a dynamic that has only worsened since October 2023. In one emblematic case, a settler was filmed shooting a Palestinian in the presence of an Israeli soldier, yet the shooter was questioned for only 20 minutes and never arrested.
A senior Israeli military commander in the central West Bank, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol, said his soldiers tried to protect both settlers and Palestinians in accordance with Israeli law. He noted that settlers had sometimes clashed with Israeli soldiers this summer.
We spoke to the commander eight hours before the attacks on Mr. Sabr Asalaya’s property and Ms. Jaraba’s car.
Soldiers arrived long after the fires had been extinguished, villagers said. While the Israeli police said they had opened investigations into each episode, no one was prosecuted.
“In some cases, suspects were arrested,” the police said in a statement, “though later released due to a lack of evidence.”
Lia Lapidot contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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11) Big Tech’s A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
Electricity rates for individuals and small businesses could rise sharply as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies build data centers and expand into the energy business.
By Ivan Penn and Karen Weise, Aug. 14, 2025
Ivan Penn reported from Anaheim, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and Los Angeles. Karen Weise reported from Seattle.
“States allow utilities to charge customers enough to recoup their costs and make money for shareholders based on how much they invest. New data centers require utilities to spend billions of dollars on power lines and plants, which should lead to bigger profits for the utilities over time.”
A transmission line running near data centers in Ashburn, Va. As the electricity demands of the structures rapidly escalate, tech companies are becoming some of the most dominant players in energy. Nathan Howard for The New York Times
The annual meeting of state utility regulators is typically a humdrum affair of dry speeches and panel discussions. But in November, the scene at the Marriott in Anaheim, Calif., had a bit more flash.
The conference’s top sponsors included the nation’s biggest tech companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Their executives sat on panels, and the companies’ branding was plastered on product booths and at networking events. Even the lanyards around attendees’ necks were stamped with Google’s colorful logo.
Just a few years ago, tech companies were minor players in energy, making investments in solar and wind farms to rein in their growing carbon footprints and placate customers concerned about climate change. But now, they are changing the face of the U.S. power industry and blurring the line between energy consumer and energy producer. They have morphed into some of energy’s most dominant players.
They have set up subsidiaries that invest in power generation and sell electricity. Much of the energy they produce is bought by utilities and then delivered to homes and businesses, including the tech companies themselves. Their operations and investments dwarf those of many traditional utilities.
But the tech industry’s all-out artificial intelligence push is fueling soaring demand for electricity to run data centers that dot the landscape in Virginia, Ohio and other states. Large, rectangular buildings packed with servers consumed more than 4 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2023, and government analysts estimate that will increase to as much as 12 percent in just three years. That’s partly because computers training and running A.I. systems consume far more energy than machines that stream Netflix or TikTok.
Electricity is essential to their success. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, recently told investors that the company could have had higher sales if it had more data centers. “The single biggest constraint,” he said, “is power.”
The rush to build power plants and transmission lines comes as big tech companies are richer than ever because of their pivot to A.I.; after announcing blowout financial results in late July, Microsoft became the second public company to surpass $4 trillion in value.
Even as some corporate customers have been underwhelmed by A.I.’s usefulness so far, tech companies plan to invest hundreds of billions of dollars on it.
At the same time, the boom threatens to drive up power bills for residents and small businesses. Nationally, the average electricity rate for residents has risen more than 30 percent since 2020, after years of relatively modest increases. Much of that increase has been driven by utilities’ catching up on deferred maintenance and hardening grids for extreme weather.
In the coming years, A.I. could turbocharge those increases.
It is difficult to predict what that will mean for consumers’ power bills. But recent reports expect data centers will require expensive upgrades to the electric grid, a cost that will be shared with residents and smaller businesses through higher rates unless state regulators and lawmakers force tech companies to cover those expenses.
A June analysis, from Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University, found that electricity bills are on track to rise an average of 8 percent nationwide by 2030 and as much as 25 percent in places like Virginia because of data centers.
In some places, it is happening already. Starting in June, the electricity bill for a typical household in Ohio increased at least $15 a month because of data centers, according to data from a major local utility and an independent monitor of the electric grid that stretches across 13 states and the District of Columbia.
Tech companies insist they are not trying to fob energy costs onto residents and small businesses, saying they are willing to pay for the power they use and for much of the equipment needed to make it available.
“We don’t want to see other customers bearing the cost of us trying to grow,” said Bobby Hollis, who leads Microsoft’s energy procurement.
But even with their expressed good will, getting the companies to make consumers whole will not be easy because determining how much large users like data centers should pay is not straightforward.
The business of keeping America’s lights on is mostly about two things: supplying reliable electricity and figuring out what to charge to deliver it. In recent years, big tech companies have inserted themselves into debates over both. They lobby lawmakers and regulators, and they are pitching their own pricing schemes to challenge those of utilities — something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
That has led to growing tensions.
The utilities pay for grid projects over decades, typically by raising prices for everyone connected to the grid. But suddenly, technology companies want to build so many data centers that utilities are being asked to spend a lot more money a lot faster. Lawmakers, regulators and consumer groups fear that households and smaller companies could be stuck footing these mounting bills.
For utilities, working with technology companies can be difficult but also lucrative.
States allow utilities to charge customers enough to recoup their costs and make money for shareholders based on how much they invest. New data centers require utilities to spend billions of dollars on power lines and plants, which should lead to bigger profits for the utilities over time.
“My No. 1 priority in all of this is to keep the lights on,” said Calvin Butler, the chief executive of Exelon, a large utility company, and the chairman of Edison Electric Institute, an industry association. “I think the tech companies’ being engaged in our industry makes this a very exciting time. Just pay your fair share of the grid.”
Ultimately, the technology companies may have an upper hand. In many states bursting with data centers, utilities cannot own power plants because of policies intended to encourage competition. But the tech giants do not have the same restrictions, and many have invested in power plants and secured control of electricity produced by others, making them both big users and suppliers of power.
The tech companies use the electricity produced at these facilities to help power their data centers or sell it to retail utilities on the wholesale market — a small but growing source of revenue. Over the past five years, electricity sales from tech companies’ energy subsidiaries totaled $2.2 billion, with much of that generated since 2022.
Tech Companies’ Electricity Sales Have Surged
Subsidiaries of major tech companies such as Amazon and Google have sold more than $2.7 billion on the wholesale electricity market in the past decade.
Quarterly electricity sales, 2015 through June 2025
“Unless people lean on the public utilities commissions, the ratepayers will take it on the chin,” said Mark Cooper, an economic analyst at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
‘Extremely New Territory’
In the debate over who will foot the bill, the industry’s eyes have been fixed on Ohio.
On a snowy day in December, a first-of-its-kind showdown played out in a small hearing room in Columbus. Lawyers for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies faced off against representatives of an electric utility.
The tech companies had plans for dozens of new data centers, so much that the local utility, American Electric Power, projected it would need six times the electricity central Ohio produced.
The utility had spent months meeting with the state’s consumer representative, tech companies and related industries, and the staff of the regulator, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, to hammer out a deal.
But in October, before the negotiations were done, the tech companies gave the utility a few days’ notice that they were submitting their own proposal. Industry experts said they had never seen that kind of front-running before. Under the companies’ plan, they would pay less upfront than the utility had wanted.
Days later, the Ohio utility, the consumer representative and the regulator’s staff countered with a plan that would create a class of customer for data centers and would require them to pay more. This category would be in addition to the four main types of electricity customers — homes, businesses, factories and public rail systems — that pay different rates in Ohio and other states.
The hearing in Columbus, before an administrative law judge, was about power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense.
American Electric Power, which has 5.6 million customers in 11 states, warned the judge that if the state did not adopt its proposal, residents and smaller businesses would bear much of the costs for tech companies’ power demands.
Despite tech companies’ professed desire not to burden others, they often push regulators to impose some of the upgrade costs on everybody. They contend that data centers bring jobs to the area, and that grid upgrades will ultimately help local businesses and residents.
At one point, a lawyer representing Amazon sought to get an executive from the Ohio utility to admit that he had once welcomed data centers to the state.
“You said something to the effect of ‘Data centers are great for the economy,’” David Proaño, a partner at the law firm BakerHostetler, prodded. “Do you remember saying something like that?”
The executive, Kamran Ali, deadpanned that he had “said a lot of things.” Mr. Ali testified that he worried about how the voracious power demands would tax the electric grid and hurt other consumers.
Scores of residential and business customers raised similar concerns in comments to Ohio regulators.
“To even consider foisting more fees on Ohio’s private citizens is a travesty,” Benjamin Yoder, who lives in Blacklick, east of Columbus, wrote in a comment for a public hearing in January.
An anonymous customer from Upper Sandusky wrote: “Our wallets cannot be strained anymore. Make them pay their own bills like we do!”
The utility in Ohio has already committed to supplying electricity for 30 data centers in the region by 2030, reaching power consumption levels in the Columbus area as high as Manhattan’s. But the tech industry is making additional requests to power 90 more data centers, which could make consumption comparable to the entire state of New York during a peak summer day.
“We’re used to a couple megawatts added to our system,” Marc Reitter, president and chief operating officer at the utility, said in an interview. “Massive amounts of power is extremely new territory.”
The utility’s proposal for a new category of customer will require data centers to make years of payments for the energy they need — something other customers are not required to do.
It wanted data centers and cryptocurrency miners to pay at least 85 percent of the electricity they request, even if they did not use it.
But Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech companies said they should pay less than what the utility wanted. The settlement the companies filed had committed to 75 percent of the electricity they requested, depending on the length of the contract. That would leave other utility customers to shoulder more of the cost of new grid equipment.
In addition, the tech industry wanted all large customers, including factories, to be treated the same. And it proposed a higher threshold for determining if data centers should be considered large users than in the utility-led proposal.
Kevin Miller, who was until recently a vice president at Amazon, said the Ohio utility’s plan could result in tech companies’ overpaying because data centers ramp up operations in phases. And data centers could be required to pay for power even if the utility failed to deliver all the energy it had committed to supplying, he said.
“We just don’t think that it has the right kind of flexibility to really match the profile over time that the data center brings,” Mr. Miller said in an interview before he left Amazon in July.
Last month, after spending months weighing the proposals, the commission ruled 5 to 0 against the tech companies.
“Today’s order represents a well-balanced package that safeguards non-data-center customers,” Jenifer French, the chair of the commission, said in a statement after the ruling.
Last Friday, the tech companies asked the commission to reconsider the case, calling the ruling “unlawful and unreasonable.”
Another Risk: Growth Could Falter
The Ohio ruling hinged on a big concern for utilities and lawmakers: that the tech companies may be asking for a lot more power than they will ultimately use. The worry is that executives could overestimate demand for A.I. or underestimate the energy efficiency of future computer chips. Residents and smaller businesses would then be stuck covering much of the cost because utilities largely recoup the cost of improvements over time as customers use power rather than through upfront payments.
These are not idle fears. Tech companies have announced plans for data centers that are never built or delayed for years.
The utility’s executives said their proposal sought to protect all customers if tech companies abandoned or delayed projects. They pointed to a case in Virginia, where regular customers had to cover initial costs of grid upgrades for a data center that started operating years later than planned.
In that case, a developer of data centers, Unicorn Interests, told Dominion Energy, a large utility, in 2010 that it would build a data center next to the regional airport in Manassas, near Washington, that would need electricity by July 2013.
Virginia regulators approved Dominion’s $42 million plan to build a substation and a transmission line to serve the campus, which was run by an investment trust founded by the real estate developers Hossein Fateh and Lammot J. du Pont, a descendant of the du Pont dynasty. By late spring 2013, Dominion had procured most of the materials it needed for the project and done some site work, but Unicorn was behind schedule.
Ultimately, the data center did not sign a customer until summer 2017. During the four-year delay, ratepayers in and around Manassas paid millions of dollars for upgrades that were not being used. Because Unicorn was not drawing electricity from the new equipment, it paid Dominion nothing or very little in those years.
In an interview, Mr. Fateh acknowledged the delays but said Unicorn had helped usher in a data center boom in the area.
He also said he supported the utility industry’s efforts to have data centers make upfront payments for grid upgrades to weed out projects that might not be completed.
“Most utilities really, really like our business because we are using a consistent amount of power, day or night,” he said. That means once they are up and running, data centers buy power all the time, unlike homes, which primarily use electricity in the morning and evening.
A spokesman for Dominion Energy, Aaron Ruby, said another data center project had replaced Unicorn and covered some of the costs, so “any impacts to residential customers would have been temporary and minimal, if anything at all.”
Data centers are contractually required, Mr. Ruby said, to pay for the full cost of new distribution infrastructure — including substations and the poles and wires that connect the data center to the substation — within the first four years of their service.
But that requirement does not apply to all upgrade costs. To serve large energy users, utilities also have to upgrade transmission lines that take electricity from power plants to the substation. The cost of upgrading those lines is generally borne by everyone.
Data centers have flocked to Northern Virginia because it is home to critical internet cabling and government agencies. The tech buildings now account for more than a quarter of the region’s energy use.
A Virginia agency concluded in a report in December that data centers had generally been paying their fair share of grid upgrade expenses, but that costs to residents could rise $276 a year by 2030 because of data centers. That number could be substantially higher if construction plans for data centers are delayed, or if they are never built or use less electricity than planned.
The report recommended that the state create a rate class for data centers — similar to the proposal that regulators approved in Ohio and other states are contemplating. At a hearing in Richmond, Va., in December, the tech companies pushed back against that idea.
“We do see an industry-specific rate class as discriminatory,” Brian George, a Google executive, said at the hearing. “Once we start going down that road, it does become a very slippery slope for how we can stop. If we assign it to one particular industry, how do we not assign it to another?”
But James Wilson, an energy economist who has consulted for consumer and environmental groups, noted that data centers accounted for almost all the electricity demand growth expected over the coming years in the Mid-Atlantic region.
“Discrimination, yes; undue, not really,” he testified at the same hearing.
The technology companies say they are open to compromises. In an interview, Amanda Peterson Corio, a Google executive responsible for data center energy, pointed to a deal with American Electric Power’s subsidiary in Indiana and consumer groups in that state, where tech companies agreed to pay some grid upgrade costs upfront to allay concerns about canceled or delayed projects.
But under that deal, data centers are not put into a new rate class. “You start to isolate different classes and start to allocate who we’re going to give power to and who we’re not,” Ms. Corio said. “That goes against every construct of how our electricity system was designed, which is to be open access.”
Tech companies say they plan to keep building data centers, but where those sites will be is uncertain. That puts utilities at risk of building more than their area needs.
Microsoft, for example, announced plans in October to build three data center campuses that would require power from the Ohio utility. “The Columbus region’s skilled work force, strong infrastructure and strategic location make it ideal for this project,” the company said then.
But six months later — before regulators ruled against the tech industry — Microsoft changed its data center strategy and said it was putting the Ohio projects on ice. For the foreseeable future, those sites would remain farmland.
Jeremy Singer-Vine contributed reporting.
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12) Behind Wall Street’s Abrupt Flip on Crypto
The reversal risks declawing a century of consumer financial protections and replacing the backbone of bank accounts.
By Rob Copeland, Aug. 13, 2025
Rob Copeland has been covering Wall Street’s posture on cryptocurrency for more than a decade.
“Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy. ‘The genie is out of the bottle,’ said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. ‘You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,’ Mr. Cagney said. Not everyone agrees that the result will be cataclysmic. ‘The consumer checking account is probably safe,’ said Tim Spence, the chief executive of Fifth Third, a Cincinnati bank with $210 billion in assets that traces its roots back to 1858. It plans to accept stablecoins issued by a large group of banks. Privately, however, many lending veterans are vexed at how rapidly changes are coming. ‘If the banking industry was being totally frank,’ one prominent banking attorney said, ‘they would say they wish stablecoins had never been invented.’”
Ari Liloan
Not long ago, bank executives would compete with one another to be the loudest critic of cryptocurrencies.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, once compared Bitcoin to a pet rock and said the whole crypto industry should be banned. Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan described the space as an “untraceable tool for money laundering,” while HSBC’s chief executive proclaimed bluntly: “We are not into Bitcoin.”
Now big banks can’t stop talking about crypto.
In investor calls, public presentations and meetings with Washington regulators, financial executives are tripping over one another to unveil new plans — including the development of fresh cryptocurrencies under bank umbrellas and loans tied to digital assets.
There’s no small mix of political opportunism at play, given that President Trump and his family are vociferous crypto boosters and investors. And of course there is a degree of old-fashioned jealousy among the traditional finance set at the riches earned by onetime fringe companies and investors as Bitcoin more than doubled over the past year to blow past $100,000.
But behind the scenes at major financial institutions — and in stark contrast to the public showboating among chief executives — fear is also rising that the rush into crypto may risk the safety of personal bank accounts in ways that Wall Street and Washington are just beginning to understand.
The worries, described by nine Wall Street executives briefed on their organizations’ crypto initiatives but not authorized to speak publicly for their employers, center on the creation of a new interbank checking account and payments system built on crypto and blockchain technology. That system would come with few consumer protections and nascent regulatory oversight.
The system, being sketched out by top executives and lawyers at huge banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi, involves a complicated corner of the crypto ecosystem called a stablecoin.
Stablecoins could upend the old financial order.
Stablecoins work like a digital i.o.u. Their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no such constraint and thus can swing wildly in price.
Here’s how they would work at scale: A bank customer places his or her cash with the bank and gets a stash of stablecoins in return. The consumer can then use these coins, for instance, to send money overseas or make international payments less expensively than wiring money.
The funds that a customer exchanges in return for stablecoins is, to the bank, the equivalent of a guaranteed profit.
That’s because a federal law passed this summer with bipartisan support requires banks to take the money they receive for stablecoins and invest it in government bonds and other virtually risk-free assets. Those bonds generate interest, which the bank keeps. Unlike traditional bank accounts, these savings don’t earn even nominal interest for depositors.
Another big change: Stablecoins eschew the century-old practice of automatic federal deposit insurance. If they fail, there is no guarantee of a government backstop.
Bankers say stablecoins, if widely adopted, could bring a radical change to the nuts and bolts of their industry, and they have the potential to upend a century of accepted banking practices.
One reason is that the money that a customer places with a bank in exchange for a stablecoin cannot be lent out in the same way that money placed in a traditional checking and savings account can be.
Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. “You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,” Mr. Cagney said.
Not everyone agrees that the result will be cataclysmic.
“The consumer checking account is probably safe,” said Tim Spence, the chief executive of Fifth Third, a Cincinnati bank with $210 billion in assets that traces its roots back to 1858. It plans to accept stablecoins issued by a large group of banks.
Privately, however, many lending veterans are vexed at how rapidly changes are coming.
“If the banking industry was being totally frank,” one prominent banking attorney said, “they would say they wish stablecoins had never been invented.”
Wildcat banks offer a warning.
Wall Street has been nibbling around the edges of crypto for years.
Investment banks have already been advising crypto companies with public listings and bond offerings (collecting fees in the process). Goldman Sachs has offered wealthy clients loans based on their crypto holdings since 2022.
The big banks’ brokerage units help major clients buy investment funds with exposure to cryptocurrency, and in some instances they help the clients directly hold crypto coins themselves.
The first Trump administration and Biden years were a step back, however, as banks cut off crypto companies and investors from their networks amid pressure from skeptical regulators.
Eventually JPMorgan, despite Mr. Dimon’s public crypto antipathy, built a team of several hundred employees to study how to make money from crypto and began testing a niche digital asset, JPM Coin, to experiment with digital payments for commercial clients. It didn’t take off.
JPMorgan in recent months has assigned a team of internal researchers to unearth legal documents related to the era of so-called wildcat banking from two centuries ago. In that era, hundreds of state-chartered banks issued their own currencies. JPMorgan’s researchers were looking into whether some of those dormant laws applied to the bank’s plan to create its own stablecoin today.
They uncovered something else, though. In the wildcat era, fraud and bank failures ruled. That tumult was fixed only by the creation of the first U.S. National Bank note, a predecessor to the modern U.S. dollar. It was issued only by official national chartered banks — one of which was the precursor to JPMorgan Chase.
The GENIUS Act codified an untested future.
Mr. Trump, who, like the nation’s biggest bankers, used to be a crypto skeptic, has worked during his second term to bring crypto into the mainstream.
This summer, Mr. Trump signed into law the GENIUS Act, passed by Congress during what Republicans called “cryptocurrency week.”
The law created a pathway for banks to operate in stablecoins tied to the U.S. dollar, long considered the steadiest global currency because of the reliability of the American economy.
It requires stablecoin issuers to maintain “reserves” of U.S. Treasury bonds or dollars equal to the total value of the coins they have distributed.
The GENIUS Act enjoyed a measure of bipartisan backing. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said it unlocked “the next generation of financial innovation.”
Critics of the law pointed out that Mr. Trump’s sons run a crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, that issues its own stablecoin and stands to benefit handsomely if the digital currency takes off.
Bank lobbyists didn’t just support the legislation, but took an active role in shaping it.
Bankers who participated in the lobbying said they felt somewhat forced by circumstance. Stablecoins, they said, were coming fast — both from new upstarts like Circle and big retailers like Walmart and Amazon, which are said to be studying creating coins of their own.
If such competitors become popular, they will act as a runaround of banks large and small, by allowing consumers to buy goods and pay for services without needing an account at an existing lender.
Thus banks have been discussing with one another how to create one big stablecoin of their own. (The name, the bankers briefed on it said, is to be determined.) They are also hedging their bets, developing individual ones if needed. Some plan to operate rewards programs, similar to existing credit card promotions, to woo customers to their own coins.
None of the coins are expected to be in use before the end of the year.
Mr. Moynihan of Bank of America confirmed during a quarterly earnings call last month that his lender was brushing up on stablecoins, saying that “both the industry and ourselves will have responses.”
He said he had no clue how popular they would become, or whether the bank would go it alone or in concert with other lenders.
“It will be a complex array,” Mr. Moynihan said.
“Hopefully not complex to the consumer, frankly,” he added.
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13) Sudan, Battered by War, Is Hit by Its ‘Worst Cholera Outbreak’ in Years
International charities warned that, left unchecked, the disease’s spread might exacerbate similar outbreaks across the African region for weeks or months to come.
By Eve Sampson, Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, Aug. 14, 2025
Patients received treatment in the cholera ward of a refugee camp in the town of Tawila in the western Darfur region of Sudan on Tuesday. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The cholera ward in Tawila, Sudan, was overflowing the first week of August, a grim sign of what the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said in a release on Thursday was “the worst cholera outbreak the country has seen in years.”
International charities have warned that the spread of the disease, no longer contained within Sudan’s borders, might exacerbate similar outbreaks across the region.
“People cross borders,” Sheldon Yett, UNICEF’s representative to Sudan, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “This epidemic has already crossed into South Sudan, and it’s crossing into Chad. Unless we’re able to address this crisis, we risk it rippling across borders for weeks and months to come.”
Sudan has had nearly 100,000 suspected cases of cholera and has reported more than 2,400 cholera-related deaths since the country’s Health Ministry declared an outbreak a year ago, Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said in its statement. The group said it had documented 40 deaths over the span of one week in the western Darfur region of Sudan alone.
The town of Tawila, in the state of North Darfur, has become a hotbed for disease. The town is about 44 miles from the city of El Fasher, the Sudanese Army’s last holdout in the Darfur region that has been under siege for over a year. The local population has ballooned to include hundreds of thousands of people fleeing nearby violence.
They had sought refuge from the bloodshed in cramped encampments with little infrastructure. But there is little water, health services or hygiene infrastructure to support the new arrivals.
“In displacement and refugee camps, families often have no choice but to drink from contaminated sources, and many contract cholera,” Sylvain Penicaud, a project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in Tawila, said in the group’s statement.
“Just two weeks ago, a body was found in a well inside one of the camps. It was removed, but within two days, people were forced to drink from that same water again.”
Cholera is caused by ingesting contaminated food or water, and infections can run rampant in areas where people live in crowded conditions with substandard sanitation. Cholera kills by dehydrating victims, often through vomiting and the onset of diarrhea, and its lethality increases when coupled with other factors like inadequate nutrition.
For just pennies, the disease can be easily treated with medication, but only if that medication is accessible.
Sudan, in northern Africa, has been engulfed in deadly violence since the civil war broke out between rival generals in April 2023. The Darfur region, which is primarily controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, a militant group that opposes the Sudanese Army, has been hit particularly hard by the war. Its population has suffered mass displacement and disease on top of the bloodshed.
This month, UNICEF reported a surge in cholera cases in Tawila and said that fighting in North Darfur had put over 640,000 children under the age of 5 at risk of hunger, violence and disease.
Mr. Yett, UNICEF’s representative to Sudan, said that the group was trying to mitigate the suffering but that the problem would persist unless the root causes — including war and displacement — were addressed.
“As populations move, so does the disease,” he said, adding, “When we think we have it under control in one place, it pops up somewhere else.”
In 2024, the United States gave $830 million in emergency aid to Sudan, more assistance than any other country provided, the United Nations estimated. The Trump administration’s slashing of U.S. aid this year has wreaked havoc in parts of the country where people used to depend on American-funded food kitchens for sustenance.
Mr. Yett said aid cuts were amplifying the cholera crisis as well, and he emphasized that, left unchecked, the outbreak risked escalating in other regions where the disease is already tearing through vulnerable communities.
A cholera outbreak has already struck a refugee settlement in Chad that hosts people from Darfur and countries that are contending with their own surges in disease.
South Sudan is experiencing “its worst and longest” cholera outbreak, according to the United Nations, with more than 80,000 cases and 1,400 deaths recorded since the outbreak was declared in October 2024.
Similarly, the Democratic Republic of Congo declared an outbreak this May, reporting 29,392 suspected cases of cholera and 620 related deaths from Jan. 1 to June 8.
This year, neighboring Angola experienced “the worst cholera outbreak in the country in almost two decades,” the World Health Organization said in a June report, citing more than 26,000 cases and nearly 750 deaths in just over five months.
Mr. Yett, speaking from Port Sudan, noted the weather and spoke grimly of what may come. The rainy season, which can lead to flooding and the mix of sewage with drinking water, has not yet concluded in Sudan.
“Already we’ve got a massive outbreak,” he said, “and the rains are still in front of us.”
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