Help World-Outlook Win New Subscribers
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Dear reader,
Over the last month, World-Outlook and its sister publication in Spanish Panorama-Mundial have published unique coverage of U.S. and world events.
This includes the three-part interview with Cuban historian and writer Ernesto Limia Díaz, ‘Cuba Is the Moral and Political Compass of the World.’ A related article by Mark Satinoff, World Votes with Cuba to Demand an End to U.S. Blockade, included information on the campaign to send medical aid to Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa and was shared widely by the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba Committee and other Cuba solidarity groups.
A number of readers sent their appreciation for Cathleen Gutekanst’s article Chicago Residents Fight ICE Abductions, Deportations, which provided a compelling, eyewitness account of this example of working-class resistance to the Trump administration’s war on undocumented immigrants. Some readers shared it widely on social media platforms.
The news analysis Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream also generated interest. It is part of World-Outlook’s consistent analysis of the danger of the rise of incipient fascism that Trumpism has posed for the working class and its allies in the U.S. and the world.
Most recently, another article by Mark Satinoff, ‘From Ceasefire to a Just Peace’ in Israel and Occupied Territories, was promoted by Friends of Standing Together (FOST NY/NJ) on the group’s website. Alon-Lee Green and Sally Abed — the two Standing Together leaders featured at the November 12 event in Brooklyn, New York, that Mark’s article covered — and Israelis for Peace sent their thanks to Mark for his accurate reporting.
This is a small sample of the news coverage and political analysis World-Outlook offers.
We ask you to use this information to try to convince at least one of your acquaintances, colleagues, friends, fellow students, neighbors, or relatives to subscribe to World-Outlook. As you know, the subscription is free of charge. Increasing World-Outlook’s subscription base will widen the site’s reach. It will also provide new impetus to improve our coverage. Comments and reactions from subscribers, or initiatives from readers to cover events in their areas, often result in unexpectedly invaluable articles or opinion columns clarifying important political questions.
Feel free to share this letter, or part of its contents, with those you are asking to subscribe. And keep World-Outlookinformed about the reactions you get from potential new readers.
In solidarity,
World-Outlook editors
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
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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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
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.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
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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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) Starbucks to Pay $39 Million in Landmark N.Y.C. Labor Law Settlement
Starbucks agreed to the settlement after failing to give workers stable schedules. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect, joined striking Starbucks workers in Brooklyn.
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Dec. 1, 2025
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City.
Mayor Eric Adams announced a $38.9 million settlement with Starbucks on Monday over violations of New York City’s law guaranteeing fair working conditions, a resolution that city officials said was the largest worker protection settlement in the city’s history.
The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection found that Starbucks had violated the law more than half a million times since 2021 by failing to provide workers with stable schedules. More than 15,000 hourly workers are expected to receive restitution payments under the agreement.
Workers have complained for years that the coffee behemoth was cutting their hours and refusing to give them predictable schedules. The city found that the company “arbitrarily cut schedules and illegally prioritized their own profits over their workers’ rights” across more than 300 locations.
“With this landmark settlement, we’ll put tens of millions of dollars back into the pockets of hardworking New Yorkers and reinforce every New Yorker’s right to a reliable schedule, full hours and basic dignity,” Mr. Adams said in a statement.
The city’s Fair Workweek Law was approved in 2017 by the City Council. Fast food employers must give workers regular schedules that stay the same week to week, must provide schedules 14 days in advance and cannot reduce hours by more than 15 percent without “just cause or a legitimate business reason.”
Starbucks said in a statement that the law was “notoriously challenging for businesses to navigate.” The company said that the violations were “about compliance” and “not about withholding wages or failing to pay partners.”
Mr. Adams, a Democrat who will leave office at the end of the month, has criticized Starbucks and stood with the workers, posting photos two years ago from a meeting with them.
His successor, Zohran Mamdani, has also embraced Starbucks workers and supported a strike by some of the company’s unionized workers to help them gain higher wages during contract negotiations.
On Monday, Mr. Mamdani appeared with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont alongside striking workers at a Starbucks store in Brooklyn. The mayor-elect said that New Yorkers should expect him to back striking workers even after he takes office.
“When I become mayor of this city, I am going to continue to stand on picket lines with workers across the five boroughs,” he said, adding, “We want to build an administration that is characterized by being there for workers every single step of the way.”
Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is expected to embrace more worker-friendly policies than Mr. Adams did, potentially further alienating business leaders who have already expressed skepticism over his affordability agenda.
Mr. Mamdani has proposed raising the maximum corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, from 7.25 percent, and adding a 2 percent tax on those who make more than $1 million to help pay for some of his proposals.
Mr. Sanders, who endorsed Mr. Mamdani in his run for mayor, assailed what he described as Starbucks’s “corporate greed.”
“We are living in an economy where the people on top have never, ever had it so good,” he said.
Mr. Mamdani, who has urged New Yorkers not to patronize Starbucks until the strike is over, said he wanted to show solidarity with the workers, and praised the city’s settlement.
“These are demands for decency,” Mr. Mamdani said. “These are workers who are simply being asked to be treated with the respect they deserve.”
Starbucks Workers United, which represents more than 12,000 baristas at over 600 locations, voted to authorize a strike at some stores that has lasted 19 days. Earlier this year, Starbucks and the union brought in a mediator in a push to revive contract talks, which had stalled over an impasse on wage increases.
For more than a decade, Starbucks workers have raised concerns about harsh working conditions. The company changed some of its practices in 2014.
New York City’s investigation found that most Starbucks employees never received regular schedules, making it difficult for them to manage child care or second jobs. The company also “routinely and unlawfully reduced employees’ hours by more than 15 percent,” the city found, which made it difficult for them to get by.
Under the settlement, most employees who worked for Starbucks in an hourly position from July 2021 through July 2024 will receive $50 for each week they worked. An employee who worked at a store for a year and a half could receive nearly $4,000.
Julie Menin, a City Council member from Manhattan who recently announced that she had enough support to become the next Council speaker, also celebrated the settlement.
“Today’s victory serves as a message to corporations: NYC will protect workers and hold violators accountable,” she wrote on social media.
Outside the Starbucks in Brooklyn, Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Sanders were asked about President Trump’s characterizing himself as the “affordability president.” Mr. Mamdani, whose meeting with the president at the White House last month was astonishingly affectionate, gave a diplomatic response, saying he was focused on how “we actually deliver” for working people.
Mr. Sanders was less tactful, calling Mr. Trump a “pathological liar.”
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2) Vaccine Committee May Make Significant Changes to Childhood Schedule
Comments by President Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and some panelists suggest the committee is likely to delay hepatitis B shots and discuss revising the use of other vaccines.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, Dec. 2, 2025
"Dr. Prasad said that he was “open to vigorous discussions and debate” from F.D.A. employees but that anyone who did not agree with the new core principles should submit their resignations."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/health/vaccine-committee-hepatitis-b-children-trump-rfk-jr.html
Advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appear poised to make consequential changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, delaying a shot that is routinely administered to newborns and discussing big changes to when or how other childhood immunizations are given.
Decisions by the group are not legally binding, but they have profound implications for whether private insurance and government assistance programs are required to cover the vaccines.
Depending on what the committee does, the changes could also further erode Americans’ confidence in immunizations. Although a majority of Americans still say they are confident about vaccines’ effectiveness, multiple surveys show the percentage has dropped sharply over the last few years.
Members of the group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, were handpicked by Mr. Kennedy, who has long campaigned against many childhood vaccines. They are scheduled to meet on Thursday and Friday.
The specific proposals the members will vote on are still unknown. The agenda is thin on details, listing neither specific speakers nor times, merely mentioning “votes” on the first day of the two-day meeting. But public comments by some panelists, as well as by President Trump and Mr. Kennedy, hint at some possible outcomes.
The committee is likely to decide that a vaccine to prevent hepatitis B — a highly contagious disease that can severely damage the liver — should no longer be administered routinely at birth and perhaps should not be offered to children at all.
The committee members may also question the safety of ingredients like aluminum salts that are present in many childhood vaccines. And they are likely to discuss whether vaccines for different diseases should be offered as separate shots rather than in the combination products currently used.
The meeting comes on the heels of unsupported claims made by Dr. Vinay Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, that Covid shots have killed “no fewer than 10” children. The internal memo did not provide any details or data. The memo went on to question the safety of administering multiple vaccines at the same time.
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services named Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and a current member of the committee, as its chair. During the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Milhoan raised concerns about myocarditis caused by Covid vaccines and urged the Biden administration to withdraw the shots from the market. Martin Kulldorff, the outgoing chair of the committee, will take on a new role as a chief science officer at the Health Department. The changes may require the department to add new members to the committee.
Mr. Kennedy has frequently said that children are given too many vaccines and too many at the same time, which, he contends, overloads the immune system and leads to conditions like autism.
Dozens of studies have looked for a possible link between vaccines and autism and have not found one. And children now receive more shots because scientists have developed effective vaccines for more of the diseases that harmed and killed people decades ago, said Dr. Bruce Gellin, who led the U.S. National Vaccine Program Office from 2002 to 2017.
The slate of routine vaccinations has grown more complex, so “it makes sense to take a step back and say, ‘Are we doing this in the most efficient and effective way that’s based on evidence?’” Dr. Gellin said.
“The question is, are they going to do that?” he said of the panelists.
In a public comment submitted to the committee, a coalition of 15 Democratic governors urged the members to ground their decisions in “rigorous science” because the guidelines will affect “families, providers, insurers, state immunization systems, and overall public health.”
At a meeting in September that devolved into chaos and confusion, A.C.I.P. members voted to limit access to the Covid vaccine and to stop recommending a combination shot against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox for children under 4.
The panel shelved a vote on hepatitis B because some members wanted a more robust discussion first.
In October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a new working group charged with reviewing the safety of childhood vaccines and their ingredients, as well as the times when the shots are administered and the other immunizations that are given to children at the same time.
The working group will “determine whether a change in the vaccine schedule may be warranted,” according to a document detailing the group’s goals.
Contrary to past practice, the names of the working group’s members have not been made public, and C.D.C. staff members are barred from participating in the meetings.
A similar working group for Covid, whose findings were presented at the September A.C.I.P. meeting, made sweeping statements about vaccine safety that were not backed by data, said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, who was a member of the vaccine committee in the 1990s.
“It just was really, really very disturbing,” she said.
Mr. Kennedy’s statements that vaccines have been added to the childhood schedule without adequate research is also inaccurate, Dr. Edwards said. She is a co-author of a textbook chapter on combination vaccines.
“Through the years, we’ve added one vaccine at a time, studying their impact on the other ones, and that’s how we’ve gotten to these schedules,” she said, adding, “I think that has to be acknowledged.”
But Dr. Prasad, who leads the F.D.A.’s vaccine division, said in the memo made public over the weekend that the agency’s current standards on giving multiple vaccines at the same time had created “a false sense of efficacy and safety.”
Dr. Prasad said that he was “open to vigorous discussions and debate” from F.D.A. employees but that anyone who did not agree with the new core principles should submit their resignations.
Other Trump administration officials, including Mr. Trump himself and the C.D.C.’s acting director, Jim O’Neill, have also suggested breaking up combination vaccines, including those for measles, mumps and rubella, into separate shots. They have argued that the combination vaccines produce too much of an immune jolt for young children.
But many immunologists say that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the immune system. The vaccines manufactured today contain fewer antigens — the part of the vaccine that provokes an immune response — by orders of magnitude than those made decades ago. And children naturally encounter thousands of antigens in the course of a single day, the experts said.
Splitting the vaccines into separate shots would create formidable logistical hurdles for manufacturers, who may decide that it is too expensive and risky to continue making them, said Michael Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota.
Companies would need to develop and test new, single-dose products, he said, and “we’re having a hard enough time keeping them producing the three-dose antigen vaccines.”
Administering vaccines as separate shots also would require multiple clinical visits, making it more difficult for parents to fully immunize their children and for doctors to keep their patients updated. It would also result in more needle jabs for children.
“On the one hand, this entire process started with a message of ‘Kids get too many shots,’” Ms. Cohen said. “And now we’re talking about taking away the combination vaccines, which of course is going to mean more doses for kids.”
“I’m not really sure what the end goal is here,” she added.
It is unclear how a new immunization schedule might affect the vaccines currently in use.
Since 1991, the C.D.C. has recommended that the hepatitis B vaccine be given as three doses, the first one administered right after birth. The hepatitis B shot is given on its own for the first dose, but the later two doses are often administered as combination products containing vaccines for other diseases, like diphtheria, tetanus and polio.
If A.C.I.P. votes to delay hepatitis B shots till age 4 or even age 12, as President Trump has suggested, doctors may no longer be able to administer the combination vaccines.
At the same time, parents who want the hepatitis B shot for their children may have trouble finding it or getting insurance companies to pay for it, said Chari Cohen, president of the Hepatitis B Foundation.
Public health experts credit the hepatitis B vaccine with nearly eliminating maternal transmission of the disease in the United States. Routine immunization has cut the number of babies infected at birth to fewer than 20 per year from about 20,000 babies per year.
Mr. Kennedy and his associates have argued that hepatitis B is primarily a sexually transmitted disease and babies do not need the protection unless their mothers are infected.
But supporters of the vaccine note that the virus can also be spread by household objects like toothbrushes, razors or combs that are used by an infected person. Only about half of cases before 1991 were a result of transmission from an infected mother. More than 90 percent of infants infected with the virus develop chronic hepatitis B.
Mr. Kennedy has pointed to other countries, like Denmark, that offer the vaccine only to babies of infected mothers. But the nationalized health care systems in such countries ensure that pregnant women are screened for diseases before delivery, some public health experts said.
In the United States, delaying the first dose to 2 months of age for babies of women with unknown hepatitis B status would result in about 1,400 additional infections per year, according to an estimate published on Monday by the Hepatitis B Foundation; delaying it to 12 years of age would lead to about 2,700 additional cases, the researchers estimated.
The Vaccine Integrity Project, an initiative dedicated to safeguarding vaccine use in the U.S., evaluated more than 400 studies over 40 years, and concluded that “the hepatitis B vaccine is safe regardless of vaccine timing.”
At their meeting, the panelists may also address the safety of vaccine ingredients like aluminum salts, or alum (not aluminum metal as it is sometimes incorrectly described). Alum has been used as an adjuvant — a substance added to vaccines to boost the immune response — to vaccines for decades and is included now in dozens of vaccines.
By enhancing the immune response, alum allows for smaller doses of vaccines to be delivered in each dose. Taking it out of vaccines would be akin to leaving out eggs when making a cake, Dr. Gellin said: “You’re not going to get the protective immune response you need.”
Mr. Kennedy has said that aluminum can harm the brain. One study published by the C.D.C. in 2022 did find a small association with asthma that the researchers concluded warranted further investigation.
But this year, a large Danish study based on the country’s national registry found no association between cumulative alum exposure in the first two years of life and 50 medical conditions, including asthma, allergies and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Mr. Kennedy panned the study as a “deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry.” But vaccine scientists said the analysis was carefully done.
“Just because he didn’t like the answer, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t done perfectly,” Dr. Gellin said.
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3) San Francisco Will Sue Ultraprocessed Food Companies
The city attorney accuses large manufacturers of causing diseases that have burdened governments with public health costs.
By Heather Knight, Reporting from San Francisco, Dec. 2, 2025
David Chiu, the city attorney of San Francisco, will file a lawsuit against a host of companies that make ultraprocessed foods. Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times
The San Francisco city attorney will file on Tuesday the nation’s first government lawsuit against food manufacturers over ultraprocessed fare, arguing that cities and counties have been burdened with the costs of treating diseases that stem from the companies’ products.
David Chiu, the city attorney, told The New York Times that he will sue 10 corporations that make some of the country’s most popular food and drinks. Ultraprocessed products now comprise 70 percent of the American food supply and fill grocery store shelves with a kaleidoscope of colorful packages.
Think Slim Jim meat sticks and Cool Ranch Doritos. But also aisles of breads, sauces and granola bars marketed as natural or healthy.
It is a rare issue on which the liberal leaders in San Francisco City Hall are fully aligned with the Trump administration, which has targeted ultraprocessed foods as part of its Make America Healthy Again mantra.
Mr. Chiu’s lawsuit, which will be filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of the State of California, will seek unspecified damages for the costs that local governments bear for treating residents whose health has been harmed by ultraprocessed food.
The city accuses the companies of “unfair and deceptive acts” in how they market and sell their foods, arguing that such practices violate the state’s Unfair Competition Law and public nuisance statute. The city also argues the companies knew that their food made people sick but sold it anyway.
It is unclear how successful the suit will be. In August, a federal judge in Philadelphia dismissed one of the nation’s first private lawsuits over ultraprocessed foods, filed by a young consumer who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease at age 16. The judge, appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ruled that the plaintiff’s claims lacked specifics about which products he had consumed and when. (The plaintiff’s lawyers at Morgan & Morgan have since filed an amended complaint, according to the firm.)
But the San Francisco city attorney’s office has had success as a groundbreaking public agency on health matters. The office previously won $539 million from tobacco companies and $21 million from lead paint manufacturers.
In 2018, the office also sued multiple opioid manufacturers, distributors and dispensers, reaching settlements with all but one company worth a combined total of $120 million. San Francisco then prevailed at trial over the holdout, Walgreens, scooping up another $230 million.
Mr. Chiu, a former Democratic state legislator and San Francisco supervisor, recently walked the aisles of a Safeway supermarket in the Excelsior District, a working-class neighborhood near the city’s southern border.
He picked up a box of Lunchables, a “lunch combination” as the box put it, which contained pepperoni pizza, a fruit punch-flavored Capri Sun and a Nestle Crunch chocolate bar. Mr. Chiu struggled to pronounce the ingredients, listed in tiny type measuring a few inches long, which included diglycerides, xanthan gum, calcium propionate and cellulose powder “added to prevent caking.”
“Modified food starch. Potassium sorbate,” Mr. Chiu continued, ticking off more ingredients on the same label. “It makes me sick that generations of kids and parents are being deceived and buying food that’s not food.”
He sounded a lot like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, who has brought his Make America Healthy Again movement to Washington. Mr. Kennedy has railed against ultraprocessed foods, which are typically made in labs and contain ingredients not found in home kitchens, for contributing to chronic diseases.
Research has linked these foods to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and cognitive decline.
Mr. Chiu stressed that he does not agree with Mr. Kennedy on other health topics, including vaccine skepticism. But he said that the science is indisputable when it comes to ultraprocessed foods.
“Many of the perspectives of this administration are not backed by science, but this is different,” Mr. Chiu said. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”
In the San Francisco lawsuit, the defendants include the Coca-Cola Company; PepsiCo; Kraft Heinz Company, which makes Lunchables and Kool-Aid; Post Holdings, the cereal maker; and Mondelez International, which makes Oreos and Chips Ahoy. The lawsuit also names General Mills; Nestle USA; Kellogg; Mars Incorporated; and ConAgra Brands.
None of the companies responded to requests for comment.
The Consumer Brands Association, a trade group that represents many of them, said in a statement that the manufacturers were working to introduce products with more protein and fiber, less sugar and no synthetic dyes.
Jocelyn Kelly, a spokeswoman for the association, said that there was no uniform definition of ultraprocessed foods and that it was unfair to lump them all together.
“Attempting to classify foods as unhealthy simply because they are processed, or demonizing food by ignoring its full nutrient content, misleads consumers and exacerbates health disparities,” she said.
Ms. Kelly added that the companies help to keep grocery store prices down for consumers.
States and cities have taken on ultraprocessed foods in other ways with regulations and legislation.
Democrats and Republicans in California, who are usually deeply divided, passed a bill this year that defined ultraprocessed foods and laid a foundation for banning them from schools, which Gov. Gavin Newsom called a bipartisan win.
In 2010, San Francisco banned fast-food restaurants from giving free toys, such as those found in McDonald’s Happy Meals. As mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg tried, but ultimately failed, to ban large sodas, including Big Gulps. Numerous cities have taxed soda and other sugary drinks, and California, Arizona and West Virginia have banned some ultraprocessed products, including food dyes, in schools.
Processed foods have been around since the 1800s. During World War II, they were a useful way to provide soldiers with shelf-stable food, including canned meats and chocolate bars that did not melt. After the war, companies realized that they could sell these kinds of products to families by emphasizing that they would save time.
In the 1970s, the country had an excess of corn and wheat and turned the crops into cheap ingredients, such as high-fructose corn syrup and modified starch. Companies heavily marketed ultraprocessed foods to children, using mascots such as Tony the Tiger and Count Chocula.
Tobacco companies, including Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, diversified their holdings by purchasing major food companies in the 1980s and used the same marketing techniques they use to promote cigarettes to sell ultraprocessed foods.
Mr. Chiu, the father of a boy in fourth grade, said it has been a constant struggle to limit ultraprocessed foods at home. His family lives at Candlestick Point in the city’s southeast corner, where few healthy food options exist.
“When we’re busy, we stop off at supermarkets that are filled with ultraprocessed foods,” Mr. Chiu said. “It’s extremely difficult when you’re walking down the aisles and your child is tugging at your sleeve to buy the products marketed to them.”
Winding through the aisles, he called out more products. Hot Pockets. Go-Gurt squeezable yogurt tubes. Cheetos. His personal ultraprocessed Kryptonite, he acknowledged, is Pringles. He found them at the end of the cold beverage aisle, just past the White Claws and other hard seltzers, but kept walking.
Asked after he perused the store whether he felt hungry or repulsed, he laughed.
“A little bit of both,” he said.
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4) Federal Immigration Operation Starts in New Orleans
It is unclear how long the effort will last in Louisiana, where the Republican governor has welcomed the agents with open arms even as immigrant communities fear what might come.
By Eduardo Medina and Hamed Aleaziz, Dec. 3, 2025
Eduardo Medina reported from New Orleans
A protest on Monday against the deployment of Border Patrol agents in New Orleans. Credit...Kathleen Flynn for The New York Times
Federal authorities announced the start of an immigration enforcement operation in New Orleans on Wednesday, the latest front in the Trump administration’s crackdown.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that its targets would include violent criminals who were released after being arrested. For weeks, New Orleans, a city led by Democrats in a conservative state, had been nervously bracing for the agents’ arrival. Immigrant advocates have been warning residents to reduce their time outdoors as much as possible, given the outcomes of past operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C.
It was unclear on Wednesday morning what specific federal agencies were involved in the operation. But previous efforts in those cities were led by the Border Patrol and a senior official, Gregory Bovino, who have been criticized for their aggressive tactics, with agents seen flooding grocery store parking lots frequented by Latinos, hanging around Home Depots to pick up undocumented people looking for work, and sometimes roughly detaining American citizens.
In announcing the New Orleans operation, the Trump administration said that it was pursuing “the worst of the worst” criminals who were in the country illegally, and included a list of 10 people it said had been released from local jails because of sanctuary city policies.
Most of the people detained in past operations, however, have not had criminal histories. In Charlotte, for example, where more than 370 people were arrested, only about 44 had criminal records, according to federal officials. The full scope of the arrested people’s crimes remains unclear.
Still, Mr. Bovino, who often engages with his critics and admirers on X, has posted on social media about a handful of the immigrants who he says have serious criminal records.
Data shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, but some argue that any crime committed by someone in the country illegally could have been prevented by stricter immigration enforcement.
Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a Republican, has welcomed the agents with open arms, telling Fox News last month that he hoped they could start “taking some of these dangerous criminal illegal aliens off of our streets.”
Helena Moreno, New Orleans’s Democratic mayor-elect who was born in Mexico, expressed wariness about what might come next.
“The reports of due process violations and potential abuses in other cities are concerning,” Ms. Moreno said in a statement before the operation began. “I want our community to be aware and informed of the protections available under law.”
As it has in its other deployments around the country, the Homeland Security Department gave its New Orleans operation a nickname: Catahoula Crunch. Critics have derided these seemingly whimsical names as discordant and offensive given the seriousness of the operations and the harshness of the department’s tactics.
The Louisiana State Police and the New Orleans field office of the F.B.I. announced on Wednesday that they would be collaborating “to deter assaults on federal officers and attempts to obstruct law enforcement actions” during the immigration enforcement operation.
The operation comes at the end of a remarkably challenging year for New Orleans. It began with a deadly terrorist attack in January, and over the summer the city’s mayor, LaToya Cantrell, was indicted on charges of using public funds to carry out a romantic relationship with her bodyguard, a city police officer.
New Orleans is also grappling with a budget crisis, and residents have criticized the city for becoming too economically dependent on tourism, which mostly provides low-wage jobs.
Many of the jobs in that industry are filled by immigrants.
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5) Police in a Louisiana City Welcome a Federal Crackdown. Immigrants Are in Hiding.
Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans, has been transformed by an infusion of newcomers. Immigrants there have been on edge all year, particularly in recent weeks.
By Shannon Sims and Rick Rojas, Reporting from Kenner, La., Dec. 3, 2025
Even before news of the operation broke last month, many in Kenner were on edge. Emily Kask for The New York Times
Over the years, the tire shops and drive-throughs along Williams Boulevard, one of the busiest roadways in Kenner, La., have been joined by taquerias, immigration law offices and Norma’s Sweets Bakery, which adapts a Latin American holiday bread into king cake for Mardi Gras.
The new businesses serve residents from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Mexico, many of whom came to Louisiana to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The strip is one of the most obvious signs of just how much Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans with about 66,000 residents, has changed.
But with dozens of federal agents arriving in New Orleans this week, following similar immigration crackdowns in Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., the usual bustle on Williams Boulevard has been replaced by an unsettling quiet.
Even before news of the operation broke last month, many in Kenner were on edge. After President Trump took office in January, the local Police Department strengthened its ties with federal law enforcement and pursued an immigration crackdown of its own. In June, the city canceled its annual Hispanic Heritage Festival after a number of sponsors and vendors pulled out.
“We all feel targeted,” said AnaMaria Bech, the publisher of Viva NOLA, a local bilingual culture and lifestyle magazine.
Kenner has made some efforts to welcome its growing immigrant community. In addition to hosting the annual festival, it opened a Hispanic Resource Center, a hub offering English classes, legal advice and health programs. Still, Mr. Trump’s relentless focus on immigration enforcement has resonated with many in the conservative, predominantly white city.
“The community, the city as a whole, they support it,” Keith Conley, Kenner’s police chief, said of the Department of Homeland Security operation that started on Wednesday. “They are totally glad to see the assistance of the federal government, our partners, coming in and doing this mission.”
Chief Conley is particularly grateful for the agreement that his department entered into in March with the Homeland Security, which deputizes his officers to identify undocumented immigrants and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
He said that undocumented immigrants have been involved in murder, sexual assault and human trafficking cases in Kenner. But far more frequent, he said, are nonviolent offenses that can still take a toll, particularly automobile crashes involving undocumented immigrants who are unlicensed or uninsured.
“I was screaming for help,” Chief Conley said.
A recent investigation by Verite News, a nonprofit outlet in Louisiana, found that traffic stops in Kenner had increasingly become a funnel for undocumented immigrants to be taken into federal custody and deported.
The outlet reported that from January to May, ICE issued at least 129 immigration detainers through the Kenner police; 20 had been issued during the same period last year. More than half of those detained this year were initially booked on traffic-related offenses.
The result has been a heightened wariness for many immigrant families, including some who have become deeply rooted in Kenner.
At one Mexican restaurant, the family who owns it has a new routine at closing time. Cesar, 50, pushes aside tables and drags out mattresses to sleep on rather than risk being pulled over on the way home. His daughter, Ximena, 19, closes the blinds. His wife, Sandra, 49, drapes a colorful cloth over the front door. They also keep close watch on a live feed from a camera perched over the back door.
“That way we can see if a truck pulls up that we don’t know, because it could be ICE,” said Cesar, who found his way to Kenner from Mexico after Hurricane Katrina. The family spoke on the condition of using only their first names, because they fear being detained.
“We lived through hurricanes and tornadoes and Covid,” Ximena said, “but nothing compares to the fear we feel now.”
The Hispanic population in Kenner, just west of New Orleans, has grown steadily over the past two decades, now accounting for 30 percent of the people living there. The increase has not been enough to offset population declines caused in part by extreme weather, soaring home and property insurance costs and a shortage of opportunity outside of service industry jobs. But it has helped soften the impacts.
Many came to Kenner because it had affordable housing, with less crime and chronic dysfunction than New Orleans. “Once you hit New Orleans, things get wild,” said Jeremy Allen, 39, a Kenner native who was watching the sun set from a park at the end of Williams Boulevard one night last week. “But here it’s always chill.”
Mr. Trump said during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday that later this month, National Guard troops would also go to New Orleans; Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, requested the deployment in September to help with “public safety concerns regarding high crime rates.”
After Hurricane Katrina, the enormous recovery efforts drew people to the region from Mexico and Central America, both undocumented and on temporary work visas. By some estimates, about 100,000 Hispanic people moved into the New Orleans metropolitan area in the decade after storm.
Officials in the region did not exactly roll out a welcome mat for them. In 2005, after Katrina struck, the mayor of New Orleans at the time, Ray Nagin, openly raised concerns with business leaders about making sure the city was “not overrun by Mexican workers.”
A couple of years later, officials in Jefferson Parish, which includes Kenner, adopted onerous rules that effectively banned the taco trucks that had proliferated after the storm. Critics argued the restrictions were a not-so-veiled attempt to run off the customers patronizing the trucks, too.
Chief Conley stressed that it would be unfair to mistake the pursuit of undocumented immigrants in the city for antipathy toward the broader Latino population.
“Kenner is a diverse and inclusive community,” he said, describing it as a point of pride. Noting that Latino residents were among those who had been pleading for more aggressive immigration enforcement, he added: “They’re the ones that stressed the concerns to me with the open borders, and how they came to this country lawfully.”
In the not-so-distant past, Ideal Mart Express might have been one of the most popular shops on Williams Boulevard. The cramped store offered churros filled with dulce de leche, a counter serving tacos and dinner platters, and a stand where horchata was ladled out of barrels into cups. The business has recently had far fewer customers than normal.
George Gibbs, a cashier, pointed to a window where customers usually lined up to wire money to their families back home. “No one is sending money,” he said.
“I understand why it is happening,” Mr. Gibbs added, “but it is hard to see good people feel so scared.”
Wolfgang, 40, moved to Kenner from Honduras as a 5-year-old. He remembered the city being far different when he was younger. “Seeing another Hispanic was like a lottery moment, it was so rare,” said Wolfgang, who gave only his first name because he was wary of drawing the attention of law enforcement officials.
On a recent evening, he brought his 9-year-old son, Ubi, and his friends to a pier on Lake Pontchartrain, where they reeled in mullets and croakers.
“I like it because I can come here to fish,” Ubi said, “or I can play basketball outside, or soccer in the backyard.”
He glanced at his father.
“Or at least,” he added, “I used to be able to play soccer in the backyard.”
A few days earlier, his father explained, Ubi kicked a soccer ball through a rotten fence board, leading to a neighbor calling their landlord and threatening to call immigration officials.
“It didn’t used to be like that here,” Wolfgang said. “Now is the first time we’ve ever had any problems being Hispanic in Kenner.”
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6) On Trump’s Insults, Somalia’s Prime Minister Says ‘It’s Better Not to Respond’
President Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” during a White House meeting on Tuesday.
By Amelia Nierenberg and Hussein Mohamed, Dec. 3, 2025
Hussein Mohamed reported from Mogadishu, Somalia.
Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, last year. Some Somalis were frustrated by what they saw as a pattern of disrespect toward Africa from President Trump. Brian Otieno for The New York Times
Somalia’s leader said Wednesday that it was “better not to respond” a day after President Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage” during a xenophobic tirade.
“We are not the only country that Trump insults,” Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre told an audience at an innovation summit in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in response to a question about Mr. Trump’s comments, according to video published by Shabelle TV, a local media network. “Sometimes it’s better not to respond,” he said.
Somalia, a nation of 19 million people in the Horn of Africa, has long regarded the United States as a key ally in the fight against the Al Shabab terrorist group. Though the Trump administration has slashed foreign aid budgets in recent months, the United States gave around $128 million to Somalia in the 2025 fiscal year.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the country “stinks” and that he did not want Somali immigrants in the United States. “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting at the White House.
In Somalia on Wednesday, some people were angry that their government had not criticized Mr. Trump’s comments.
“Somali leaders and politicians have to defend the nation and the national interests,” said Abdullahi Omar, 35, a trader in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. “Why have you kept your mouth shut about Trump’s hate speech toward our people?”
Others were frustrated by what they saw as a pattern of disrespect toward Africa from Mr. Trump, who has a history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries.
“We are not garbage,” said Ali Yahye, 24, a graphic designer in Mogadishu. “Trump’s remarks were baseless and the Somali community in the U.S. has made a lot of contributions to the country.”
Anwar Abdifatah Bashir, the executive director for the East African Institute for Peace and Governance, described Mr. Trump’s comments as “naked insults,” but said the Somali government was unlikely to criticize the Trump administration because it still provides Somalia with some financial support.
The Trump administration dismantled the United States Agency for International Development earlier this year, cutting off swaths of foreign assistance to the world’s poorest countries, including Somalia. Many Somalis are still struggling with the dire humanitarian crisis that followed years of severe drought, which killed at least 43,000 people there in 2022 alone, and heavy rains and floods in 2023.
“If they keep silent, they are indirectly subscribing to his bombastic and hyperbolic rhetoric,” said Mr. Bashir.
Mr. Trump has used such rhetoric throughout his rise in politics, including in his first term as president, when he demanded to know why the United States would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as “shithole countries,” rather than, say, Norway.
But he has long been especially focused on Somalis in the United States, and in particular, on Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago.
Mr. Trump’s remarks came as an immigration enforcement operation began targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Somalis began migrating to Minnesota in large numbers as the East African nation descended into civil war in the mid-1990s. There are about 79,400 Somalis in the state, of whom just over half were foreign-born, according to recent data from Minnesota Compass, a research group in the state.
Immigrant activists and local officials say that the vast majority of Minnesotans with Somali roots are American citizens or legal permanent residents. Nationally, about 73 percent of Somali immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens, according to the Census Bureau.
Mr. Trump has seized on immigration as a potent political weapon, demonizing immigrants and equating them with crime and disease. In a social media post on Thursday night, Mr. Trump claimed that Somalis were “taking over” Minnesota and that Somali gangs were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey.’”
Abdirashid Hashi, an analyst who once led the Heritage Institute of Policy Studies, a nonpartisan think tank based in Mogadishu, condemned such framing as grossly disproportionate.
“There are about 40 million Somalis worldwide,” he said on X, noting the diaspora across Africa. He said while a “microscopic” number of Somalis in the diaspora may have committed crimes, “reducing an entire people to the actions of a handful is simply bigoted and dishonest.”
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from London.
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7) Israel Says a Gaza Border Will Reopen, but Only for Palestinians to Leave
Israel had agreed to open the Rafah crossing as part of the October cease-fire deal with Hamas but kept it closed. Egypt denied that the border would reopen soon.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Dec. 3, 2025
The Rafah crossing at the border between southern Gaza and Egypt in 2023. Israel has said it will reopen “in the coming days,” but Egypt denies this. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Israel said on Wednesday that it would begin allowing some Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip for Egypt “in the coming days” through the Rafah border crossing.
Such an opening would be a lifeline for Gazans hoping to flee the devastated enclave, particularly the sick and wounded.
Israel’s military liaison on humanitarian affairs, widely known by its acronym, COGAT, said that the crossing would open only one way, allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza but not to return, and that it would be overseen in part by the European Union, working with Egypt and Israel.
But the Egyptian government on Wednesday denied that it was coordinating with Israel to reopen the Rafah crossing.
Egypt’s state information service said that, according to the cease-fire agreed upon between Israel and Hamas in October, the border had to be open in both directions. In addition to allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza for Egypt, that would most likely mean that the tens of thousands of Gazans displaced to Egypt could also begin returning home.
Israel and Hamas agreed on those broad terms for reopening the border in mid-October, when they signed a cease-fire that ended the two-year war in Gaza. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel later said the Rafah crossing would remain closed until further notice.
Shosh Bedrosian, an Israeli government spokeswoman, told reporters on Wednesday that opening Rafah was conditional on Hamas returning the last two bodies of captives believed to still be in Gaza. On Wednesday, Hamas handed over another body to Israel for identification.
Much about how the Rafah crossing will operate remains unclear, such as exactly when it will reopen and how many Palestinians will be allowed to leave.
The Rafah crossing was the main route out of Gaza for Palestinians who were able to escape during the first several months of the war. It was a gateway for many seeking medical treatment abroad, although Israel has also permitted some to leave through its territory.
Israeli forces invaded Rafah in May 2024 and seized the crossing. Israel and Egypt could not agree on how to reopen the border, which trapped some sick and wounded Palestinians without access to proper medical treatment.
At least 16,500 sick and injured Palestinians still need treatment unavailable in the devastated enclave, the World Health Organization said this week.
The Rafah crossing briefly reopened in February during a cease-fire that collapsed in mid-March. At the time, the E.U. border monitors, as well as officers from the internationally backed Palestinian Authority, helped oversee operations at the crossing.
Throughout the war, most Gazans have been unable to flee the Israeli military campaign for neighboring countries. Those who managed to leave often had to secure approval from Israeli and Egyptian security services.
More than 250 Israelis and foreign nationals were taken hostage during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza. Two brief cease-fires freed more than 130 survivors, while Israeli forces rescued several others and recovered the bodies of still more.
In October, Hamas freed the final surviving 20 hostages and committed to handing over the remains of those who had been killed. Yet that process has taken time: Hamas says some were lost under rubble, while Israeli officials have accused Hamas of dragging its feet.
Two bodies — those of an Israeli and a Thai — are believed to still be somewhere in Gaza. Hamas officials, accompanied by the International Committee for the Red Cross, have been excavating parts of Gaza to find them.
If a body is found, the Israeli authorities will conduct forensic testing to establish whether it belongs to one of the final two people believed to have been taken captive. On Tuesday, Hamas handed over remains that Israeli officials later said did not belong to a hostage.
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8) Will All Newborns Still Receive Hepatitis B Shots? A Committee’s Vote Will Tell.
The federal vaccine panel appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to decide on Thursday that the shots should be delayed for infants whose mothers test negative for the virus.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, Reporting from Atlanta, Dec. 4, 2025
Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices may decide to end the recommendation that babies get immunized against hepatitis B. Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
A federal vaccine committee is expected to vote on a significant change to the nation’s vaccine policy on Thursday, deciding whether to end a decades-long recommendation to immunize all babies at birth against hepatitis B, a highly contagious virus that can damage the liver.
The committee, whose members were appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is most likely to end the practice, and to delay vaccination for most babies until they are older, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, the panel’s newly appointed chair, said in an interview. But, he added, the panel was likely to continue to recommend the immunization of newborn children of women known to be infected with the virus, and perhaps also the infants of women who were not screened for infection.
The committee, called the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, will meet again on Friday to debate broader changes to the timing of vaccines given to children, as well as the composition of the shots. They will also address whether aluminum salts, which are added to vaccines to increase the immune response, should be removed from vaccines, Dr. Milhoan said.
Although the committee members will not vote on Friday on the issues they discuss, some public health experts see the debate as a likely prelude to sweeping changes in the childhood vaccine schedule. Aluminum salts are present in dozens of vaccines, for example, and their removal would require the development of entirely new shots.
The members of the panel were handpicked by Mr. Kennedy, who has long campaigned against many childhood vaccines, and some panelists share his skepticism of vaccines in general. Nearly all of the new members have spoken out against Covid vaccines.
Officials at the Health Department gave the committee the task of evaluating whether hepatitis B shots for infants whose mothers tested negative for hepatitis could be delayed, Dr. Milhoan said, adding, “That’s what we’ve been asked to do.”
Decisions by the group are not legally binding, but they have significant implications as to whether private insurance and government assistance programs are required to cover the vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy has long questioned the hepatitis B vaccine’s safety and claimed, incorrectly, that it was not tested properly. He has also said, without evidence, that the vaccine causes autism and he has upbraided the C.D.C. for recommending universal vaccination at birth.
But some public health experts said that delaying the first dose could endanger children who may share a home or other space with someone who unknowingly has hepatitis B. One woman who became infected with the virus in early infancy is expected to speak at the meeting on Thursday.
As many as 70 percent of the roughly two million Americans with hepatitis B are unaware of their diagnosis, said Chari Cohen, president of the Hepatitis B Foundation.
“You don’t know who is going to be exposing them to the infection, so you’re not protecting those babies,” she said.
Many public health experts are concerned about Thursday’s vote because children are especially vulnerable to hepatitis B. More than 90 percent of infants infected with the virus develop chronic hepatitis B — which can lead to cirrhosis, liver failure and liver cancer — compared with less than 5 percent of people who are infected as adults. The vaccine committee was set to vote on the hepatitis B birth dose at its previous meeting in September, but the members deferred the vote after some said they needed more time to review the data.
During that meeting, Martin Kulldorff, then the panel’s chair, acknowledged that the members were “rookies” when it came to performing their duties. Given the importance of their decisions, the members were sharply criticized by outside experts for not using the established “evidence-to-recommendations” format, which typically entails detailed presentations on effectiveness, feasibility, cost-benefit ratio and equity.
The committee’s discussions at times devolved into heated arguments during the meeting; at one point, a live microphone caught one member calling another “an idiot.”
This time around, committee members have spent dozens of hours poring over data and learning the meeting’s format, Dr. Milhoan said.
Still, comments by Dr. Milhoan and other panelists, as well as by President Trump and Mr. Kennedy, suggest that the vote may be a foregone conclusion. Uncertainty about the outcome centers mainly on what age the panel will recommend that children receive the first dose. The ages proposed range from 2 months to 12 years.
Routine immunization at birth has cut the number of babies infected at birth to fewer than 20 per year, from about 20,000 per year before the practice was implemented. Delaying the first dose to 2 months for babies of women with unknown hepatitis B status could result in at least 1,400 additional infections per year; delaying the dose to 12 years of age would lead to at least 2,700 additional cases, according to a modeling study released on Monday. The study, led by Eric Hall at Oregon Health and Science University, was posted online and has not been vetted for publication in a scientific journal.
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said in a statement that a decision to end the universal birth dose would be “heartless.” She urged Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chair of the Senate health committee, to compel Mr. Kennedy to appear before that group.
Dr. Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, has been vocal about his support for the hepatitis B vaccine, but cast the vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy after receiving reassurances that as secretary he would not take vaccines away from anyone who wanted them. “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” Mr. Kennedy said then.
The C.D.C. makes recommendations, but it is the states that decide to impose mandates, requiring certain vaccines for entry into day care programs or school.
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9) Former F.D.A. Commissioners Sound Alarm on Plan to Change Vaccine Policy
Twelve former commissioners, in a New England Journal of Medicine article, said they were “deeply concerned” by a leaked memo from the agency’s vaccine regulator.
By Rylee Kirk, Published Dec. 3, 2025, Updated Dec. 4, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, has repeatedly criticized Covid-19 vaccines as deadly despite the scientific consensus that they are safe. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
In an article published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, 12 former Food and Drug Administration commissioners sharply criticized anticipated changes to vaccine policy that were detailed in a leaked memo from an agency official.
“We are deeply concerned by sweeping new F.D.A. assertions about vaccine safety and proposals that would undermine a regulatory model designed to ensure that vaccines are safe, effective and available when the public needs them most,” the former commissioners wrote.
The former commissioners, including four from the first Trump administration, were responding to a memo written by Dr. Vinay Prasad, the director of the F.D.A.’s vaccine division. He sent it to agency staff members on Friday, outlining findings from a review of reports concerning 10 childhood deaths and attributing them to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, after receiving a Covid-19 shot.
The memo was obtained by The New York Times and not publicly released. It did not provide details such as the ages of the children, whether they had any health problems or how the agency had determined the vaccine-death link. Nor did it disclose the makers of the vaccines involved.
In the memo, Dr. Prasad proposed radically transforming how vaccines are regulated and approved, though it was unclear whether the White House had been advised of the memo’s contents. The proposals could be challenged by lawmakers and drug companies.
Among the changes Dr. Prasad outlined for oversight and approval were requirements that vaccine studies include all subgroups, such as pregnant women. He said the annual practice of updating flu vaccines to match a circulating strain would be re-examined. Companies also would need to do larger studies before promoting vaccines as safe to administer together, such as the flu and Covid-19 vaccines, according to the memo.
Dr. Prasad did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., said in an emailed statement that “Americans deserve evidence-based science” and that Dr. Prasad’s memo “lays out a philosophical framework that points us toward that higher standard.”
“The fact these criticisms are coming from former F.D.A. officials who opposed raising the bar for vaccine science confirms we are on the right track,” the spokeswoman, Emily G. Hilliard, said.
The Health and Human Services Department is overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly criticized the Covid shots as deadly despite the scientific consensus that they are safe. Mr. Kennedy has said, wrongly, that there is no scientific evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism.
The former commissioners, who served in each presidency dating to George H.W. Bush’s administration, wrote that the proposals in Dr. Prasad’s memo would “undermine the public interest” and “upend core policies governing vaccine development and updates.”
“The memo offered no explanation of the process and analyses that were used to reach the new retrospective judgment, nor did it indicate why that assessment should justify wholesale rewriting of vaccine regulation,” the commissioners wrote.
The 10 deaths that Dr. Prasad attributed to Covid shots had previously been investigated by F.D.A. staff members who reached different conclusions, the commissioners wrote. Additionally, “substantial evidence” shows that Covid vaccines reduce the risk of severe disease and hospitalization in children, the commissioners wrote.
The people the F.D.A. aims to protect, such as those at high risk from serious infections, would be harmed by not updating vaccines against current strains of viruses, such as the flu virus, they wrote: “Because these viruses change frequently, repeating large-scale efficacy trials for every new seasonal strain is not feasible within the time needed to update the vaccines.”
If the current methods are changed, there will be a higher and more subjective bar for vaccine approval, the commissioners wrote. It would also be more costly for companies to win approval for their vaccines.
Additionally, the commissioners criticized the administration’s unchecked changes.
“Changes of this magnitude should be developed by guidance or regulation, with broad consultation within the agency, meaningful opportunity for public comment and often public advisory-committee input,” the former commissioners wrote.
In the memo, Dr. Prasad encouraged F.D.A. employees who did not agree with him to resign.
“Americans’ safety depends on a culture in which evidence is reviewed openly and staff can surface concerns, challenge leadership and engage with external scientists without fear of reprisal,” the commissioners countered.
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10) U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes On New Significance
The details could raise questions about who was responsible for a follow-up strike on Sept. 2 — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary.
By Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, Published Dec. 3, 2025, Updated Dec. 4, 2025
The reporters have been covering the U.S. military’s operations in the Caribbean.
On orders from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The military’s contingency plans have taken on new significance as Admiral Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are set to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an uproar over the killing of the survivors.
The men plan to present a vigorous defense, officials said, of what they will assert was a lawful follow-up strike on the survivors. That moment is just a small part of Mr. Trump’s legally disputed campaign of killing people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they were combatants in a war, but it is now the focus of intense congressional scrutiny.
The details of the contingency planning could raise more questions about who was responsible for the second strike — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary who approved the overall operation. Many critics, including some lawmakers, have said the follow-up attack could be a war crime.
Defenders of both Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Bradley said that once lawmakers learn more about the planning scenarios and the circumstances of the second strike, they will be exonerated.
President Trump on Wednesday offered his support for both men. The Pentagon did not respond to request for comment on the military’s planning.
On orders from Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people, as part of a legally disputed policy of summarily executing people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were combatants on a battlefield.
The alleged radio communications by the initial survivors — including any recordings of intercepts the U.S. may have — may not be the only messages that lawmakers seek to scrutinize as contemporaneous evidence of what happened.
Several U.S. officials told The New York Times that military officials had used a written texting system known as “Strike Bridge” to communicate, both during planning scenarios ahead of the attack and during the operation itself. The written messages, they said, included communications between Admiral Bradley and the SEAL Team 6 operators directing the drone.
Strike Bridge automatically saves those messages, officials said. Several congressional officials said lawmakers had asked to review logs related to the operation, along with written documentation like Mr. Hegseth’s “execute order” and the rules of engagement. It is not clear whether the Pentagon will turn them over.
U.S. officials said the military was also weighing whether it could show the full, unedited video of the Sept. 2 engagement with the boat to the lawmakers. Congressional officials said lawmakers needed to see the entire video recording to conduct proper oversight.
Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he would release whatever video footage the administration had of the Sept. 2 strike.
Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.
The Pentagon’s law of war manual says that “to be considered ‘shipwrecked,’ persons must be in need of assistance and care, and they must refrain from any hostile act.” A U.S. naval commander handbook says combatants “qualify as shipwrecked persons only if they have ceased all active combat activity.”
The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”
A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.
One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.
A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.
The second strike in the Sept. 2 attack appears to have attracted bipartisan oversight interest in part because Republicans can criticize it without directly challenging Mr. Trump. That is because even if one accepts Mr. Trump’s claim that it is an armed conflict, killing shipwrecked enemies is a war crime.
Mr. Hegseth issued the broad orders that authorized the military to sink the boats, destroy the drugs and kill the people aboard. Those orders, developed ahead of the first strike, have remained largely unchanged throughout the campaign, officials said. Admiral Bradley and his subordinates developed the specific plans and scenarios for the operation based on the broad order issued by Mr. Hegseth.
Mr. Hegseth reviewed those plans and gave approval for the specific strike on Sept. 2 based on the plans, but he turned the running of the operation over to Admiral Bradley.
U.S. officials said Mr. Hegseth fully supported Admiral Bradley’s actions, believing they followed the plans Admiral Bradley had presented to him and other senior Pentagon officials.
Mr. Hegseth was monitoring a live video feed of the strikes, officials said. Mr. Hegseth said on Tuesday that he did not “stick around” to see if there were any survivors or the second strike that killed them.
Dave Philipps contributed reporting.
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11) New York Times Sues Pentagon Over First Amendment Rights
The lawsuit said the Defense Department’s new set of rules for journalists “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
By Erik Wemple, Reporting from Washington,
Dec. 4, 2025
A new set of press restrictions at the Pentagon took effect in October. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The New York Times accused the Pentagon in a lawsuit on Thursday of infringing on the constitutional rights of journalists by imposing a set of new restrictions on reporting about the military.
In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, The Times argued that the Defense Department’s new policy violated the First Amendment and “seeks to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”
The rules, which went into effect in October, are a stark departure from the previous ones, in both length and scope. They require reporters to sign a 21-page form that sets restrictions on journalistic activities, including requests for story tips and inquiries to Pentagon sources. Reporters who don’t comply could lose their press passes, and the Pentagon has accorded itself “unbridled discretion” to enforce the policy as it sees fit, according to the lawsuit.
The suit said that “reporting any information not approved by department officials” could lead to punishment, “regardless of whether such news gathering occurs on or off Pentagon grounds, and regardless of whether the information at issue is classified or unclassified.”
The complaint sought a court order halting enforcement of the rules and a declaration that the provisions “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” were unlawful. The Times has retained Theodore J. Boutrous, a First Amendment lawyer who has argued major media access cases in federal court. Julian E. Barnes, a Pentagon reporter for The Times, is listed as a plaintiff alongside the company.
Sean Parnell, the chief spokesman for the Pentagon, said in a statement: “We are aware of The New York Times lawsuit and look forward to addressing these arguments in court.”
The new rules are the latest step in a monthslong effort by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to curtail the access and privileges of the Pentagon press corps.
Mr. Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January after a bruising confirmation process that surfaced allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he said were untrue. Early in his tenure, Mr. Hegseth proposed evicting from the Pentagon a veteran reporter at NBC News who had contributed to some of the coverage.
The department later stripped several national news outlets of their workspaces in the Pentagon, offering them mostly to conservative outlets. Mr. Hegseth has also added limits on where reporters can roam in the complex.
A draft of the new restrictions first emerged in September, and was revised after pushback from lawyers representing news organizations. The final rules were released on Oct. 6, and more than a week later, dozens of credentialed journalists — including six from The Times — surrendered their badges instead of signing the document. The departing outlets have continued reporting on the military despite the access limits.
Many major news organizations released statements in October condemning the Pentagon policy as an incursion on the First Amendment. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections,” said a statement from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media and NBC News.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, a senior Times lawyer said that there had been discussions with other news organizations about joining the suit but that the newspaper had decided to proceed alone.
The suit took issue with multiple provisions of the new policy, including one that empowered the Pentagon to deem a journalist “a security or safety risk.” Such a determination could hinge on whether the journalist engaged in unauthorized disclosure of classified information or certain unclassified information, among other considerations.
The policy’s wording on “solicitation” has been a particular worry of media lawyers. It asserts that the First Amendment does not protect reporters when they “solicit government employees to violate the law by providing confidential government information” and could apply to “calls for tips” that encourage Defense Department employees to share “nonpublic” agency information.
Providing channels for sources to send information, the suit said, was a “routine” practice for journalists.
Legal clashes between journalists and the government over access to federal buildings have arisen repeatedly across President Trump’s two terms.
During his first administration, the White House pulled the press passes of two White House correspondents. The journalists regained those passes after litigation. This year, The Associated Press sued the government after being excluded from White House press pool events in cramped spaces such as the Oval Office; litigation challenging that move is ongoing.
In each of those cases, the government targeted one journalist or outlet for punishment. The Pentagon restrictions, on the other hand, seek to bind an entire press corps. And those restrictions, the suit argued, would suppress the work of news organizations “with perceived viewpoints the department disfavors.”
After the departure of the legacy press corps, the Pentagon announced that a new group of outlets had agreed to the restrictions and would work from the press space in the building. The new arrivals feature an array of pro-Trump outlets that have echoed administration talking points and show little inclination to investigate its actions.
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12) ‘This Is Illegal,’ He Said, Spreading His Arms. ‘This Is Illegal.’
By M. Gessen, Dec. 4, 2025
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Israel and the West Bank
“The United States, in other words, continues to support Israel not only financially and militarily but also, in effect, legally, by helping ensure its continued impunity. … B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, published reports that used the word ‘genocide’ in their titles. The B’Tselem report was called ‘Our Genocide.’ ‘Genocide is not crime committed by a small group,’ Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, told me. ‘The whole society is recruited to it. Ours is a genocidal society.’ She recounted the staff meeting in which, during a briefing from researchers working on the ground in Gaza, the scale of the catastrophe became clear to everyone present. It was also clear to them that the mass killings of civilians were not simply collateral and that starvation was not a side effect of the war. These acts were intentional. The intent was genocidal. They decided that the most important thing they could do was to tell the story of what they now felt was their genocide.”
Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
We are living in an upside-down world. Here is an example. When the U.N. Security Council endorsed President Trump’s so-called peace plan for Gaza, including what looks like indefinite U.S.-backed Israeli control in the territory, it contradicted decades of the U.N.’s own resolutions and the rulings of the International Court of Justice. The Palestinian human rights activist Shawan Jabarin wrote to the body, pleading for it to respect international law.
“To seek, as a matter of supposed political compromise, to sideline international law would be to render the U.N. complicit in Israel’s violations, to fundamentally break the promise of the U.N. Charter and to fuel only ever intensifying human carnage,” he wrote.
Jabarin got his start in activism 44 years ago as a member of a student group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist, Soviet-backed militant group. In the 1980s and ’90s, he spent about eight years in Israeli prisons. At the same time, he made the long transition to leading Al-Haq, the oldest and probably most authoritative human rights organization in the occupied territories and one of the oldest in the Arab world.
But in 2021, Israel designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian civil society organizations as terrorist groups. In September the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on Al-Haq and two other Palestinian groups, explicitly for their work with the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant in connection with accusations of war crimes in Gaza.
On the day the U.N. Security Council put its seal of approval on Trump’s plan, Israel was launching airstrikes on Gaza. The next day, Gaza health officials said 76 Palestinians had been killed. Altogether, since the U.S.-brokered deal went into effect, Gaza health officials say, more than 350 Palestinians have died, most of them at the hands of Israeli forces. Israeli authorities continue to restrict the movement of humanitarian aid, so that only a small fraction has been getting in. And yet world leaders and Western media refer to what is happening in Gaza as a cease-fire, and the activists — who are peacefully opposing the carnage — are facing sanctions. This is the upside-down state of our world.
For the second installment in my series on the state of international justice, I traveled to Israel and the occupied West Bank to talk to the activists who are documenting human rights violations committed in Gaza and the West Bank. (I could not visit the few researchers who continue to work in Gaza, which has been effectively closed to international journalists for more than two years.) I wanted to see how, having been designated as terrorists, placed under sanctions, harassed and threatened with prosecution, they are continuing their work. What I found is that they have expanded their idea of what that work is.
I visited Jabarin in his office in Ramallah in the West Bank. “One American organization was told by their lawyer that if they give us a cup of tea, that’s like giving a cup of tea to bin Laden,” Jabarin told me. We were having coffee and dates. Al-Haq’s headquarters, in a small office building set back from a busy commercial street, looks and sounds like an NGO office anywhere in the world: generic furniture, phones ringing dissonantly, a lot of sunlight and not quite enough air. But what’s outside the building is not like any other place I’ve been.
Over the past couple of years, many more people have become aware of the violent practices of the Israeli occupation — the continuing displacement of Palestinian villagers, the beatings and robberies committed by settlers, some of which take place under the direct protection of the military, and the detentions, torture and killings carried out by Israeli troops. The violence was frequent before Oct. 7, 2023, and has become a daily occurrence since.
But it’s the administrative, quotidian, usually nonviolent enforcement of the occupation that strikes me whenever I visit Ramallah. One day, as I was leaving my hotel for an interview, Israeli soldiers blocked off the street just outside. This had nothing to do with me, but what should have been a 10-minute drive took me two hours. “And this,” I thought in between attempting mostly useless side-street maneuvers, “is how the occupation works.”
Under the 1995 Oslo Accords, Ramallah is designated as Area A, which is fully governed by the Palestinian Authority. (Area B is, hypothetically, under Palestinian civil control but policed jointly with Israel, and Area C is governed entirely by Israel.) Nonetheless, Israeli troops can — and do — bring the city to a standstill anytime they want. The currency is Israeli. Residents use Israeli phone numbers, for which they pay Israeli companies, and consume food and other products made in Israel.
The day I was trying to drive in gridlock happened to be Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish religious calendar, when Hebrew-language television and radio in Israel go off the air. The radio in my rental car produced nothing but static, even though in this majority-Muslim, minority-Christian city it was — or should have been — an ordinary Thursday. Most residents of Ramallah cannot enter Israel; many of them have never been there, and yet they are at all times aware of the customs of the occupying power and the whims of its armed services.
In the West Bank outside Ramallah, Israel has long exercised near-total control of the two most important resources: water and roads. The dwindling number of Palestinian farmers who still have access to their land often can’t get enough water to farm. As for roads, the new ones, built by Israel for the convenience of settlers, are almost completely off limits to Palestinians. Many of the roads on which Palestinians were once able to travel have been closed off by the Israeli authorities over the past two years. Palestinian villages have metal gates at the entrance, erected and operated by Israeli troops, and many of these gates stay shuttered for days, weeks or months.
Before Oct. 7, 2023, getting around the West Bank was hard and unpredictable: You never knew where a checkpoint might pop up or a gate might be shut. Now it’s quite predictable: You really can’t get from most places to most other places. Jabarin’s mother lives in a village outside Hebron. It used to take him an hour and a half to get there. Now it can take eight hours.
“This is illegal,” Jabarin said, spreading his arms as though to encompass all of his life and his people’s lives. “This is illegal. The occupation is illegal.” The International Court of Justice agrees, as has the United Nations, according to numerous resolutions passed starting in 1967. And yet now the Security Council has effectively given Israel’s occupation of Gaza the force of international law.
U.S. sanctions have caused Al-Haq to lose access to its bank accounts. All 45 Al-Haq employees now work without pay. “That’s 45 families,” Jabarin said.
Still, Al-Haq continues its work: documenting the genocide in Gaza and the constant violence in the West Bank, working with the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice and filing complaints in the courts of countries whose nationals are suspected of committing war crimes while serving in the Israeli Army. At this point Al-Haq has little left to lose. Some other Palestinian organizations, though, have become more cautious.
Defense for Children International-Palestine is another prominent human rights group. Its general director, Khaled Quzmar, also leads Defense for Children International, a Geneva-based coalition of dozens of groups worldwide. In 2023 the Palestinian organization sued the Biden administration in federal court, arguing that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide obliges the United States to stop supporting Israel. The judge in that case concluded that he did not have the authority to rule on foreign policy matters.
This year, Quzmar told me, he decided against joining another lawsuit, in part because he did not want to invite U.S. sanctions. After being designated a terrorist organization by Israel in 2021, Defense for Children International-Palestine lost much of its European and American funding, but at least it still has access to its bank accounts and can continue its core work: documenting the effects of the genocide and the occupation on children and providing services to children and families. According to the organization, more than 350 Palestinian children are in Israeli custody; more than 50 have been killed in the West Bank this year.
But the threat of U.S. sanctions, which has loomed particularly large in the past few months, has made the group step away from some of the work Israel least wants it to do. The United States, in other words, continues to support Israel not only financially and militarily but also, in effect, legally, by helping ensure its continued impunity.
In Israel a bill pending in the Knesset — the Parliament — would make it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to cooperate with the International Criminal Court, including supplying the court with information about allegations of war crimes. Even though this legislation is not yet law, almost every human rights defender I interviewed mentioned it.
One activist told me that he was limiting his work to putting all available information on the genocide and allegations of war crimes online. If someone then wants to take that information to The Hague — he trailed off so I could fill in the blank. A lawyer told me, with a similar figurative wink, that he was pursuing cases only in the domestic judicial system. If, by going all the way to the highest court, he happened to fulfill the international courts’ requirement that all domestic remedies be exhausted first, well ….
In most places I’ve reported from, the work that prepares the ground for pursuing international justice is the work of documenting — collecting testimony, organizing data, analyzing visual information. Israeli human rights defenders are certainly doing this kind of work, despite their government’s attempts at intimidating them, but their primary focus has been on something else: on naming the crime. In July two leading organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, published reports that used the word “genocide” in their titles. The B’Tselem report was called “Our Genocide.”
“Genocide is not crime committed by a small group,” Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, told me. “The whole society is recruited to it. Ours is a genocidal society.” She recounted the staff meeting in which, during a briefing from researchers working on the ground in Gaza, the scale of the catastrophe became clear to everyone present. It was also clear to them that the mass killings of civilians were not simply collateral and that starvation was not a side effect of the war. These acts were intentional. The intent was genocidal. They decided that the most important thing they could do was to tell the story of what they now felt was their genocide.
The 88-page report contains testimonies and statistics — more than 58,000 killed, almost a third of them children — but its focus is on the narrative. The report examines ideology and language as well as structures of the occupation, the displacement, violence and imprisonment that made the genocide possible. It doesn’t argue that the genocide was preordained but aims to show that by Oct. 7, 2023, the conditions that made it possible were in place and the Hamas attack became the “triggering event.”
This story about the genocide is also intended to serve as a warning. The B’Tselem report suggests that the practices documented in Gaza may spread to areas under direct Israeli control — not only the West Bank but also Israel, where about one in five residents is Palestinian.
Years before preparing the report, Novak spent two months in Rwanda because she “wanted to understand the moment before,” she said. “It’s very similar. The fact that there are weapons in the streets and they are in the hands of men and all of this is connected to one person,” in this case the former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom the report identifies as a force behind spreading genocidal speech. Since Oct. 7, his office has been distributing guns to Israeli settlers. More recently, it armed self-appointed militias that harass antigovernment demonstrators in Tel Aviv.
We were talking in a quirky little house in Jaffa, which Novak shares with her partner, Yael Harari, and their 2-year-old son. A few weeks after the B’Tselem report was released, Harari graduated from medical school. What should have been a triumphant occasion felt unbearable. Harari couldn’t face the ceremony — the giant Israeli flags, the self-congratulatory speeches, all while people were starving and being killed in Gaza. In the end, she, too, decided to act by naming the genocide. She attended the ceremony. When her name was called, before walking across the stage, she opened her graduation gown to expose a white T-shirt with the words of an amended Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm,” with “harm” struck out and replaced by “genocide.” In a video of the graduation, you can hear the crowd go silent as she starts walking.
Something similar happened with the “Our Genocide” report. When B’Tselem released it, Novak and her staff braced for the reaction. They had been vilified before. Novak had been doxxed, threatened and at least twice forced to temporarily leave the country. But this time, there was no such reaction. Mainstream Israeli news outlets largely ignored the report in much the same way as they have been ignoring almost everything happening in Gaza. Since October 2023, their coverage has focused almost exclusively on the Hamas attack, the Israeli hostages, Israeli soldiers who have died in uniform and the outside world, which they say has been unfairly criticizing Israel.
Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper with a small audience, covered the report, but “when something happens only in Haaretz, it’s as if it hasn’t happened at all,” Novak said.
The work related to international justice, war crimes and, of course, genocide, refers to the Nuremberg trials, which began almost exactly 80 years ago. Defendants in those trials — German generals, judges, industrialists and others — often claimed not to have known about the nature of the crimes or the extent of the crimes committed by their compatriots. The B’Tselem report explicitly aims to prevent this justification. The title alone does the job.
Over the years of interviewing Israeli dissidents, I’ve noticed that the origin stories of their activism usually date to one or another of Israel’s wars or crises. It is as though these explosions of violence open the opportunity for seeing — or foreclose, for some, the opportunity to not see. Ruchama Marton, the founder of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, told me her story when I visited her in Tel Aviv. She is 88, five feet tall and has just published a memoir whose title can be translated as “A Tough Woman” or “A Difficult Woman.”
With her cat lying on the dark wood dining table between us, Marton told me that in 1987, when the first intifada began, she knew that Israeli television was lying to her. She didn’t know what specifically it was lying about, but she is, she told me, “very sensitive to lies.” She gathered 11 colleagues, as many as would fit in a van, and they went on a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin had acknowledged that the Israeli forces’ strategy for suppressing the uprising was to beat the protesters. Even so, what she saw at Al-Shifa Hospital shocked her. “Every bed — these were young people with broken limbs, many of them unconscious because of being hit with clubs to the head. They were intubated.”
After leaving Gaza, the doctors pulled over at a gas station, discussed what they had seen and decided to form an organization. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel provides medical services in the occupied territories, and in Israel it has published many meticulously documented reports on such topics as access to health care, torture in Israeli prisons and, now, genocide.
In July the group issued a 65-page report to coincide with B’Tselem’s. It’s called “Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide.” Marton told me she started using the term two years ago. Having done this work for more than 35 years, she had witnessed the long, systematic creation of “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as the Genocide Convention puts it.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai was in the United States, in the second month of an academic year he was spending at Princeton working on a book about the year 536. Like many Israelis abroad, he struggled to locate his role and his relationship to what was happening in Israel and Gaza. He was watching and reading all he could, in Hebrew and English. “If this is being done in my name, then I need to know what it is,” he recalled thinking. The more media he consumed, the more he noticed a gap between information readily available to Israelis and to people outside Israel.
In December 2023, when South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Mordechai read the documents. The case, he realized, was an attempt to organize all available verifiable information into a coherent narrative. He could do this, too, he thought. And he could add more recent information.
Mordechai started assembling publicly available facts about what was happening in Gaza into a report, which he saved as a PDF file and posted on X and on Academia.edu. He kept publishing revised and updated versions. He studied the relevant law and classified the actions of Israeli forces as crimes against humanity. After a few months, he started using the term “genocide.” “I read the Genocide Convention, and what I could see fit the definition,” he told me. “I am not a legal expert, but I know how to read, and this is what I do in my day job.”
Few seemed to notice Mordechai’s report until one day, in March 2024, his 28-post thread on X went viral. Overnight, the audience for that version of the report went from a couple of hundred to five million.
Mordechai returned to Jerusalem in August 2024. His project now involves over 100 volunteers — Jews and Palestinians, many of them academics. They maintain an online archive that includes media and expert reports, published testimonies and witnesses’ accounts posted on social media. He continues to update the main report, which is now more than 200 pages long and cites about 4,000 sources. Plans include an encyclopedia, a collection of statements made by Israeli officials that appear to show intent to commit crimes against humanity or genocide, and content that “an interested person can take as a PowerPoint to their family.”
Each of these activists — Jabarin and Novak, who are professional human rights defenders; Marton, whose primary work was in psychiatry but who accumulated decades of human rights experience; and Mordechai, with his volunteer researchers — is working to preserve the record and to name the crime that Israel is committing.
One way to think about this work is as a bare minimum. Israeli activists are reluctant to talk about international justice not only because their government may criminalize such talk but also because the possibility of such justice for Gaza seems so remote.
Another way to think about it is as work for the future. The International Criminal Court may yet succeed in prosecuting cases related to Gaza. The International Court of Justice, where the South African case against Israel is pending, will perhaps eventually consider it. Novak, who spent years learning from South African anti-apartheid activists, told me that she hopes a reckoning with “our genocide” will become the foundation for a society in which Palestinians and Jews live together as equals. Mordechai, too, envisions truth and reconciliation commissions and a museum of the Gaza genocide — “like Yad Vashem,” the Jerusalem complex dedicated to the history of the Holocaust. Someday, when the world has a chance to turn right side up again.
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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13) How Israel’s Settlement Surge in the West Bank Is Displacing Palestinians
The Israeli government authorized 22 settlements in May, the largest expansion in decades, and Palestinian families are now being forced from their homes.
By Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 4, 2025
The reporters visited an area near Ramallah in the West Bank where a new settlement is being built and nearby Palestinian homes are now empty.
Mr. Abdulrahman’s home, foreground, and the new settler outpost about 200 yards away in the background.
The reporters visited an area near Ramallah in the West Bank where a new settlement is being built and nearby Palestinian homes are now empty.
For two decades, Muhammad Abdulrahman, 58, lived with his wife and his beehives on a remote hillside in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
But in May, Israeli settlers set up camp about 200 yards away and took control of the road leading to Mr. Abdulrahman’s home, blocking him from returning, he said. Israeli soldiers then evicted him and his wife, Suha Abdulrahman, the couple said.
The Israeli military said that Mr. Abdulrahman left voluntarily, but he said that he has still been unable to return home. Last month, a video shared by an Israeli lawmaker on social media showed his house had been turned into a space for religious study by the settlers.
“All my memories are in that home,” Mr. Abdulrahman said by phone last month from his brother’s house in the nearby town of Betunia, where he is now staying. “They are not only stealing our land but also trying to cut the roots that connect us to it.”
The Abdulrahmans were among the first Palestinians affected by an Israeli government decision in May to redraw the map of the West Bank by turning more Palestinian areas into Jewish settlements.
In the most extensive expansion in decades, the government approved 22 villages and neighborhoods for settlements across the territory, including one called Beit Horon North, near where Mr. Abdulrahman and his wife lived, west of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. It was part of a broader and decades-long push by Israel to entrench its control over the West Bank.
That process has become more aggressive since 2022, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office, and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, which was ignited by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023. There has been a surge of settler violence in the West Bank, which Israeli police have largely failed to address. Israel has also conducted extensive military operations, which it has said were aimed at combating militants, that have uprooted entire neighborhoods in Palestinian cities. Historians and researchers say that has led to the largest wave of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank in a half-century.
Most of the international community sees the creation of a Palestinian state that includes the West Bank as key to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since capturing the territory in 1967, however, Israel has expanded its presence there through settlement building, even in densely populated Palestinian areas.
The government intended to accelerate that process with its decision in May to expand the settlements, according to Israel Ganz, a head of a local settler council who helped promote the plan. The Palestinian Authority, which administers large parts of the West Bank, is also racing to claim territory before Israel does.
“Say there are 500 acres of land the state of Israel doesn’t want to lose — it puts a village there,” Mr. Ganz said. “That doesn’t mean a 500-acre city will be built, but once you’re there, no one else can be.”
The United Nations and the International Court of Justice say that all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank area violate international law. Israel rejects that.
Some of the 22 settlements approved in May already existed but they had been deemed illegal under Israeli law. The recent decision meant that these were authorized retroactively. Others are planned for the northern edge of the West Bank, in a region where no officially recognized settlements have existed since Israel dismantled them in 2005.
In August, the Israeli government approved a major settlement project, known as E1, that would effectively split the West Bank in two, making it harder for Palestinians to establish a contiguous state there.
In recent months, members of the Israeli government have also repeatedly threatened to annex parts of the West Bank.
‘This is our land, and I make the rules here’
Over the past year, settlers have built a record number of outposts — small encampments often made of prefabricated homes — according to an Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information.
More than 40 were built in the past six months alone, according to Hagit Ofran who monitors the West Bank for Settlement Watch, a project run by the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now.
The government’s plan for the 22 settlements “aims to curb Palestinian urban growth and link Israeli-populated areas,” according to Mr. Ganz, who helped select some of the sites. “Beit Horon North, for instance, will stop Ramallah from spreading,” he added.
When we visited Beit Horon North in July, Israeli settlers appeared to be in control of the area.
“This is our land, and I make the rules here,” said Elkana Shahar, a young settler who was wearing a sleeveless shirt with a peace sign. He and a few other boys had been left on a hot morning to watch over a scattering of belongings in the shade of an awning — a worn sofa, a refrigerator, a fan and bookshelves. The settlers had also poured concrete in preparation for permanent construction.
When we approached, one of the settlers drew what appeared to be a handgun that they later said was a pepper-spray pistol.
“Did you get approval to be here?” Mr. Shahar asked. He demanded that we leave, saying that it was private property.
On the same road, two other young Israeli settlers were seen breaking into a recently built Palestinian home that had been abandoned. The gate to the yard was broken, and the back window had been shattered.
Many settlements grow out of such outposts. A spokesman for the Israeli Civil Administration, a military unit that manages civilian affairs in the West Bank, said that building the Beit Horon North settlement required further legal and planning procedures. The outpost that we visited there was not part of the government-authorized settlement, and was illegal, they said, but that taking any action against it was “subject to the approval of the political echelon.”
Under the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s, both Israelis and Palestinians committed to not take any steps that would change the status of the West Bank. But successive Israeli governments largely ignored dozens of unauthorized Jewish outposts in the region — and the military has often discretely provided their security — ushering in a period of large-scale settlement expansion.
Some remote areas, like the one where Mr. Abdulrahman lived, were not part of that expansion until this year.
“We thought no one paid attention to our patch of land,” said Mr. Adulrahman. He and his wife lived in an old two-room house built from large, uneven stones, surrounded by pine trees and an olive grove. No other homes were within earshot.
Mr. Abdulrahman said he was ready to fight for his home, and he had filed a complaint with the Israeli police and the Israeli Civil Administration. The police did not respond to a request for comment.
It was not the time for emotions, Mr. Abdulrahman said. “It’s time to put Israel’s claim that it’s a rule of law country to the test.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel, and Sanjana Varghese from London.
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14) Deadly Attacks in Gaza Test Cease-Fire as Body of Another Captive Is Returned
Israel launched a military strike after it said Hamas militants attacked its soldiers, the latest clashes in the two months since a truce was signed.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Dec. 4, 2025
The Israeli military launched a deadly strike on Gaza on Wednesday after saying Hamas had attacked its soldiers, the latest spate of violence to test the cease-fire agreed to almost two months ago.
The Israeli military said it killed a militant in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, in retaliation for a Hamas attack in nearby Rafah that it said had injured five soldiers. Suhaib al-Hamss, the director of the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital in Khan Younis, said the Israeli strike killed at least six people, including a man, two women and three children, and wounded many others in an encampment for displaced people.
The cease-fire was agreed to in October, and there have been frequent flare-ups of violence, including Israeli military strikes on Gaza. The Israeli military has said it has targeted Hamas, but Palestinian health officials have said many civilians have been killed in the strikes, including children.
But key parts of the agreement have been fulfilled, including the return of all the living hostages. Roughly 250 Israelis and foreign nationals were taken hostage in the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza.
On Wednesday, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, handed over the remains of a Thai farmworker. The body of the last captive, an Israeli police officer, has not been returned.
It is unclear if there has been any progress on efforts to demilitarize Gaza, which Israeli and American officials believe would cement a long-term cease-fire.
In Rafah, a Hamas militant opened fire on an Israeli armored personnel carrier, which had been brought in after a suspicious person was identified in a building in the area, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman. One soldier was wounded seriously, she added.
Video of the Israeli strike on Wednesday evening showed a cluster of tents engulfed in flames as people hurled water at the fire.
Dr. al-Hamss said in a phone interview that a flood of dead and wounded people arrived at the field hospital and that medical staff provided basic treatment before the patients were transferred to a larger hospital with more resources. Many of the patients had shrapnel wounds, he said.
“It was utter chaos,” he said, “a totally catastrophic situation.”
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15) Militant Leader Backed by Israel Is Killed in Gaza, Official Says
Yasser Abu Shabab, a Bedouin man in his 30s, was at the center of an Israeli project in Gaza to build up anti-Hamas militias.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Dec. 4, 2025
Destruction in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, where Yasser Abu Shabab was reported killed on Thursday. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
Yasser Abu Shabab, the leader of a Palestinian militia backed by Israel, was killed on Thursday in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, according to an Israeli security official.
The official, who shared sensitive details on the condition of anonymity, said he was killed in a clash in eastern Rafah. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear.
Mr. Abu Shabab, a Bedouin man in his 30s, was at the center of an Israeli project in Gaza to build up militias that could undermine Hamas.
Israeli officials said Israel had provided arms to the Popular Forces, Mr. Abu Shabab’s militia, but the group refuted that.
In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that the Israeli government “activated” clans in Gaza opposed to Hamas at the advice of security officials. “What’s bad about it?” he said. “It’s only good, and it only saves the lives of Israel Defense Force soldiers.”
Allegations that Mr. Abu Shabab stole scores of aid trucks earned him a notorious reputation among Palestinians.
In late 2024, Gazan transportation company owners, truck drivers and international humanitarian officials accused Mr. Abu Shabab of running a sophisticated looting operation.
Georgios Petropoulos, a senior United Nations official who was based in Gaza at the time, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.”
In an interview in November 2024, Mr. Abu Shabab, thin and lightly bearded, denied he had looted a large number of aid trucks. But conceded that his men — armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles — had raided half a dozen or so aid trucks since the start of the war.
“We are taking trucks so we can eat, not so we can sell,” he said, asserting that he was feeding his family and neighbors. “Every hungry person is taking aid.” He accused Hamas of being primarily responsible for stealing the aid, an accusation that Hamas has denied.
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