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      Some Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Were Shot Multiple Times, Officials Say

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      The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said that nearly all of the 15 bodies recovered had gunshot wounds.Days after the United Nations accused Israel of killing 15 humanitarian workers in Gaza, officials who recovered the bodies or carried out the autopsies said some of the rescue workers were shot multiple times before being buried in a mass grave.The Palestine Red Crescent Society, which had eight of its members killed and carried out the recovery mission, said that nearly all 15 bodies showed gunshot wounds, according to a spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh. One paramedic was found with his hands and feet tied toward his body, Ms. Farsakh said.“My colleagues were shot; the bodies who were retrieved, many of them have multiple gun shots. We found all of them thrown in a mass grave, the bodies were put next to each other and covered with sand,” said Ms. Farsakh in a telephone interview from Ramallah.The deaths of the aid workers, who first went missing on March 23, have drawn international condemnation in recent days.On that day, in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, ambulances and a U.N. vehicle came under attack from Israel’s military, then went silent. On Sunday, rescue teams found 15 bodies, most in a shallow mass grave along with their crushed ambulances and the vehicle marked with the U.N. logo. The United Nations, which is typically cautious about assigning blame, accused Israel of killing them.An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said on X on Monday that nine of those killed were Palestinian militants. He said Israeli forces “did not randomly attack” an ambulance, but that several vehicles “were identified advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting them to shoot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Desperation Grows in Gaza as U.N. Shutters Bakeries

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      Anxious residents rushed to obtain bags of flour as the United Nations warned that Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries were deepening the humanitarian crisis.Bilal Mohammad Ramadan AbuKresh has lost his home, his job, his wife and seven other relatives during the war in Gaza. Now, as the United Nations closes 25 bakeries across the territory, he is also losing his only reliable source of food.Before Wednesday, Mr. AbuKresh, 40, said he would leave his tent in a camp for displaced people in northern Gaza at dawn and stand in line for hours at one of the bakeries, waiting for bread for his four children.“The line was unimaginable, like the Day of Judgment,” Mr. AbuKresh said on Wednesday, the day after the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep the bakeries in Gaza open.But at least it was affordable, compared to the $30 he paid for a bag of pasta that he bought recently to feed his family.The lack of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza over the past month has prompted violent competition for food and driven up prices.Mr. AbuKresh said he has resorted to selling his children’s jewelry and collecting trash to sell to scrounge up enough money just to buy a bit of food. “To secure a bag of bread for my children, I risk death a hundred times,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Use of Immigration Law Appears to Conflict With Limits Imposed by Congress

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      A crackdown targeting foreign students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians conflicts with free-speech protections that lawmakers added in 1990.The Trump administration is asserting that it has broad power under a 1952 law to kick out foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. That statute says the secretary of state can deem noncitizens deportable for foreign policy reasons, and the secretary, Marco Rubio, made clear recently that he had already used it to cancel hundreds of student visas.“It might be more than 300 at this point,” Mr. Rubio said last week. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”But that expansive conception of power appears to conflict with a key limit Congress added nearly four decades after the law passed. Lawmakers explained that the modification, which is recorded elsewhere in federal statute books, means the law may be used “only in unusual circumstances” and “sparingly” if the problem stems from foreigners’ exercise of free speech.Lawmakers also gave two examples of when deporting someone under the 1952 law over speech would still be legitimate. Both scenarios, laid out in a report explaining the 1990 bill that enacted the restriction, were highly exceptional.The first was if a particular foreigner’s mere presence in the United States would somehow violate a treaty. The other was if it “could result in imminent harm to the lives or property” of Americans abroad, like when allowing the former shah of Iran to come to the United States in 1979 led to a riot at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a hostage crisis.The additional guardrails raise questions over what rights foreign students are entitled to and underscore the Trump administration’s far-ranging interpretation of its authority in aggressively moving to deport those who have protested Israel’s war in Gaza. The executive branch has broad discretion to deny visas to applicants while they are abroad. But once noncitizens are on American soil, they are protected by the Constitution, which includes the rights to free speech and due process.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel’s Military Says It Struck Beirut’s Suburbs

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      The attack was the second in less than a week, raising fears that a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah could unravel.The Israeli military said early Tuesday that it had conducted a strike on the southern outskirts of Beirut, the second attack near Lebanon’s capital in less than a week.Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire in November, raising hopes that Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades could be over. But the recent strikes have prompted fears that the truce could unravel.The Israeli military said the latest strike, in the Dahiya area in Beirut’s southern suburbs, had targeted a Hezbollah operative who had directed and assisted Hamas in planning a “significant and imminent” attack against Israel.Israel acted to eliminate the operative because he posed an “immediate threat,” the military said on social media. It added that the Dahiya area was a key stronghold for Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and political party backed by Iran.Hezbollah made no immediate comment on the strikes on its semiofficial page on Telegram, a social media platform.On Friday, the Israeli military launched airstrikes in the same area, and ordered residents in a densely populated neighborhood to evacuate. The attack was hours after rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanese territory.Hezbollah denied any involvement in that attack on Israel and said it remained committed to the cease-fire. The Israeli military said it had targeted a site that stored Hezbollah’s drones.Also on Friday, at least three people were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israeli positions, in solidarity with its Palestinian ally, after Hamas led an attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, igniting the war in Gaza. The fighting escalated into full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon. More

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      What We Know About Talks for a Renewed Gaza Cease-Fire

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      Hamas said it had accepted a proposal for a new cease-fire, which would see some hostages released from captivity in Gaza. But details were elusive.Israel and Hamas both signaled over the weekend that efforts for a renewed cease-fire in Gaza were underway, less than two weeks after the breakdown of a temporary truce and the resumption of Israel’s air and ground campaign against the militant group in the enclave.Hamas said on Saturday that it had accepted a proposal for a new cease-fire, which would see some hostages released from captivity in Gaza. Israel said it, too, had received a proposal via third-party mediators and had responded with a counterproposal in coordination with the United States.“The military pressure is working,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday in remarks at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting, adding that Israel was “suddenly seeing cracks” in Hamas’s position.Neither side published details of the proposal or the counterproposal, but an official briefed on the talks suggested that they broadly echoed previous proposals floated in recent weeks. While there was no indication that a breakthrough was imminent, the public statements suggested that after weeks of fruitless negotiations, contacts over a deal were proceeding even as the war continued.On Sunday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said it had recovered the bodies of eight emergency medical technicians, five Civil Defense personnel and a United Nations employee in Rafah in southern Gaza. The medical organization said it had lost contact with nine of its crew members more than a week ago after they were directly fired upon by Israeli forces. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.What did Hamas say?Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official and negotiator, said in a speech on Saturday that his group had received a proposal two days earlier from Egyptian and Qatari mediators for a renewed cease-fire, adding that Hamas had “responded positively and approved it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

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      The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      What We Know About the Detentions of Student Protesters

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      The Trump administration is looking to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States, citing national security. Critics say that violates free speech protections.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily.Pool photo by Nathan HowardThe Trump administration is trying to deport pro-Palestinian students and academics who are legally in the United States, a new front in its clash with elite schools over what it says is their failure to combat antisemitism.The White House asserts that these moves — many of which involve immigrants with visas and green cards — are necessary because those taken into custody threaten national security. But some legal experts say that the administration is trampling on free speech rights and using lower-level laws to crack down on activism.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily. He did not specify how many of those people had taken part in campus protests or acted to support Palestinians.Mr. Rubio gave that number at a news conference, after noting that the department had revoked the visa of a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. He did not give details on the other revocations.Immigration officials are known to have pursued at least nine people in apparent connection to this effort since the start of March.The detentions and efforts to deport people who are in the country legally reflect an escalation of the administration’s efforts to restrict immigration, as it also seeks to deport undocumented immigrants en masse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Trump team group chat news is obscuring an essential question | Mohamad Bazzi

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      The revelation that top members of Donald Trump’s administration disclosed secret US military plans against the Houthi militia in Yemen in a private group chat that included a prominent journalist has generated predictable outrage in Washington. Democrats are calling for a congressional investigation and the resignation of some of the officials involved in the breach, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser, Mike Waltz.In an article published on Monday, the Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, outlined how he was able to follow the conversation among members of Trump’s cabinet over two days leading up to a series of US airstrikes on 15 March. But in the widespread outrage over the sharing of military information on a Signal chat, one essential question is getting lost: why is Trump bombing Yemen in the first place? Five consecutive US presidents and administrations (George W Bush, Barack Obama, the first Trump administration, Joe Biden and the second Trump administration) have ordered military attacks on Yemen, which is the poorest country in the Middle East.Collectively, these leaders have continued more than two decades of failed US policies toward Yemen, centered on repeated bombings, counter-terrorism operations and support for a dictator who ruled the country for decades. Trump, who portrayed himself throughout the last presidential campaign as “the candidate of peace”, appears almost eager to repeat past US mistakes in Yemen. During Yemen’s long civil war, years of intense bombing by two US allies – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – failed to dislodge the Houthis from power. By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that the Yemen conflict had killed 377,000 people – nearly 60% of whom died not in fighting but from indirect causes, including famine, cholera outbreaks and destruction of the health system. And while Yemeni civilians suffered, the Houthis emerged stronger after each military confrontation.Why aren’t Democrats and other critics of the Trump administration asking this basic question: what have two decades of regular US attacks on Yemen achieved, beyond more death and misery in a country where Washington already helped instigate one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters? Anyone interested in real accountability for US policymaking should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.The Trump administration says the latest US strikes on Yemen are intended to pressure the Houthi militia to stop attacks on international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. After the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, the Houthis began firing missiles and drones at commercial vessels sailing around the Bab el-Mandeb strait, where the Red Sea comes closest to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen. The Houthis said they were acting in support of besieged Palestinians and pledged to stop targeting shipping lanes once Israel ended its war on Gaza.The attacks disrupted global shipping, as companies rerouted hundreds of vessels around South Africa, which can add thousands of miles to a freighter’s journey between Asia and Europe. In January 2024, the Biden administration, along with Britain, launched missile strikes against dozens of targets in Yemen. But Houthi leaders did not back down, and they stepped up their attacks on shipping vessels and continued to fire drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were shot down before reaching Israeli territory. Starting in July 2024, Israel carried out four rounds of airstrikes against Yemen, including attacks on the international airport in Sana’a, power stations and several ports.For more than a year, Biden avoided the most clear-cut path to stopping the Red Sea attacks and US escalation against the Houthis: his administration failed to apply pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to end Israel’s assault on Gaza and accept a ceasefire with Hamas. Biden refused to withhold billions of dollars in US weapons or to stop providing political cover for Israel at the UN security council and other international bodies. Instead, the Biden administration continued to insist that it could bring the Houthis to heel by force.Biden’s strategy failed to secure international shipping in the Red Sea. And the Houthis, who were losing support inside Yemen before the Gaza war, turned US attacks into a public relations bonanza. Houthi leaders portrayed themselves as one of the few movements in the Arab world willing to defend the Palestinian cause and fight Israel and its western allies – in contrast to Arab governments that stayed on the sidelines and occasionally issued statements condemning Israel’s war. The Houthis also used the Gaza conflict to elevate their profile within the so-called “axis of resistance”, a network of regional militias supported by Iran. Two of the main factions in this alliance, Hamas and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, were decimated by the Israeli military over the past 18 months, providing a new opening for Houthi leaders to enhance their popularity throughout the Middle East.The Biden administration – along with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy – finally persuaded Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, which took effect on 19 January, a day before Trump’s inauguration. After the truce in Gaza, the Houthis stopped their attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, as they had promised for more than a year. But as the ceasefire’s first phase expired on 2 March, Netanyahu refused to start the second phase of negotiations, which required a complete Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and talks over a permanent truce. Instead, with the Trump administration’s support, the Israeli government imposed a new siege on Gaza, banning all food and other aid deliveries. Netanyahu backed out of the deal he had initially agreed to, and tried to pressure Hamas into accepting a six-week extension of the ceasefire’s first phase.By 18 March, Israel resumed its brutal war on Gaza with airstrikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. In the days leading up to the ceasefire’s collapse, Houthi leaders warned that they would restart their attacks on shipping vessels if Israel resumed its war. And that’s when the Trump administration began threatening renewed US military strikes against Yemen.Trump is now repeating the same failed approach to Yemen as Biden and previous US presidents. In the Signal group chat messages revealed this week by the Atlantic’s editor, Trump cabinet members – who included the vice-president, JD Vance; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe – expressed disdain for European allies and debated the timing of US attacks on the Houthis. But none of these top officials raised the possibility that pushing for a renewed ceasefire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’s rationale for their aggression against commercial shipping in the Red Sea.The most senior officials on Trump’s national security team did not seem to consider the idea of taking the Houthi leaders at their word: that they would cease disrupting global trade once Israel stops bombing Gaza, as they had done in January. Instead, the US security establishment continues bombing Yemen as it has done for two decades – and somehow hoping for a different outcome this time.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies and a journalism professor at New York University More