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Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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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) Israel at War With Itself
By Roger Cohen, Visuals by David Guttenfelder and Saher Alghorra, Oct. 5, 2025
At Kibbutz Nir Oz, time is frozen. The tricycles, dollhouses and washing detergent piled outside charred homes testify to lives that stopped two years ago when a Hamas assault left 117 people dead, kidnapped or missing from this small Israeli farming community near the Gaza border. Wind chimes tinkle over the collapsed swings of absent children.
Of the 384 residents at the time of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, a handful have returned, but like Israel as a whole, they find themselves gripped still by a horror that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 was intended to prevent. “Every conversation ends with the 7th of October,” said Ola Metzger, who recently came back with her family.
Her husband, Nir Metzger, whose father was taken hostage by Hamas and killed last year in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, is the general secretary of the kibbutz. A big issue confronting him is whether to demolish burned and shattered houses or to preserve them as a memorial.
“It’s a heated debate,” he said, sitting in the bright kitchen of his newly constructed house. “I say demolish and rebuild. I don’t want kids passing incinerated homes. It’s time to move forward.”
But how? Whether in a divided and more isolated Israel, or in a devastated Gaza, the future is for now shackled by new levels of distrust and hatred. Although Hamas said on Friday that it had agreed to release all of the remaining Israeli hostages, live and dead, it did not say that it would accept most aspects of a plan presented by President Trump, including the demand that it disarm. Mr. Trump welcomed the statement, and Israel said it would work with him.
The longest war of an endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not over yet and has come to challenge Israel’s image and understanding of itself. Its military has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, raining down such destruction on every aspect of life in Gaza that much of the world accuses it of genocide. Antisemitism is on the rise. The attack this week on a synagogue on Yom Kippur in Manchester, England, was only the most recent example.
For Palestinians, a statehood that more countries have recognized of late remains a remote aspiration, at best, and that is the immovable issue at the heart of war after war.
Mr. Trump, shrugging off more than a century of failed Western interventions in the Middle East, has proposed a form of tutelage over Gaza that posits prosperity “crafted by well-meaning international groups” as a “pathway” to peace.
It is an ambitious plan for a strip of land where destruction has reached apocalyptic proportions. The proposal was seemingly prepared in part to allow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to claim victory over Hamas. If the hostages are freed, it would certainly bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s standing.
But Mr. Trump’s idea of turning Gaza into a coastal business emporium with “preferred tariff and access rates” and a marginal Palestinian role in governance seems at once demeaning to the people who live there and unlikely to work.
“This plan does not guarantee our rights as human beings with dignity,” Riwaa Abu Quta, a young Gazan woman who has been living in a tent in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi for more than a year, told me in a telephone interview. She has lost her home, her job and her hopes since the war began. “It gives us the feeling that displacement will be our identity.”
Displacement and the quest for a homeland are, of course, intrinsic to the intertwined fates of Israelis and Palestinians. The Holocaust and the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, in which some 750,000 Palestinians were driven out during Israel’s War of Independence, vie for greater weight on the sterile scales of competitive victimhood. By rekindling nightmarish memories of these disasters, the Oct. 7 attack and retaliatory war in Gaza have pushed the two sides deeper into enmity.
“The Oct. 7 slaughter and seizure of hostages reinforced Holocaust associations for Israel, and for many Palestinians in Gaza, the war has been a new Nakba,” said Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “So narratives feed themselves in an endless loop.”
At the two-year mark of the greatest defeat in the country’s 77-year history, Israelis find themselves mentally and physically exhausted, and not only the 295,000 reservists who have been called up again and again. Some 83,000 Israelis emigrated in 2024, 50 percent more than the previous year. Seven members of the Israeli military died by suicide in July and August alone.
People either compulsively follow the news or, simply spent, do not follow it at all. They speak of being overloaded. Posters and stickers of hostages and fallen soldiers in Gaza fade and peel on walls and benches. Anger flares at the smallest thing. After repeated ugly brawls over lanes, the beachside Gordon swimming pool in Tel Aviv, established in 1956, sent a letter on Aug. 7 urging its members to “avoid any expression of physical or verbal aggression.”
Arab neighbors speak of an imperial Israel after Mr. Netanyahu’s decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and blow to Iran’s nuclear program. But in Israel, there is no triumphal sense of regional military ascendancy.
Rather, Israel has found its weakest enemy, Hamas, the most intractable, perhaps because defeating an idea is never easy, and is consumed by doubt. An intensely interconnected society, where the collective, forged in school and through military service, is fundamental, now debates whether it has lost its way and its ideals.
“There is no history, as in America, of the rugged individual in Israel,” said Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli author and historian. “The mythology here is of the rugged commune, and it is that sense of shared responsibility that has been shattered.”
The Two Israels
The former defense minister and chief of staff of the Israeli military, a man once close to Mr. Netanyahu, was angry. More than angry, he was shaking with indignation.
“We have lost our way. Eighty years after the Holocaust, we are talking about ethnic cleansing, Jewish supremacy, clearing Gaza City of its inhabitants,” Moshe Yaalon told me. “Are these the values of the state of Israel?”
Tears welled up, and he had to pause.
“I fought to defend the Jewish, democratic liberal state in the spirit of our Declaration of Independence,” he said. “What we have now with this government is a tyrannical, racist, hateful, corrupt and boycotted leadership. That must be the main issue for the next election.”
The prime minister’s office declined to comment.
Of course, Israel is still a Middle Eastern country that holds elections — one is due next year — and where it is possible to say such things, at least as an Israeli Jew, without retribution. Still, Mr. Yaalon’s fury reflects the widespread conviction that a fundamental compact of Israel’s democracy was broken over the past two years and may be hard to repair.
At the heart of that compact is the idea that you never leave a soldier on the field. In allowing the hostages’ agony to persist for two years in Gaza, where at least 41 were killed, Mr. Netanyahu transgressed against this core national tenet.
Worse, in the view of his critics, he placed his own interests above the nation’s, doing everything to put off a commission of inquiry into the Oct. 7 debacle that stemmed in part from his policy of supporting Hamas to ensure that the Palestinian national movement remained divided and ineffectual.
Not so, say Mr. Netanyahu’s many supporters. They view him as the nation’s savior who, through a war of “resurrection,” as he calls it, has vanquished Hamas and made Israel safer. The jury will likely be out for a long time, but to suggest that Israel’s leader, after a total of 18 years in power, has no political future would be rash.
“Most Israeli prime ministers would probably have made the same decisions as Bibi,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and deputy minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s office, calling the prime minister by his nickname. “He may have no credibility in the world, but he saw Oct. 7 as a summons to history and stepped up.”
The price has been high. Mr. Netanyahu has polarized Israelis and incensed the world.
Largely shielded from the extent of the terrible Palestinian suffering in Gaza, or in some cases untroubled by it, Israelis are consumed by their nation’s internal fracture. The Oct. 7 attack brought the apotheosis of a long-brewing struggle between two Israels.
The first, a growing Messianic religious movement, now a decisive presence in the government, sees the Oct. 7 massacre of an estimated 1,200 people as a “miraculous moment that forced the Jewish nation to take another step toward redemption,” as Daniella Weiss, a prominent leader of the settler movement, put it to me.
That redemption, for Ms. Weiss and her many followers, takes the form of Israeli control of all the land of Eretz Israel, bequeathed — as they see it — by God to the Jews.
The second Israel, secular, liberal and committed to safeguarding the nation’s democracy, sees this rightward drift as a mortal threat to the values embodied in the nation’s founding charter. This calls for “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
That lofty goal has proved unattainable in a Jewish state where two million citizens, or 20 percent of the population, are Arab or Palestinian. But many still believe that abandoning the struggle for its ideals would betray Israel’s essential promise.
“Bibi has done terrible things not only to Palestinians, but to us,” said Gadi Shamni, a retired major general and a former Israeli military attaché in Washington. “He has thrown away our basic values, of sanctifying life and of ethics in war, for which we sometimes paid a heavy price.”
Mr. Shamni said that, “with ministers demanding that we act as war criminals,” officers confronting a shadowy enemy embedded in Gaza’s civilian urban fabric had struggled to uphold values considered sacrosanct during his own time in the military.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, a man convicted several times of inciting racism, has suggested that not even “a gram of food or aid should get into Gaza,” and has called for “the clearing of one million people out of there” through “voluntary immigration.”
Bezalel Smotrich, the hard-line Israeli finance minister, has called for “total annihilation” in Gaza. “They are to be destroyed, destroyed, destroyed,” he said last year.
Such statements have fed the charges of Israeli genocide against Palestinians.
A Dream Foreclosed
Both Mr. Smotrich and Mr. Ben-Gvir reside in the occupied West Bank, where more than a half-million Israelis live. Freed of all constraints since the Oct. 7 attack, the settlers have rapidly stepped up their land grab in an attempt to foreclose the already distant possibility of a Palestinian state.
The new Israeli flags that line West Bank highways proclaim a colonization that, 58 years after the 1967 battlefield victory that extended Israeli authority to the Jordan River, seems irreversible.
Across the biblical land Israelis call Judea and Samaria, Bobcats and other earthmovers heave rocks in clouds of dust. They carve dirt roads into terraced hillsides topped by the white caravans of yet another Israeli settlers’ outpost.
Cameras are ubiquitous; no Palestinian life goes unwatched. Israeli authorities have installed hundreds of automated yellow gates at the entrances to Palestinian towns and villages. They may slam shut, fencing in their populations, at any hint of disturbance.
In Al Mughayir, a hillside village of about 3,000 people with a view of ancient olive and almond groves, recent Israeli depredations have been exacting. An incident on Aug. 21 involving an overturned tractor and an injured settler — the exact circumstances were never clarified — led hundreds of Israeli soldiers to swarm into the village, detaining the mayor for nine days and searching more than 500 homes. At the same time, settlers hacked and bulldozed countless olive trees across the villagers’ fields.
“I felt they were uprooting my own heart,” said Aisha Abu Alia, 53, as she stood in the fields gazing at the devastation.
Later, in her house at the center of the village, wearing a purple head scarf, she sat flanked by several family members, two of them engaged in intricate embroidery. Over the course of her life, Ms. Abu Alia said, she had experienced ever greater pressure and humiliation, aimed at “throwing out every Palestinian from this land.”
Unmarried, because “I know many people who got married and regretted it,” Ms. Abu Alia lives in her parents’ house. She has one sister and seven brothers, two of them in the United States who have constantly urged her to move there.
“But it’s impossible to leave,” she said, as if stating an evident truth. “Never.”
Her house commands a view of the village and the fields beyond it where settlers bring their sheep to graze, as well as of the main road, and so it has been requisitioned several times by the Israeli military. On June 16, she said, dozens of soldiers burst into her home. An officer explained that she lived in a “terrorist neighborhood.”
“Why don’t you love Israel?” he asked, as Ms. Abu Alia recalled.
“Why don’t you love Palestine?” she responded.
“There is no such thing as Palestine,” the officer said.
“With God’s will, one day there will be a Palestine and no Israel,” she said.
This enraged the soldiers. Thirteen years ago, Ms. Abu Alia had sewn an elaborate tapestry depicting Palestine on all of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It gives particular prominence to Al Aqsa, the sacred mosque compound in Jerusalem that has long been a flashpoint.
An Israeli soldier hurled the framed tapestry to the floor, breaking the glass, Ms. Abu Alia recalled. She indicated the damage and escorted me around the house, pointing to slashed couches, a smashed clock and defaced photographs of her nephews.
I asked her about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. “I did not celebrate, even if we did not feel anything for the Israeli victims because we have had so many dead,” she said. “I knew our lives would be turned upside down.”
Her 17-year-old niece, Sara, interjected: “Even if it had not happened, Israel would have done something like this. It just put everything into fast forward.”
“Gaza spilled over,” said Samar, Ms. Abu Alia’s cousin, pausing in her embroidery. “We lost homes, we lost trees, we lost many of our own. There is no law, nothing that stops them any longer. Our children are traumatized.”
Her 8-year-old daughter, Nour, wearing a purple T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Be a Younicorn,” smiled bravely, a portrait of innocence. I wondered if the cycle of war would sweep away her life one day or if some almost inconceivable act of statesmanship might protect her.
“I don’t see any possibility whatsoever of a two-state solution,” Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, told me. “There is too much history here now and too little geography.”
Israel, Hostage
Viki Cohen fondled the charred Rubik’s Cube found in the disabled tank from which, on Oct. 7, 2023, her then 19-year-old son Nimrod was dragged by masked Hamas operatives into Gaza. The other three members of his tank crew were killed.
Nimrod Cohen, along with an estimated 20 hostages — and the corpses of 25 others — has now been held in Gaza for more than 725 days. He recently turned 21. Every few months, Ms. Cohen and her husband, Yehuda, have received “signs of life” communications from the Israeli military. For many other families, a dreaded knock on the door has signaled the slaying of their loved ones.
“He loved the Rubik’s Cube,” said Ms. Cohen, who used to work for a company providing caregivers for the aged, but quit more than a year ago. “All my time goes to bringing Nimrod back home.”
Israel, for two years now, has been taken hostage. Whether this nightmare will end with an exchange of the hostages for Palestinian prisoners in the next few days or weeks remains to be seen.
“We hope it’s a matter of days,” Mr. Cohen said, after hearing that Hamas had agreed to free all of the hostages. His whole family was gathered on Saturday in a state of extreme tension and emotion. He struggled for words, his wife struggled for breath. “I can’t talk now, I am counting the minutes and even the seconds,” he said. “I have to take care of my son.”
The nation is on tenterhooks. Turn on the TV, and there is a discussion about the hostages. Look around, and there are the empty plastic yellow chairs or yellow ribbons that have become their symbol. Listen to anyone, and, at the very least, it seems, some personal bond ties them to the hostage nightmare. Israel can seem very small.
There are live hostages and dead hostages because this is a conflict in which even corpses are used to inflict psychological torment on the enemy and are considered tradable assets.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets at different times to demand that the government recognize the nation’s anguish and prioritize the hostages’ release. Many, including the Cohens, have been protesting for almost three years, first against Mr. Netanyahu’s attempt to debilitate the Supreme Court as a means to exercise unfettered power, and then against his perceived neglect of the hostages.
In an earlier interview, Mr. Cohen, an algorithmic engineer in a tech company, wore a black T-shirt with the words, “Ceasefire Hostage Deal Now.” Nimrod is a normal child, he said. “He’s special to us because he’s our son. We’re only talking about him because he had the misfortune to be kidnapped, and we’re fulfilling our basic responsibility to fight for his release.”
His tone was matter-of-fact. This “now needless war” has been going on a long time, far too long in his view. His wife cannot sleep thinking of her son who never sees sunlight.
“We are disgusted, we are frustrated,” Mr. Cohen said. “We see Netanyahu’s government as our enemy. He’s only prolonged the war so he can survive. My son Nimrod is being held in a tunnel financed by money Netanyahu pushed into Gaza.”
He looked at me hard. “Everybody is to blame except him, except Caesar,” he said. The only way to end the war, he believes, is for Mr. Trump to force Mr. Netanyahu to do so.
The Cohens think that if their son survives, he will be one of the last ones out. He is young. He is a soldier. Hamas has every reason to hold on to him. Still, they hope, and now that hope is fervid.
I asked how they feel about their nation, two years into its trauma. “I don’t want my country to be a country that rules others,” Mr. Cohen said. “I don’t want to live in a country whose international borders are not declared and recognized. I want to live in a normal country.”
‘The Place of Funerals’
Over several weeks, I spoke regularly by phone to Riwaa Abu Quta in Gaza. The war has taken her from her home in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, now largely razed by Israel, to Al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, where she lives in a tent in a camp with hundreds of other displaced people.
At 30, she has lived through many wars, but none so brutal. She is scared and angry, “as any human being would be.” She has tried to care for her younger sister Alaa, who has muscular dystrophy, but the required medicine long since disappeared.
Her tasks are boring, she said. Finding food of some kind, perhaps canned beans; securing drinkable water; cleaning the tent where her family lives. All the while listening to the hum of Israeli drones or the roar of fighter jets that could deliver more carnage in the rubble.
Sometimes, she puts sand in the pockets of clothes draped over the tent as protection from bullets or shrapnel. She knows it is ridiculous. But so is her crazed situation. There is no safe place. Her nightmares begin at daybreak.
She feels history is repeating itself. Her forebears were driven out of a village near Jerusalem. In a way, she said, she is losing that village again.
Her voice is always calm. It is also full of pain. She has lost countless friends. Gaza, she said, has become “the place of funerals.” More than 66,000, according to the Gaza health authorities, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
She had a world: an online job with an educational company, an application for a scholarship to study in Britain, her gym, her home. That is gone. All she has now is sand.
She blames Israel above all for killing the innocent; Hamas for bringing disaster on the Palestinian people; and a feckless world that chooses this moment to recognize a Palestinian state when the step is “too late and so small compared to the destruction we live.”
Mutating Rage
At Kibbutz Nir Oz, the demolition of charred and damaged houses began on Aug. 31. Backhoes were used to break down the “safe rooms,” the hardest to tear down, even if in many cases they proved anything but safe. It was grim work, but perhaps a signal of a new beginning.
Some houses will be left untouched, at least for now, including the remains of the home of the Bibas family, whose suffering was spread over three generations.
Yarden Bibas and his wife, Shiri, and their two young children, ages 5 and 9 months, were taken by Hamas as hostages. Shiri was killed in captivity and her corpse returned after 505 days, one day after the bodies of her children. Yarden was released alive after 484 days. Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silverman, were burned alive in their Nir Oz home.
“Yarden, we’re glad you’re back. Sorry, forgive us,” says a message on the ruin that was his home.
Such slaughter revived Holocaust memories, mocked the “Never Again” embodied in Israel’s very creation, and so roused the country to a deep rage. The lesson of docile death learned over centuries was that Israel hits back, always. If this fury was disturbing to some, it was also understandable to many, at least for a few weeks, when much of the world rallied to Israel’s side.
That sympathy, after Gaza’s obliteration, has generally vanished. Israel is isolated, as was illustrated last month when Mr. Netanyahu was left to detail what he considers his war’s successes to a nearly empty meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Representatives from around the world walked out.
In Israel, anger over Oct. 7 persists, redoubled by what is seen as the Hamas attack’s rapid relegation to a small detail of the war, and by the conviction that fervid anti-Zionism around the world has crossed a line into resurgent antisemitism. “After the Holocaust, it was unsavory to hate Jews,” said Mr. Oren, the former Israeli ambassador. “But that period has ended, and the world has reverted to form.”
There is also a strong feeling, however, that the way Mr. Netanyahu prosecuted the war led Israel to a sustained brutality in Gaza that will haunt the nation for many years. Mr. Netanyahu denies the charge that he persisted in the war in order to remain in power and evade taking responsibility for a disaster, but the charge seems unlikely to abate.
Mr. Gorenberg, the Israeli historian, rejected the accusation against Israel of “genocide,” noting that the term was first used in the very early weeks of the war when Hamas missiles were raining down on Tel Aviv, and so was evidently stained from the start with “an unjustifiable animus.”
However, he added, “There have been horrible, reprehensible war crimes in a war that at some point, I would say early 2024, ceased serving the purpose of defending Israel.”
This long war has transformed young Israelis from the TikTok generation to a cohort forged in a crucible of violence that has known few restraints. How the experience will affect them, and what trauma they will carry, is as yet unclear, but it will bear heavily on the direction that Israel takes.
The same may be said of the Palestinians, many killed, displaced, wounded, their national aspirations in tatters despite all the pious words of support from an indignant world.
“Enough of blood and tears. Enough,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel declared on the White House lawn 32 years ago in the time of hope that was the close of the 20th Century. But this century’s thirst for blood has so far proved unquenchable.
Adam Rasgon and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Fatima AbdulKarim from the West Bank.
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2) Israel and Hamas Prepare for Talks on Trump’s Plan to End Gaza War
Indirect negotiations through mediators are planned for Monday in Egypt and are expected to focus on one main issue, swapping hostages for Palestinian prisoners. That may leave talks on other obstacles to ending the war until later.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Oct. 5, 2025
A protest calling for the release of Israeli hostages and an end to the war in Gaza was held on Saturday in Tel Aviv. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Israeli and Hamas negotiators were preparing for talks in Cairo planned for Monday, which mediators hope will pave the way for the end of the war in Gaza.
But American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators will face numerous roadblocks that could delay or undermine the chances for a quick cease-fire. This round of talks is expected to focus on one main issue — swapping the remaining hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners — which may leave negotiations on other formidable obstacles to ending the war until later.
Israel believes that about 20 living hostages still remain in Gaza, as well as the bodies of at least 25 others. But because Hamas views the captives as their most significant leverage with Israel, the group is unlikely to free them unless other elements of the deal are worked out.
Under the terms of President Trump’s latest plan to end the nearly two-year-old war, the hostages would be swapped for 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in prison and for 1,700 Gazans jailed by Israel during the war. Israel would also hand over the bodies of 15 Gazans for each dead Israeli.
Mr. Trump suggested in a post on social media on Saturday that the hostages might be released as soon as Hamas agrees to the latest terms, particularly how far Israeli forces would withdraw from their current position in Gaza.
But that is only one element of Mr. Trump’s sweeping plan, which envisions the creation of an internationally supervised Palestinian government and a postwar security force drawn from foreign countries, as well as the disarming of Hamas.
Hamas officials have expressed significant reservations about many of these points, particularly about laying down their weapons. But even the terms of exchanging hostages for Palestinian prisoners will most likely present difficulties, analysts say.
Mr. Trump’s proposal demands that Hamas return all of the surviving captives and the bodies in its possession within 72 hours of Israel’s agreeing to the cease-fire.
Both Israeli and Hamas officials say that the Palestinian group might need more time. Some living captives are believed to be held deep underground, while the bodies of others would need to be located and dug up.
Another thorny issue will be how far Israeli forces commit to withdrawing from their current positions within Gaza.
In previous talks, Hamas had agreed for Israeli troops to withdraw to a buffer zone close to the enclave’s borders. But the lines envisioned by Mr. Trump would leave Israeli forces deployed far deeper in Gaza, which Hamas could object to.
Israel and Hamas have now fought for two years since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war and killed about 1,200 people. The devastating Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 65,000 people — including thousands of children — according to local health officials.
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3) Judge Blocks Trump’s Deployment of National Guard in Portland, Ore.
A federal judge appointed by President Trump issued a temporary restraining order, siding for now with Oregon and Portland lawyers who called federalizing the guard a presidential overreach.
By Anna Griffin, Reporting from Portland, Ore., Published Oct. 4, 2025, Updated Oct. 5, 2025
Department of Homeland Security agents, police officers and U.S. Border Patrol Agents stand guard at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., on Thursday. Credit...John Rudoff/Reuters
A federal judge on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from using Oregon National Guard soldiers in response to nightly protests at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Ore.
Judge Karin Immergut, of the U.S. District Court in Oregon, sided with Democrats who run the state government when she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the mobilization. President Trump and the Defense Department had ordered 200 Oregon soldiers for a 60-day deployment.
In her ruling, Judge Immergut wrote that she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president exceeded his constitutional authority in mobilizing federal troops for local work and likely violated the 10th Amendment.
The soldiers have been training on the Oregon coast and were expected to be in place by the weekend, though federal officials have not said what duties they would perform beyond assisting ICE.
The restraining order expires in two weeks. During that time, the judge is expected to rule on a request for a longer injunction against the deployment. Federal lawyers have appealed the restraining order, which is part of a larger lawsuit filed by Oregon and Portland that accuses the president of violating his constitutional authority.
“President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman said. “We expect to be vindicated by a higher court.”
The decision comes as the president pushes to deploy the National Guard in several major U.S. cities to combat crime and support immigration enforcement. On Saturday, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, said that Mr. Trump planned to send 300 Guard troops to Chicago soon.
Before the judge’s ruling, Oregon National Guard troops were not the only Guard troops who were on the cusp of deploying in the state. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he was told by the federal government that, against his wishes, California National Guard troops who had been deployed in Los Angeles under federal orders were going to be sent to Oregon to help train troops there, according to a state official close to the governor who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation.
During almost two hours of arguments Friday, lawyers for Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, contended that the president did not have the authority to use the National Guard at the ICE facility and warned that the arrival of federal forces would lead to greater violence.
State and city attorneys described Mr. Trump’s selection of Portland for deployment as “at best, arbitrary, and at worst, a politically motivated retaliation for the adoption of policies” that the president viewed as too liberal.
The president’s actions “represent one of the most dramatic infringements on state sovereignty in Oregon’s history,” Scott Kennedy, an attorney for Oregon said in court. “They radically reshape the balance of federal-state power,”
State lawyers also questioned the timing of Mr. Trump’s decision, noting records from the Portland Police Bureau that showed the size of the nightly demonstrations had dwindled before the president posted on his social media website last Saturday that he planned to ask the Department of Defense to use federal troops to “protect” Portland.
Portland Police commanders checked in with ICE officials every evening, according to records they filed in support of the temporary restraining order, and for several weeks prior to the president’s declaration, ICE employees reported that things were relatively quiet and that they did not need help.
Judge Immergut, who was appointed by Mr. Trump during his first term, agreed that the timing of the president’s order did not meet the legal standard for calling in the National Guard, saying the state provided “substantial evidence that the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days — or even weeks — leading up to the President’s directive.”
Mr. Kennedy also said the situation in Portland did not meet the standard required for mobilization of federal soldiers for domestic work; the law allows federal troops to be used domestically in times of foreign invasion, rebellion or when normal law enforcement efforts are not capable of maintaining order.
Federal lawyers contended that the protests in Portland constituted both a potential rebellion and a law enforcement challenge beyond what federal officers on the ground could handle. But Mr. Kennedy said the federal government was defining “rebellion” so broadly it could include any political demonstrations or “opposition to its authority.”
Judge Immergut agreed, writing that the federal government had shown evidence of “sporadic violence” but not “any evidence demonstrating that those episodes of violence were part of an organized attempt to overthrow the government as a whole.”
Eric Hamilton, a Justice Department lawyer, told the judge the decision to use National Guard soldiers was prompted by the Sept. 24 shooting that killed two detainees at a Dallas ICE facility and months of demonstrations in Portland that have left federal employees frightened and exhausted.
“Violent and cruel radicals have laid siege,” he said. “The evidence we have submitted at least reflects a danger of a rebellion, monthslong targeting of the Portland ICE building with violence, intimidation and threats.”
In the order released Saturday evening, Judge Immergut wrote that the president’s argument about the need for mobilization was contradicted by evidence that recent protests had been comparatively quiet and nonviolent, supporting the state’s case that the decision to use troops “was not ‘conceived in good faith.’”
The nightly demonstrations at Portland’s ICE building began in early summer and have included occasional skirmishes between protesters and federal agents as demonstrators tried to block vehicles from entering and exiting a parking garage. Multiple times a day, ICE agents in riot gear march out of the building to clear the driveway. During daylight hours, the crowd disperses quickly. At times federal officers have used pepper balls, tear gas and other crowd dispersal weapons to move people back.The Portland Police Bureau reported 27 arrests since early June outside the building, and court records show at least two dozen arrests by federal officers.
The protests have turned rougher since the president’s announcement last weekend with the arrival of right wing counterprotesters, some of whom have been spotted observing the crowd from the ICE building roof. A march to protest the potential deployment Saturday afternoon ended with federal officers using tear gas and pepper balls against a crowd that had gathered in the road in front of the building.
Judge Immergut, a former U.S. attorney in Oregon, is the second federal judge assigned to Oregon’s lawsuit against Mr. Trump. The first recused after a request from the federal lawyers because his wife, Representative Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat, had spoken out against the National Guard deployment.
Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.
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4) Illinois and Oregon Intensify Efforts to Block Trump’s Guard Deployments
By Julie Bosman, Shawn Hubler, Anna Griffin and Eric Schmitt, October 6, 2025
Federal law enforcement officers in Broadview, Ill., on Friday. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Officials in Oregon and Illinois stepped up efforts to block what they denounced as President Trump’s “invasion” of their cities with National Guard troops, fighting legal battles on multiple fronts on Monday even as 200 soldiers from Texas were headed for Chicago.
Illinois officials sued Mr. Trump on Monday, hours after the president ordered hundreds of Texas National Guard soldiers to deploy for “federal protection missions” in Chicago and Portland, Ore. The lawsuit in Illinois followed a stern ruling by a federal judge in Oregon on Sunday blocking Mr. Trump from sending Guard members from any state to Portland.
The torrent of moves by the Trump administration to deploy the military to U.S. cities in support of immigration enforcement efforts has left courts across the country scrambling to keep pace with a raft of orders that some judges have already deemed unconstitutional.
Here’s what else to know:
· Local opposition: Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, called the order to deploy Texas troops to his state “Trump’s invasion.” In their lawsuit, Chicago and Illinois officials argue that the administration’s “provocative and arbitrary actions have threatened to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry.” A U.S. military official said Monday morning that the first group from Texas Guard troops were moving to Chicago.
· Judge’s ruling: The ruling Sunday night by the federal judge in Oregon, Karin Immergut, came in response to the administration’s bid to circumvent a restraining order she had issued a day earlier, blocking Mr. Trump from sending hundreds of California Guard troops to Portland. After Mr. Trump moved to replace the California troops with soldiers from Texas, Judge Immergut broadened her order to cover all Guard troops. Read more ›
· Chicago: Federal immigration agents have inflamed tensions and drawn large crowds or demonstrators with aggressive tactics such as deploying tear gas on city streets with no warning, raiding apartments in the middle of the night, and handcuffing a City Council member at a hospital. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, said Monday that he would establish “ICE-free zones,” preventing federal agents from staging without a warrant.
· Portland: Mr. Trump has described Portland as a city “burning to the ground.” But the demonstrations there have rarely expanded beyond a one-block radius of the immigration detention facility in the city. Until the president’s announcement that he was sending in troops, protests rarely numbered more than two dozen people. Clashes have turned more violent since Mr. Trump’s announcement, and two people were arrested Sunday night.
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5) Ravaged by War: Trying to Survive Gaza’s Present, Hoping for a Future
Two years of intense warfare in Gaza have left its people with a dismembered and disordered society. The destruction is vast and many Gazans have mental and physical wounds that could scar a generation.
The Israeli military brought down a high-rise building last month in Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The pallets of aid dropped from the plane, their parachutes popping as they fell to the battered and hungry people of Gaza below.
On the ground, most people in the seaside strip have been forced from their homes into a fraction of the territory. Living in tent camps, they struggle to find food, water and medicine. Many of the houses, businesses and neighborhoods that framed their former lives have been pulverized, leaving them little to return to whenever the war might end.
In the two years since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has unleashed tremendous military might in Gaza, causing destruction that has few parallels in modern warfare. The result is a dismembered and disordered society. Entire branches have been lopped off family trees, with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.
Last month, a United Nations commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Israel denies the accusation, saying it seeks to destroy Hamas and return the hostages taken in the group-led attack that killed 1,200 people.
Israeli and Hamas negotiators were expected to hold talks in Cairo on Monday about a possible swap of Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Such an agreement could push forward a new plan laid out by President Trump to end the war after many failed attempts.
But it remains unclear who — if anyone — would govern the territory or pay for reconstruction to restore the lives of the people of Gaza.
In the meantime, most are too busy surviving to ponder the future.
“The thinking about life after the war comes only when the war ends,” said Hamza Salem, a former gas station attendant who lost both legs during heavy Israeli bombardment early in the conflict.
Damaged Bodies, Upended Lives
Before the war, Mr. Salem lived in northern Gaza with his wife and children, three sons and a daughter, Rital. She was 5, liked to make beaded bracelets and had just started kindergarten.
“Life was moving, praise God,” Mr. Salem said.
The war changed everything.
An Israeli strike during the war’s early weeks hit near Rital, severing her right arm above her wrist, according to Mr. Salem and his father, Abdel-Nasr Salem, who was injured in the same attack. The Israeli military said it struck Hamas military infrastructure.
Three months later, after the family had fled to southern Gaza, another strike hit near Mr. Salem, and he had to have both legs amputated above the knee, he said.
Both have struggled to get treatment as Gaza’s health system has collapsed.
Israeli forces have repeatedly evacuated, raided and struck hospitals, accusing Hamas of using them for protection. Fewer than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partly functional, the World Health Organization says.
As the war progressed, medicine ran short and cancer treatments and dialysis became scarce. After Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza this spring, hunger spread. In August, a group of global experts declared that more than half a million people in Gaza were experiencing a “man-made” famine whose effects included starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
Malnutrition and trauma can hamper mental and physical development, experts say, meaning the health effects of the war could echo through a generation.
“There is an ever-present threat of illness and death which children are having to battle with every day,” said Tess Ingram, the UNICEF spokeswoman in Gaza. “This creates a level of toxic stress that is not just harmful, but potentially life-threatening long term.”
Israeli officials have played down the severity of hunger in the enclave, saying they work to facilitate the entry of aid into the territory. The government has called the famine report “an outright lie.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that it strikes only military targets and adheres to international law. It accused Hamas of building military infrastructure — including command centers, weapons depots and combat tunnels — in densely populated civilian areas as well as booby-trapping roads and civilian homes.
More than a quarter of the 167,000 Gazans who have been wounded have sustained “life-changing injuries,” the World Health Organization says. More than 5,000 have lost limbs.
With the borders sealed by Israel, people cannot readily flee the enclave to seek safety from the bombardment, as refugees from Syria and Ukraine did. The wounded cannot easily seek care abroad because permissions for medical evacuations are hard to obtain.
Rital’s severed arm was lost in the chaos of the strike that injured her, so it could not be reattached, Mr. Salem said. Because of shortages at the hospital, he had to buy anesthesia and medications from nearby pharmacies.
The blast that wounded him also knocked him unconscious, Mr. Salem said. He woke up 10 days later to find that he had no legs.
Inadequate sanitization led to an infection, he said, and he was later discharged with no medication, leaving him to cope with the pain.
The family fled again in September after Israel launched a new assault on Gaza City, he said. They went by foot to central Gaza, his father and sons struggling to push his wheelchair on damaged and sandy streets.
The family is now sheltering at his sister’s house, Mr. Salem said, but they have few clothes, little money and no tent to sleep in should they have to flee again.
“We have no other place to go,” he said.
Ravaged Communities
The United Nations estimates that nearly four out of five buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. As of last December, the U.N. said there were more than 50 million tons of rubble, so much that 105 trucks would take 21 years to remove it. In February, the World Bank priced the physical damage in Gaza at $29.9 billion — 1.8 times the annual economic output of Gaza and the West Bank.
The numbers do not capture all that is lost. Erase enough of the landmarks in someone’s daily life — the shop where they bought tomatoes, the cafe where they met with friends — and that life fades away.
For Nidal Eissa, a father of three who owned a bridal shop in Gaza City, life centered around the apartment building he shared with about 30 relatives. It is now in ruins, satellite imagery shows, as is the orange grove down the street, his local butcher shop and the barbershop where he used to take his son.
Nidal Eissa’s neighborhood
His family’s building was packed with memories.
“I lived my best days and years in this home,” said Mr. Eissa, 32.
The family gathered there for milestones, he said. New babies were welcomed with sweets. Brides and grooms were feted with meals. Departed relatives were mourned with bitter coffee and dates.
His children attended nearby schools, and the family received medical care at a local clinic, all run by the United Nations.
His bridal shop, White Angel, was a short drive away.
Early in the war, amid intense Israeli bombardment, a strike on a nearby truck damaged his shop, he said. He salvaged as many dresses and accessories as he could and moved them to his apartment.
The goods were lost in August, when Israel bombed the building, according to Mr. Eissa and his cousin Walid Eissa. The Israeli military, both men said, warned a neighbor beforehand who alerted the family. They fled the area, but the building was destroyed. The Israeli military said the strike hit “a military target.”
Suddenly homeless, his extended family scattered to find shelter. Mr. Eissa and his wife and children ended up in southern Gaza, where they sleep in a tent.
He hopes to rebuild his life in a Gaza no longer ruled by Hamas.
“If the war ends with solutions and the ruling system changes, I will open a business and stay in my country,” he said. “Most important is that they change the regime that dragged us into ruin and destruction.”
Childhoods Lost
Mahmoud Abu Shahma, 14, also lives in a crowded tent near the beach.
He spends his mornings waiting to fill up jugs of water for drinking and bathing. He makes tea on a wood fire and eats bread sprinkled with spices — or whatever else he can find to fend off hunger. The rest of the day, he wanders around the camp where he lives. He has been out of school for more than two years.
“No one has asked me to study,” he said. “If there was a school, I would go.”
His parents cannot fill the void because they were both killed, leaving him among the many thousands of orphans created by the war.
The conflict has all but done away with conventional childhood. Children have been wounded and killed, lost loved ones and endured prolonged deprivation.
“You are creating extremely difficult conditions for mental, human and physical recovery,” said Tareq Emtairah, the director general of Taawon, a Palestinian charity that supports orphans.
In April, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, part of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, said that more than 39,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war. Of those, some 17,000 had lost both.
Mahmoud Abu Shahma lives in one of seven tent camps in southern Gaza that house more than 4,000 children who have lost at least one parent. An additional 15,000 rely on the camps for food, medical care and other services, said Mahmoud Kallakh, who manages the camps.
Aid workers say many of the children have frequent nightmares or anxiety. Some have been through such extreme mental or physical anguish that they have stopped speaking.
The education system has crumbled even for children whose families remain intact.
More than 700,000 children lack formal schooling, and nearly all schools need rehab or reconstruction, according to UNICEF.
All universities are closed, many of them destroyed by Israeli forces who accused Hamas of operating inside them.
Ad hoc schools have popped up in camps for displaced people, where children gather under tarps and sit on the ground.
Mayasem, an arts and culture organization, runs a school in southern Gaza that offers classes in Arabic, English, math and science.
One student, Rateel al-Najjar, 8, said that she was happy to be studying again, but that the school lacked chairs, crayons, notebooks and pencils.
She loves math, she said, and wants to be an architect like an uncle of hers who was killed in the war.
Najla Abu Nahla, the executive manager of Mayasem, said the school focused less on academic achievement and more on fun, sports and music to support the children’s mental health.
When classes end, she said, they do not want to go back to waiting in line for food or fetching water.
“Here,” she said, “they can just feel like children.”
An Economy in Tatters
Before the war, Mona al-Ghalayini was a rare woman who had worked her way into Gaza’s business elite.
She co-owned a supermarket and owned and managed an eatery called Big Bite and the upscale Roots Hotel, which rose next to the marina on Gaza City’s Mediterranean coast.
Little remains of her holdings.
The supermarket?
“Burned and looted,” she said by phone from Egypt, where she fled early in the conflict.
Big Bite?
“Also gone.”
The hotel?
“It needs to be completely restructured.”
Last year, she opened a Palestinian restaurant, Jouzoor, in Cairo. She thinks about returning to Gaza, someday, but said it must have stability, running water and electricity — what she called “the components of life.”
She cannot anticipate when that might be.
“There is no clear vision for anything that you can build on,” said Ms. al-Ghalayini, 55. “The future is not clear for anyone.”
Gaza before the war was poor, a condition exacerbated by a partial Israeli-Egyptian blockade aimed at weakening Hamas. But Gazans with means invested in shopping malls, restaurants, factories and farms that helped feed and employ the population.
The war halted nearly all formal economic activity, and unemployment is at least 80 percent, according to the World Bank.
The conflict has undermined Gazans’ ability to feed themselves, with more than 70 percent of irrigation wells, greenhouses and fishing boats damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations. As of July, less than 2 percent of cropland was both undamaged and accessible to farmers.
The share of Gazans living in what the World Bank calls “multidimensional poverty” — meaning the lack of access to income, education and services like electricity and clean water — is projected to increase to 98 percent, from 64 percent before the war.
The conflict has shredded the finances of many enterprising Gazans.
Hassan Shehada, 61, once employed more than 200 workers who sewed jeans, jackets and other clothing, much of it to be sold in Israel, he said by phone from Gaza.
During the war, one workshop with 60 sewing machines was destroyed, he said. When his family fled Gaza City for central Gaza, they took 20 sewing machines and other supplies with them, but they have struggled to find enough electricity to put them to use. So he cannot work or go home and tries to keep up with reports about former employees who have been killed.
Still, he hopes that peace will come and that the people of Israel and Gaza will realize that their fates are intertwined.
“Israel can’t give up on us, and we can’t give up on Israel,” he said. “If there is no real peace built on solid foundations between us, nothing will work.”
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6) With Trump’s Gaza Plan on the Line, Negotiators Gather in Egypt for Talks
Though significant issues remain to be hashed out between Israel and Hamas, some are saying that after two years of death and destruction, a breakthrough may be near.
By Ephrat Livni, Oct. 6, 2025
Destroyed homes in the center of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Thursday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Under pressure to end the war in Gaza after two brutal years of combat, negotiators for Israel and Hamas will meet on Monday with mediators in Egypt to discuss a sweeping peace plan presented by President Trump last week.
Much still remains unresolved.
The indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, are likely to focus on two aspects of the 20-point proposal that Mr. Trump unveiled: exchanging Israeli-held Palestinians for captives taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that set off the war, and an Israeli pullback from parts of Gaza.
Israel believes that about 20 hostages are still alive in Gaza, and also seeks the remains of about 25 others. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on Sunday that Hamas had “agreed to the president’s hostage release framework.”
Under that plan, the hostages will be exchanged for 250 Palestinians prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Gazans jailed by Israel during the war. For every hostage whose remains are released, Israel will also release the remains of 15 Gazans.
While the plan calls for the release of the hostages within 72 hours of Israel agreeing to it, that would be logistically difficult, experts say. And the two sides have yet to agree on which Palestinian prisoners will be released.
Those are just some of the issues that remained to be hashed out.
On Friday, Hamas said it was willing to release the hostages. But Hamas has not addressed major points in the American peace plan, among them demands that it has objected to in the past. The proposal, for example, calls on the group to disarm and for it to have no role in the governance of Gaza — both key Israeli positions that Hamas has long rejected.
Questions also remain about the withdrawal of Israeli forces from positions in Gaza.
In a social media post on Saturday, Mr. Trump said that Israel had already agreed to an initial withdrawal line within Gaza for the first phase of the deal.
“When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be IMMEDIATELY effective, the Hostages and Prisoner Exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next phase of withdrawal,” he pledged.
But Hamas may still seek to negotiate those lines.
In previous talks on ending the conflict, Hamas agreed to Israeli troops withdrawing into a buffer zone near Gaza’s border with Israel. But Mr. Trump’s plan would leave Israeli forces deeper in Gaza, and Hamas has signaled that it may object to elements of the plan.
In a speech to Israelis over the weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to cast the Trump plan as a victory. He said the stage for a possible deal to end to the war had been set by his decision to keep up the pressure on Hamas with a devastating military campaign, which drew condemnation from much of the world. He also cited diplomatic efforts.
Members of Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition have long objected to a deal and have threatened to dissolve his government if he agrees to one. The prime minister has sought to appease them, but he is also under pressure from many Israelis who want a hostage deal and an end to the conflict, as well as from the international community, not least Mr. Trump.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump posted images of Israelis rallying in Tel Aviv for a hostage deal. He added no comments, but the images appeared to speak for themselves.
Defying Mr. Trump does not appear to be an option, even for Mr. Netanyahu. By Saturday, the Israeli military was limiting its actions to what Israeli officials called defensive operations and responses to immediate threats.
Hamas, too, is under pressure to end the war.
Many Palestinians in Gaza see the Trump proposal as their best hope after nearly two years of extreme privation and repeated displacement. Much of Gaza has been destroyed, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, including thousands of children, and Mr. Trump has said that Israel will have a green light to destroy Hamas if the group does not agree to a deal.
Mr. Trump demanded on social media that Israel stop bombing Gaza to allow the agreement with Hamas to move forward. The Israeli military instructed its forces to focus on defense, curbing military operations in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials.
The fighting on the ground has nonetheless continued. The Israeli military said that it launched multiple attacks on Sunday against what it described as militants threatening troops. Emergency workers in Gaza said that they had been unable to reach some of those killed because they were in combat zones.
Israel and Hamas have held indirect talks off and on throughout the war, with negotiations generally falling apart. Mr. Rubio conceded on Sunday that the war was not yet over and that there was work to be done, but he said this time could be different.
“What gives you hope here is that at least there is now a framework for how all this can come to an end,” he said.
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7) Greta Thunberg Among Hundreds From Gaza Aid Flotilla Deported by Israel
Israel intercepted the boats at sea and detained the participants for days before expelling them. Some of the activists say they were mistreated, which Israel denied.
By Ephrat Livni, Oct. 6, 2025
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist, arriving at an airport in Athens on Monday after being deported from Israel. Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel on Monday deported the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and about 170 other participants in a flotilla that tried to deliver aid by sea to Gaza but was intercepted by the Israeli authorities, the foreign ministry said.
The widely publicized mission, involving dozens of boats and hundreds of activists, aimed to breach an Israeli blockade of Gaza, where hunger is widespread and a U.N.-backed panel of experts has declared that famine afflicts hundreds of thousands of people.
Israel, which has limited deliveries to the territory for almost two decades, has imposed stringent restrictions on the entry of food and other aid since the war there began two years ago. For more than two months earlier this year, it prevented any food from being brought in.
Flotilla participants say that Israeli forces illegally intercepted their boats last week in violation of maritime law and international humanitarian law. Israel says the activists violated a legal blockade.
Some who were arrested and then released over the weekend reported that they had been mistreated in Israeli custody. Israel’s foreign ministry denied the accusation in statements on Monday and over the weekend. “All the legal rights of the participants in this P.R. stunt were and will continue to be fully upheld,” the ministry said, accusing activists of spreading “fake news.”
There had been reports from activists and others over the weekend that Ms. Thunberg was mistreated. Ms. Thunberg confirmed those reports on Monday. She was among the participants deported to Greece and addressed crowds waiting for the activists upon their arrival in Athens.
“I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment, trust me, but that is not the story,” she said, according to a video of her remarks posted by flotilla organizers.
Ms. Thunberg turned discussion to the plight of Palestinians. She accused Israel of committing genocide and attempting to erase a population before the world’s eyes. A United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza last month concluded that Israel was committing genocide, allegations that Israel has repeatedly rejected.
Those deported on Monday were sent to Greece and Slovakia, the Israeli foreign ministry said. “The deportees are citizens of Greece, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Norway, the U.K., Serbia and the United States,” it said.
On Sunday, the ministry said that Israel had sent to Spain 29 flotilla participants from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. On Saturday, 137 people from the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Malaysia, Bahrain, Morocco, Switzerland, Tunisia, and Turkey were deported to Turkey, it said.
A livestream posted by the flotilla organizers showed crowds of what appeared to be hundreds of people waiting for the activists at the airport in Athens. “Free, free Palestine,” they chanted. The flotilla participants were greeted warmly by the crowds.
Miriam Azem, a spokeswoman for Adalah, a legal organization for Arab minority rights in Israel that is representing the flotilla participants, said in an interview on Sunday night that lawyers who met with activists were told they had been kept on their knees with their hands bound for many hours. They were held in overcrowded cells and denied adequate drinking water, she said, and some said they had also been denied food and critical medications in the initial days and were deliberately deprived of sleep.
Some flotilla participants were on a hunger strike while in custody, Ms. Azem and the group’s organizers have said.
Ms. Azem said that there had been numerous due process violations, with lawyers for the group not notified that hearings were taking place and activists denied access to counsel. She said that Israel’s process was “entirely illegal,” with activists forcibly taken to the country, then treated as having entered illegally and detained in a security prison. She spoke of “a cycle that is meant to intimidate and to deter.”
On Monday, Ms. Azem said that about 140 flotilla participants were still being detained, but said that the organization could confirm the number and that it was receiving little information from the Israeli authorities.
Relatives of some of the American participants on the flotilla — there were about 20 — met in Capitol Hill on Monday to press lawmakers for their release.
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, was drafting a letter to be sent on Monday afternoon to Secretary of State Marco Rubio inquiring about four Californians aboard the flotilla who were detained, along with other Americans.
The participants were on a “nonviolent mission to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza,” Mr. Khanna wrote, according to a draft of the letter shared with The New York Times. He called for more aid to enter Gaza in addition to protection of flotilla participants.
“The U.S. has an obligation to protect its citizens abroad and must act immediately.” Mr. Khanna wrote.
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8) In Israel, Two-Year Anniversary of Oct. 7 Attack Is Quiet but Inescapable
The somber milestone comes with peace talks underway, hostages from the Hamas-led attack still in Gaza, more than 67,000 Palestinians dead and Israel more isolated than ever.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 7, 2025
Israel marked the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack that began its longest war in subdued fashion on Tuesday, with new hopes of ending the conflict but with hostages still in captivity and its exhausted military adding to the death toll of Palestinians and to the destruction in Gaza.
The arrival of the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, a national and religious holiday, shut down most businesses across Israel for the day. The government delayed official remembrances of the war’s traumatic first day until Oct. 16, after the end of the High Holiday season.
But Tuesday’s milestone was inescapable.
There were quiet gatherings at some of the kibbutzim near Gaza that suffered the most in the massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, and informal events drew participants throughout the country.
In the city of Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, about 20 runners in T-shirts with messages advocating the return of the hostages made their way early in the morning along a popular route surrounding the town, which is home to Nimrod Cohen, a soldier held hostage. Passing cars honked in solidarity.
Hundreds of Israelis came to Hostages Square in the center of Tel Aviv, silently meditating over art installations and memorials to those still captive and citizens killed on Oct. 7 or while in captivity. Israel believes that about 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza along with the remains of 28 others who died in captivity.
Ilana Yahav, 69, a therapist, said Oct. 7 had opened so many wounds that it was impossible to care for everyone who was suffering.
“If you were there, or someone in your family was there, or you only saw a video — it will be a lot of years of treatment,” she said.
Tzlil Sasson, 38, and her husband had driven from Lehavim, east of Gaza, with their three young children.
“It was important for us as parents to bring them here, to remember, and to pray,” she said. “Maybe, in a couple of days, the hostages will be free — we hope.”
In Kfar Aza, a tiny kibbutz less than two miles from Gaza where at least 62 neighbors were killed and 19 taken hostage, several dozen residents held a memorial that began with a moment of silence at 6:29 a.m. That was the moment on a Saturday morning when Hamas began launching thousands of rockets, overwhelming Israel’s air-defense system.
Under cover of that aerial onslaught was the main Hamas offensive: an invasion by thousands of assailants who swarmed across the fence separating Gaza from border towns and dozens of tiny agricultural communities. They killed residents in their homes, gunned young people down at a music festival and overran Israeli military bases.
All told, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 captives back to Gaza. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.
A shocked Israel mobilized to unleash a devastating military response that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians in the past two years, including both civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza health ministry.
It has wounded tens of thousands more, flattened thousands of buildings and reduced much of the territory’s infrastructure — and its landscape — to rubble, shrapnel and sand.
The war has forced Palestinians in Gaza into a punishing cycle of fleeing Israeli attacks by taking shelter in a supposed haven in another part of the territory, only to have to flee again. And food shortages and obstacles to supplying and distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza residents led an international group of experts on hunger crises to declare in August that part of the enclave was suffering from famine.
In Israel, the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to end it in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages have bitterly divided society, exacerbating fissures that existed before the Oct. 7 attack.
Many Israelis contend that he has extended the war and passed up opportunities for a cease-fire even after the decapitation of Hamas’s leadership so that he could keep his right-wing coalition together and extend his hold on power.
The prolonged conflict has forced reservists to serve multiple lengthy tours of duty, draining the economy and putting soldiers’ lives on hold, while inflaming longstanding resentment of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are exempt from military service.
Israel’s conduct of the war, including the tremendous casualty count and gruesome images of children and others killed and maimed in Gaza, as well as statements by far-right allies of Mr. Netanyahu of their desire to depopulate and annex the territory, have prompted widespread allegations, including by a United Nations commission and Amnesty International, that Israel has committed genocide.
Israel denies this and insists that its military works to protect Palestinian civilians, including by warning them of its attacks. It also blames Hamas fighters for endangering civilians by fighting from the cover of hospitals, schools and other populated areas.
Outrage over the war has fueled a global rise in antisemitism and violence against Jews. That has included the killings of an elderly woman at a march in Boulder, Colo., to support the hostages; of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, D.C., outside a Jewish museum; and of two worshipers at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain promised to clamp down on antisemitism and faulted students for planning protests “on the anniversary of the atrocities” of Oct. 7.
“This is not who we are as a country,” he wrote in The Times of London. “It’s un-British to have so little respect for others.”
The prolonging of the war has also ratcheted up Israel’s isolation on the world stage. That was never clearer than in late September, when 10 countries, including traditional allies like Britain, Canada, France and Australia, recognized Palestinian statehood for the first time.
Hamas issued a statement Tuesday calling the Oct. 7 attack a “glorious crossing,” and a spokesman for the group, Fawzi Barhoum, described it as “heroic.” In remarks released on a Hamas social-media channel, Mr. Barhoum said the attack had “restored our national cause to its global position” and “stirred the conscience” of people worldwide to support the Palestinian cause.
Yet by some measures, Palestinian political aspirations appear farther out of reach than ever.
The Oct. 7 attacks caused the Israeli body politic to shift rightward, with many liberals who might have once belonged to the Israeli peace camp now feeling betrayed and saying they oppose a Palestinian state on Israel’s border.
On both sides of the Israel-Gaza border, the war seemed far from over on Tuesday.
Though Hamas is weakened and its arsenal depleted, after 7 a.m., rocket sirens sounded in Netiv HaAsara, an Israeli community on Gaza’s northern border, and the Israeli military said that a projectile had fallen in the area.
In Deir al-Balah, in Gaza, Israeli warplanes could be heard overhead at 1 a.m. and again after 5:30 a.m. As the sun rose, gunfire could be heard in the eastern part of the town, along with the blasts of occasional artillery rounds.
Ahmed al-Haddad, 51, a Gaza resident who said he, his wife and their four children had been displaced five times, said their suffering had surpassed what his grandparents had told him about the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when Palestinians were displaced in Israel’s war for independence.
“This war is the harshest, the most merciless,” he said. “It feels like history repeating itself, only harder.”
Back in Israel, a moment of silence in kibbutz Kfar Aza at 6:29 was anything but, as drones whined, helicopters flew overhead and explosions frequently ripped through the air.
Zion Regev, a municipal leader, read out an adapted version of the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. His voice dropped as he noted that “our Gali and Ziv” — two brothers from Kfar Aza still held hostage in Gaza — had yet to return home.
“Some say what happened is receding into the distance, but for me, it’s stronger than ever,” said Nitzan Kaner, 37. She said she was trapped for about 30 hours when militants attacked.
On Tuesday morning, she said she had experienced a sleepless night:
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what we went through.”
A few minutes away, hundreds of Israelis visited the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 300 people were killed. Signs bearing the faces of the victims are arranged in rows, like dancers at a rave.
Anat Magnezi held a poster with a photo of her son Amit, 22, who was killed, over her own face.
“I wish that all the world would see this and know what happened to us and that it is real,” she said. “But all the world is against us now.”
Roman Fourmann, whose stepdaughter Dana Petrenko, 23, was killed along with her boyfriend, stood with his family at a small memorial erected in their honor.
“It feels no different today than when it happened two years ago,” he said. “We go to work, we keep on living. But we can’t shake the feeling that it’s still Oct. 7.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Kfar Aza, Israel; Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot; Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
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9) We Tried to Reach Gazans We Interviewed Over Two Years of War
We kept wondering: Did they find their missing relatives? Were they even still alive? Here’s what happened to them.
By Vivian Yee, Lauren Leatherby, Samar Abu Elouf, Bilal Shbair, Iyad Abuheweila, Abu Bakr Bashir and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 7, 2025
We’ve interviewed more than 700 people in Gaza over the past two years. Their stories stayed with us.
We kept wondering: Did they find their missing relatives? Are their homes standing? Did they bury their dead? Were they forced to flee again? Were they even still alive?
So we tried to find them again. This is what they said.
No single experience can fully contain the agony of Gaza, the near-obliteration of a society and a place.
Collectively, however, the people we spoke to over the past two years have helped us see how the war has crushed those who have lived it.
They told us about the raw wounds of their grief, their fear of the next airstrike, their dread of tomorrow. About the first time they fled home as Israeli bombs and shells fell closer, the first time they put up a makeshift tent, the second time, the third.
About their weakening bodies, their children crying for bread, their days searching for baby formula and lentils. About their hopes of being evacuated for medical treatment, of going back to school, of reuniting with their families.
We tried to get back in touch with many of them. Many did not respond. Some phone numbers no longer worked. Others had escaped Gaza. Some, we learned, had been killed.
Of the nearly 100 we reached, everyone lost something or someone: a family member, a friend, their home, hope.
I lost a sister, a brother, and nearly 40 relatives. That alone feels like more than enough grief for one lifetime.
Ismail al-Sheikh
First spoke to us in January 2025
Our lives are nothing but suffering on top of suffering. We’ve lost relatives and been scattered across tents.
Hanaa al-Najjar
First spoke to us in April 2024
When we spoke last summer to Samar al-Jaja and her nephews, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila, it had been 10 months since the brothers’ parents and baby sister had been killed in an airstrike.
Under their tent at a charity camp, they still held out hope that they would see their parents when they were allowed to go home to Gaza City.
But when they got home earlier this year, only their parents’ bedroom was still standing.
There was no one inside. The five of them stood there, numb.
“The kids said sadly, ‘We wish we were buried with them,’” Ms. al-Jaja, 32, said when we contacted her again recently.
They have never been able to mourn properly. The sweets that people in Gaza traditionally distribute on the anniversary of a death were too expensive to make, given the wartime price of flour and sugar.
They couldn’t even say a prayer at their parents’ graves. They do not know where they are.
“Even that closure has been taken from us,” she said.
She spoke to us from a half-destroyed building in Gaza City where she and her nephews were sheltering.
Days later, Israeli forces stormed the city, the latest operation in the two-year campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which began after the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Negotiators from Israel and Hamas began holding talks in Cairo on Monday about a possible swap of Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. If they agree, the war could be one step closer to ending.
But as they wait to hear what will happen to them, Palestinians in Gaza must keep trying to survive.
Ms. al-Jaja and her nephews moved to another neighborhood to escape the offensive in Gaza City, then fled south. They paid nearly $4,000 to a truck driver to load half their belongings — it was “pay or risk death,” the driver told them, Ms. al-Jaja said.
After a 14-hour journey, they ended up back in the same charity camp they were living in last year. This time, they have no tent.
Almost everyone we spoke to has been displaced from homes or shelters multiple times. Many have no home to return to.
If, God forbid, an evacuation happens to my family, it would be the 10th time so far since the start of this war.
Nour Barda
First spoke to us in April 2024
We’ve been left with this choice: die in Gaza City or be displaced to the south. It makes you feel helpless rage and humiliation.
Montaser Bahja
First spoke to us in January 2025
Last October, when we wrote about Hammam Malaka and his wife, Najia Malaka, they had been separated for almost the entire war.
They had gotten stuck less than 20 miles apart after Israeli troops cut off northern Gaza from southern Gaza.
He was trapped in the south with Yamen, 6, and Sandy, 4. She was in the north with Seela, 3, Ashraf, the baby, and Mohammed, their newborn.
When we spoke to Mr. Malaka again recently, he said they had finally managed to reunite in January, during the brief cease-fire.
He told us how they found each other at what had been the border between north and south Gaza: “I switched on the flashlight of my old Nokia phone and began shouting into the dark — ‘Ashraf! Mohammed!’ — hoping she could hear me and find me more easily,” he said.
Then he saw her. “I ran and hugged her and our children with everything in me,” he said.
But their 3-year-old, Seela, was not there. She had been killed while they were apart.
After reuniting, the family returned home to Gaza City, but then were forced to flee south again.
Since Israel broke the cease-fire in March, their days have been spent in a perpetual struggle against hunger and danger, which Mr. Malaka said were like “endless waves crashing over us.”
Without work, he said, he has taken the risk of grabbing supplies from passing aid trucks or lining up at aid distribution points.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed searching for something to eat, according to aid officials.
Many people we spoke to told us about hunger: suffering from malnutrition, losing significant weight or going days at a time without food, even as they tried desperately to find it.
I lost 20 kilograms during the time of famine. There were times when I just collapsed and could not carry injured people and run for 100 meters to reach the ambulance.
Naseem Hassan
First spoke to us in October 2023
As a mother, all I think about is how to save one meal for tomorrow, how to bring water without quarrels in the long lines.
Yasmin al-Attar
First spoke to us in March 2025
Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, had managed to carve out a sliver of something like normal life when we first spoke to him last November.
He was managing a shawarma place in Deir al Balah, one of the few places where ordinary life went on amid the agony all around it.
In January, during the cease-fire, he moved home to Gaza City.
That was the last good thing that happened, he told us recently.
He lost his wife’s sister to an airstrike in June and his uncle to another strike in September. He has been displaced four times since January.
Since August, he has also been injured twice: once when an airstrike hit near his house, wounding him and his wife with shrapnel, and again when he was passing a Gaza City high-rise that was bombed.
“The hardest thing is living with the feeling that all you can do is wait for death,” he said.
He added: “Now I look at my children and wonder, will I see them alive in the months ahead? Will they be safe? And as a father, will I have the strength to protect them?”
He no longer sells shawarma to eager customers. Instead, he spends his days scrounging for food, clean water and cash to pay the astronomical prices at the markets.
There have been many days when all he could bring his family was bread with cheese and thyme.
“Daily life is another kind of war,” he said. “This is what life has been reduced to: moving from one danger to another, trying to feed my children, trying simply to survive.”
The anguish of just getting through the day came up again and again as we spoke to people about what it feels like to live through the war.
Even animals, if they were subjected to what we’ve lived through, couldn’t become accustomed to it. We are living through a catastrophe.
Fatma Edaama
First spoke to us in May 2024
I try to hold on to hope — to be the father who reassures his children, and the son who stands with his extended family. But fear and despair haunt us everywhere, as if this tragedy has no end.
Amir Ahmed
First spoke to us in October 2023
My daughter Batoul wakes up screaming day and night from the bombings or the sound of warplanes, suffering from severe terror.
Safaa Zyadah
First spoke to us in February 2024
Every night, I lie awake wondering if tomorrow will bring anything better, or if it’ll just add another layer of pain.
Mohammed Shubeir
First spoke to us in October 2024
Not everyone we tried to reach survived.
Some died, or were killed, after we first spoke to them.
In October 2024, when we talked to Mohamed Kilani, a lawyer in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, he was barely able to feed his twin 2-year-old daughters.
“We have been given one option only: that is to die,” he told us at the time.
Later, we saw social media posts from his family that mourned his death. When we reached his cousin, she said he had gone to look for food for his family and never returned.
After he disappeared, family members saw some photos of stray dogs eating corpses in northern Gaza, the cousin said. They thought they recognized his body among them.
Many people spoke about waiting — or wishing — for death.
I have nothing, no work, no food, no shelter, and no blankets. I wish I had been home when it was bombed so I could rest.
Bilal Assabti
First spoke to us in October 2023
I wish for a missile at any moment. It would strike us all together, so that it would be better than this life.
Ahmed al-Nems
First spoke to us in May 2025
Some people we spoke to were lucky: They managed to leave, whether by paying their way out, through their foreign passports or because they were evacuated for medical treatment.
But it is a tainted prize.
They all have loved ones in danger back in Gaza. And for all the safety of where they are now, it is not, in the end, home.
Niveen Foad is one of them. She was the only available caretaker for her 6-year-old cousin, Sarah Yusuf, who was badly injured in an airstrike. Israel allowed Ms. Foad, her three daughters and Sarah to be evacuated to Italy in February 2024.
Since we first spoke to her there, two more of her children have managed to join her in Bologna.
Sarah, the 6-year-old, is doing better after intensive medical treatment, and her parents and brother have also come to Italy.
Ms. Foad is learning Italian and training to be an assistant chef: moving forward.
Yet thoughts of what, and who, she left behind sit heavily in her mind.
“I feel like I betrayed my own country by leaving, but sometimes I also think that I deserve a chance in life,” she said. And her kids deserved that chance, she said.
“It’s a confusing and constant fight with myself,” she added.
On the bus home from buying fish recently, she thought of her father in Gaza, who loves fish.
“My tears poured down, thinking I can afford to buy food and eat, but they can barely get anything,” she said.
Italy is her present, she said. Gaza, she believes, is still her future.
She wants her daughters to continue their education in Italy. But for them to get married and settle in Italy — impossible, she said.
“Whatever happens, I’ll end up in Gaza,” she said. “Staying in Italy is just a temporary solution.”
We reached dozens of people who had been able to leave Gaza for places like Italy, Jordan and Egypt. Some, like Ms. Foad, were determined to go back. A few were less sure. Though physically safe, all are tormented by Gaza.
Guilt claws at them, and worry keeps them up at night.
I try to stay away from people and sit alone all the time because I am constantly thinking about my mother, my sister, and my two brothers who are still in Gaza.
Ruba Abu Jibba
First spoke to us in November 2024
If I were in Gaza it would have been easier for me, because my situation would be similar to that of the people around me, but the emptiness I live in now abroad is extremely exhausting.
Mohammed al-Aloul
First spoke to us in February 2024
When we first spoke to Maher Ghanem last year, his grief was fresh.
His wife had died from cancer weeks before. She had been prevented from leaving Gaza for treatment after Israeli forces seized a crucial border crossing out of the enclave.
He told us when we called him again recently that he had remarried — a traditional, arranged union — so he wouldn’t have to care for his seven children alone.
In September, he went to a graduation ceremony for one of his daughters, who had just nominally finished middle school. But it seemed absurd to Mr. Ghanem, he said.
Realistically, his children have had almost no schooling for the last two years.
His youngest son was in first grade when the war began. Now the child talks to his father about trying to make some money ferrying passengers on a donkey cart, Mr. Ghanem said.
“There isn’t a school for him to attend, anyway,” he said.
Mr. Ghanem, a former security officer with the Palestinian Authority, recalled attending joint Israeli-Palestinian meetings at a kibbutz in central Israel in the late 1990s.
The point was to discuss how to co-exist peacefully.
Those meetings, too, now seemed absurd.
“There isn’t a glimmer of hope left in Gaza,” he said. “Me, and everyone else I know, just wants to get out.”
Many of the people we spoke to wanted to leave Gaza.
Even if the war ended somehow, few still thought there was any future left for them in Gaza.
But I don’t want to die. I still want to grow up, become an architect, rebuild Gaza, become a football player in Palestine’s national team, and win the World Cup.
Mohamed Abu Rteinah
First spoke to us in February 2024
We don’t have a present or a future. The only hope we’re living with is to be able to leave. That is the only way we will give our kids a normal life.
Ehab Fasfous
First spoke to us in August 2025
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10) No, Trump Can’t Deploy Troops to Wherever He Wants
By Stephen I. Vladeck, Oct. 7, 2025
Mr. Vladeck is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
President Trump’s escalating efforts to deploy armed troops onto the streets of several American cities run by Democratic officials are raising a question courts have been all but completely able to avoid since the Constitution was drafted: Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based on facts that they contrive?
The text of the relevant statutes doesn’t answer that question. But our constitutional ideals, to say nothing of common sense, should — and the answer must be no.
Contrary to some Trump critics, the president’s actions in Washington and Los Angeles as well as the developing situations in Portland and Chicago are not tantamount to imposing martial law. That’s only when the military supplants civilian government, not when it supplements it. Indeed, if there were consensus among officials and citizens that civilian authorities could not adequately enforce the laws, there would likewise be consensus that Congress has given the president the power to use federal troops — whether regular or federalized National Guard personnel.
The problem instead is that many Americans don’t believe the president’s claims. We look at pictures and videos out of Portland and we don’t see “war-ravaged” anything. We look at news reports out of Chicago and see the principal violence coming from federal officers — not being directed toward them. To put the matter directly, there’s a factual dispute about whether resorting to the military is justified. As Judge Karin Immergut (a Trump appointee) put it sharply in the Portland case, in which she ruled over the weekend that there was no legal basis for sending in troops, the president is acting in a manner that is “untethered to the facts.”
The Constitution’s drafters were not averse to domestic use of the military. One of the immediate catalysts for the 1787 Constitutional Convention had been the embarrassing inability of the national government to respond to Shays’s Rebellion — a relatively modest uprising that began in Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1786. That episode exposed for all to see the impotence of the government created by the Articles of Confederation — and it highlighted the need for a stronger, centralized federal executive. To that end, one of the powers the new Constitution expressly gave to Congress was the power “to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.”
When Congress first codified that power in 1792, there was little debate about the insurrection or invasion parts. Lawmakers’ concerns focused on when troops could be used for law enforcement. Their response was to authorize such deployments only when local authorities were unable or unwilling to enforce the laws themselves — and only when a federal judge or Supreme Court justice agreed with the president’s determination that those circumstances were present. (The statute they passed is the precursor to what’s known today as the Insurrection Act.)
President George Washington followed those statutory requirements to the letter in 1794, when he used troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1795, Congress removed the requirement of ex ante judicial approval (perhaps believing that other presidents would be similarly scrupulous). But Congress still insisted on a series of procedural requirements and time limits for domestic uses of the military. The point wasn’t that the president’s determinations would be conclusive; it was that the president would be allowed to go first — and, where necessary, other institutions could push back.
Until this year, Congress’s 230-year-old choice had been borne out. Presidents of both parties have been especially careful to use the military domestically only in contexts in which there was a clear factual predicate, whether because local authorities were overwhelmed by riots or were refusing to enforce civil rights laws. Indeed, until this year, there was virtually no judicial precedent on the scope of these powers, because their factual limits had not been seriously tested.
The Trump administration has pushed the envelope in three different respects. First, in Washington the administration invoked the federal government’s unique control over the District of Columbia National Guard (and the Metropolitan Police Department) in response to claims about crime rates there that were belied by the Justice Department’s own statistics. In Los Angeles, the administration called out hundreds of Marines and federalized thousands of members of the California National Guard in response to dubious claims that local authorities were unable to keep order, especially in the face of anti-ICE protests. Now the administration’s attention has turned to Portland and to Chicago, near where there has been a long-running, peaceful protest around one of the most visible ICE facilities.
In the California, Oregon and Illinois cases, the administration is trying to walk a legal tightrope. It is invoking an obscure provision in Title 10 (the part of the U.S. Code that deals with the military) to federalize National Guard troops. But that provision authorizes federalization only when “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” And without a request from local officials, the president can use “regular forces” only if “unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States.”
On Monday, President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.” But the same reason he hasn’t invoked that statute yet should also doom his reliance on the more obscure National Guard authority.
Instead, the federal government is trying to use dubious factual claims about what’s true on the ground in these cities to justify federalizing National Guard troops both from within those states and from outside of them.
That is what we, and more important the courts, face: a factual dispute more than a legal one.
Typically, our constitutional system resolves these kinds of factual disputes through litigation. Neutral judges and juries hear legal arguments and factual testimony and decide for themselves what has, and what has not been, established. But the president’s advisers and supporters have spent the past few days arguing that this is not an appropriate role for the federal courts to play — because the president’s determinations in national security cases should be, and (they claim) historically have been, conclusive.
This, then, is the real legal test President Trump’s deployments raise: Can the courts meaningfully scrutinize the president’s claims, or must they blindly defer? To date, we’ve seen fairly aggressive pushback to the administration’s arguments from the courts — from Judge Charles Breyer in the Los Angeles case and from Judge Immergut in Portland.
The Supreme Court will no doubt have the last word. And the question is going to be whether the president can use a contrived crisis as a justification for sending troops into our cities. In other words, the issue is going to come down to who decides the facts when it comes to domestic use of the military. That question meant one thing when we had presidents who, for whatever reason, were constrained to acknowledge reality. It means something else altogether in an administration for which, to borrow from George Orwell, 2 + 2 = 5.
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11) Coal Is Unreliable, Expensive and Dirty. Trump Is Going All In.
By Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted, Oct. 7, 2025
Mr. Feaster and Mr. Wamsted are analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Nathan Howard/Reuters
The two-unit Cumberland coal plant in northwestern Tennessee, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the United States, capable of supplying electricity to as many as 1.4 million homes when it is running.
But lately, the plant has been failing right when customers need electricity the most.
In the middle of the heat wave that hit the eastern United States this June, one of the units tripped offline, forcing the T.V.A. to declare a power emergency and ask customers to cut back on electricity use. For consumers, this meant raising the temperature of their air-conditioning on some of the hottest days of the year.
Cumberland’s problems run so deep that the T.V.A. plans to retire the 52-year-old units in 2026 and 2028. It has warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that keeping the plant open any longer would require significant investment and create economic and reliability risks.
“Clean, beautiful coal” has become a mantra for the Trump administration. But it is neither clean nor beautiful. More to the point, it is neither economical nor reliable — central concerns for utilities and power producers across the country. In contrast, wind and solar energy and battery storage, which the administration actively opposes, are less expensive, more reliable and far better for the climate.
Most of the coal mined in the United States today fuels aging electric power plants such as Cumberland that are costly to maintain and increasingly unsound. It’s why America gets just one-third as much electricity from coal as it did in 2007, when power production from coal peaked. Since then, large coal-fired plants have been steadily replaced by cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives. In 2025 alone, 23 units are scheduled to close or be converted to gas by utilities and other power producers. From 2026 to 2030, 109 more units are expected to stop burning coal, according to research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, where we work.
The Trump administration is betting that forcing coal plants to stay open, offering $625 million to upgrade plants, giving away coal on federal land, cutting pollution limits and opening more land to coal mining will spark a turnaround for coal-fired power generation. But while these measures could prolong the operating lives of some coal plants for a short period, they will not reverse the decline of an industry hurtling into economic and technological obsolescence.
Coal-fired power plants are essentially steam engines, a technology the railroads abandoned in the 1950s and ’60s. They are practically identical to the first coal-fired plant, built in 1882 by Thomas Edison to produce electricity in New York City.
But power technology and grid operations have evolved significantly over the past two decades, first by the rise of generation that has no fuel cost (wind and solar) and more recently by battery storage, which can send power to the grid as needed. Batteries in Texas now store power when demand is low and solar generation is high (think 10 a.m.) and then send that power back into the system when demand is high (around 7 p.m.).
This capability, which didn’t exist in the grid until recently, is sharply lowering spikes in power prices and reducing consumer costs. It’s also enabling even more low-cost renewables to be built and reducing the old approach of building expensive fossil-fueled plants dedicated to meeting periods of peak demand.
Coal plants, in contrast, cannot respond quickly to changes in grid demand. Many of them lose money across the day when power prices are low, since they cannot easily stop running in response to low demand.
While coal power struggles with high fuel, operation and maintenance costs, solar and battery storage costs are projected to continue falling while performance improves, further undercutting coal’s competitiveness.
Because the batteries large enough to store electricity for the grid are based on the same technology as batteries for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, they benefit enormously from global investment and research. As a result, energy storage density, a key measure of performance, has been improving by 5 percent or more annually. Solar panels have also seen consistent increases in efficiency combined with falling costs.
Battery storage and solar have other key advantages that conventional power plants do not. Both can be built at nearly any size, from small residential units to large, high-power utility projects. They can also be built almost anywhere, helping utilities avoid costly transmission upgrades and other infrastructure investments.
These advantages have increasingly undercut the economics of coal generation. The problem has gotten so severe that many utilities, even in coal-friendly states, have converted or are planning to convert their existing coal plants to burn natural gas to keep them open and operating. Think about that for a minute: It is often cheaper and more reliable to retrofit a coal plant to burn gas than to keep operating it as is.
Gas is the preferred option for the T.V.A. saddled with the Cumberland coal plants. It is building a 1,450-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant as a replacement.
The Trump administration is likely to push the T.V.A. to continue operating the facility past its planned closure dates, regardless of the cost and reliability implications for consumers. The Department of Energy has already forced a Michigan utility to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant open — despite long-term, state-approved plans to close it in May — which cost $29 million in the first five weeks alone. Consumers, including many who are not even served by the utility, will ultimately be forced to pay for these actions.
These costly stopgap measures are largely performative. They will not prevent coal’s declining importance as an electricity generation resource. The alternatives are simply less expensive, more reliable and quicker to build.
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12) Live Updates: Trump Officials Head to Anxious Cities Fighting to Keep Out Troops
The Texas National Guard was preparing to deploy in the Chicago area this week. Officials there and in Portland, Ore., are trying to block the troops in court, as administration officials accused protesters of attacking federal agents.
By Anna Griffin, Mitch Smith, Robert Chiarito and Glenn Thrush, Reporting from Portland, Ore., Chicago and Washington. Oct. 7, 2025
Federal officials have said the National Guard was needed to protect ICE agents and buildings, including a processing facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, Ill. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Senior Trump administration officials were headed to Chicago and Portland, Ore., on Tuesday as the legal and rhetorical battles escalated over President Trump’s efforts to send out-of-state National Guard troops to both cities.
Hundreds of troops were expected to deploy in the Chicago area within the next 48 hours, according to officials. It would represent the latest in an extraordinary series of military incursions in American cities that serve as Democratic strongholds.
Illinois and Chicago officials have contested the deployment orders in court, calling them an unconstitutional “invasion.” Mr. Trump has also tried to send troops from Texas and California to Portland, Ore., but a federal judge has blocked those moves for now. A federal judge in Illinois declined to immediately take the action on Monday.
Mr. Trump has contended that major U.S. cities led by Democrats need the military to crack down on crime — which troops are generally barred from doing under federal law — and assist federal immigration agents as they attempt to carry out his mass deportation policies.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and other Democratic leaders have accused the president of conducting a campaign divorced from reality in an effort to punish political enemies, sow chaos and consolidate his power under martial law.
Here’s what we’re covering:
· Administration officials: Attorney General Pam Bondi said during testimony in Congress that Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, were “on their way to Chicago” along with the troops from Texas. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, was traveling to Portland, Ore., on Tuesday. Local and state officials have suggested that such visits are designed to stir further outrage and provoke unrest.
· Approval and resistance: State leaders sparred over the president’s authority to send National Guard troops across state lines. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, defended the action, saying in an interview on Fox News that Democratic-led states “are refusing to enforce the law, and we have chaos.” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, has called the mobilization a blatant attempt by President Trump to assert unconstitutional powers.
· City leaders weigh in: A coalition of cities from across the country filed a legal brief late Monday supporting Oregon’s attempt to block National Guard soldiers from deploying in Portland. The brief also claimed that Mr. Trump plans to send troops to 19 more states. City leaders said they were “gravely concerned that any protest — real or perceived — within their borders will result in another unnecessary deployment of the military.”
· An act from 1807: Federal law generally prohibits the military from conducting domestic law enforcement operations. But Mr. Trump said that he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act, enacted in 1807, to justify sending troops. That could allow the president to bypass court rulings that have blocked the deployments on other legal grounds.
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13) In a Toxic World, Pets Could Be Vital Health Watchdogs
A better understanding of how pollution affects pets could benefit humans and animals alike.
By Emily Anthes, Oct. 7, 2025
Tara Anand
On a frigid February night in 2023, a freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. For days, the train’s hazardous contents spilled into the surrounding soil, water and air. It was an environmental and public health catastrophe, and efforts are underway to monitor the long-term health effects on the people of East Palestine.
But one team of scientists is focused on a different group of local residents: the dogs. After the derailment, the researchers recruited dog owners in and around East Palestine, asking them to attach chemical-absorbing silicone tags to their pets’ collars.
The preliminary results, which have not yet been published, suggest that dogs living closest to the crash site were exposed to unusually high levels of certain chemicals. The researchers are now analyzing blood samples from the dogs to determine whether the chemicals may have triggered genetic changes associated with cancer.
“This is what we should be doing in the wake of any of these disasters,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute, who is leading the research. “The pets that live in our homes are being exposed to the same things we’re going to be exposed to.”
Our pets breathe the same air, drink the same water and often sleep in the same beds that we do. And yet, there is relatively little research on how environmental toxins and pollutants affect our animal companions.
That is an enormous missed opportunity, experts said. Our pets, they argued, are ideally situated to act as environmental health sentinels, helping scientists identify hazards that transcend species barriers. Understanding more about how pollution affects pets could ultimately yield insights that improve both animal and human health.
“I do like to use the analogy of the canary in the coal mine, with this one distinction, which is that canaries were sacrificial,” said Dr. Audrey Ruple, a veterinary epidemiologist at Virginia Tech. “Our dogs are not. We care deeply about our companion dogs and our companion animals.”
The air out there
In 2020, California experienced a record-setting wildfire season, one that often left the skies filled with smoke. On particularly bad days, Stephen Jarvis, a graduate student in the Bay Area, found himself with headaches, irritated eyes, shortness of breath and even chest pains.
He also noticed the effects in his partner’s asthmatic cat, Manolo. “On days when the air quality was worse, his symptoms would flare and he would have a hard time breathing,” Dr. Jarvis said.
Last week, Dr. Jarvis, now an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, published a paper suggesting that Manolo’s breathing problems were not a one-off. He and his colleagues reviewed five years of veterinary data from across Britain, alongside data on the levels of airborne fine particulate matter, which is one of the main pollutants in wildfire smoke and a well-known human health hazard.
When air pollution rose, so did the number of veterinary visits for cats and dogs, the researchers found. If the nation kept air pollution below the threshold recommended by the World Health Organization, it could prevent between 80,000 and 290,000 vet visits per year, they concluded. “That’s a lot of angst and a lot of money off the table for pet owners,” Dr. Jarvis said.
It’s a sobering finding, especially given the fact that climate change and intensifying wildfires are expected to make air quality worse in the coming decades.
“When we are considering how to protect ourselves from unhealthy air, we should also be thinking about our pets and wildlife,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at Cornell who studies the effects of smoke on wild animals.
Smoke inhalation can cause an array of respiratory problems in animals, including coughing and shortness of breath. Studies have also begun to link wildfire smoke to other health consequences, including eye infections and cellular stress in dogs and heart problems and blood clots in cats.
Birds are especially vulnerable because they are highly efficient breathers, extracting more oxygen from the air than mammals do. Unfortunately, Dr. Sanderfoot said, that means that they are also “processing higher concentrations of all of the nasty stuff” in polluted air. “They are more sensitive overall to air pollution than we are.”
Heavy burdens
Cats and dogs, which tend to spend a lot of time on or near the ground, could be at elevated risk from other chemical contaminants. Compared to humans, they may have more exposure to cancer-causing chemicals used in lawn care or the heavy metals, like lead, that tend to accumulate in household dust.
In 2014, when lead began leaching into the drinking water in Flint, Mich., there was reason to believe that pets were especially vulnerable. Unlike people, pets usually “subsist wholly” on tap water, said John Buchweitz, a veterinary toxicologist at Michigan State University.
After Dr. Buchweitz and his colleagues set up lead-screening clinics for local dogs, they found several animals whose results were of “extreme concern,” including three Australian shepherds all living in the same household. The dogs had been losing weight and behaving strangely, and all three had elevated lead levels in their blood.
Dr. Buchweitz was alarmed; he knew that the family living there also had young children. “I personally reached out, contacted the health department, and said ‘This house needs to be investigated,’” he recalled. Officials subsequently found that the drinking water at the home contained enough lead to pose a clear danger to both people and animals.
Known unknowns
Although a chemical spill, wildfire or water crisis can present an acute, immediate health risk, many environmental health hazards are harder to identify: Does regular, low-level exposure to a particular pollutant, for instance, increase someone’s lifetime cancer risk?
Pets have shorter lives than people, and are more likely to live them out in a single geographic location, making it easier for scientists to tease out some of these subtle effects. Plus, the devotion of pet owners helps facilitate data collection, experts said.
“People are worried about their pets,” said Dr. Karlsson, who leads Darwin’s Dogs, a large community science project that aims to identify the genetic and environmental contributors to canine health and behavior. “And as a scientist, that’s an opportunity. Because if people are concerned about it, then they’re going to help us with the work.”
Tens of thousands of American dog owners have enrolled their pets in Darwin’s Dogs and similar initiatives, including the Dog Aging Project and the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study. Among other data, these projects are collecting information on some of these dogs’ everyday exposure to chemicals, measuring the levels of herbicides in their urine, mailing out silicone, chemical-absorbing dog tags and asking owners to submit samples of their dogs’ drinking water.
To Dr. Ruple, who led the Dog Aging Project’s pilot studies with silicone tags and drinking water, the owners seemed more eager to participate than they would have been in research on their own environmental health risks. “I think that people are quite suspicious of science at this point in time,” she said. “But their love for their dogs overrides whatever distrust they might have.”
And the dogs, in turn, can give back, helping scientists identify chemicals that put both humans and animals at risk. After all, Dr. Ruple noted, the word “sentinel” refers to someone whose job is keeping watch. “That’s what we have always used dogs for,” she said. “Guardians of our livestock, guardians of our family, guardians of our homes.”
And in a toxic world, perhaps, guardians of our health.
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