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      Gaza Medic Missing Since Israeli Attack Is in Israeli Custody, Palestinian Group Says

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      Asaad al-Nasasra has not been heard from since the March 23 ambush by Israeli forces, which left 15 aid workers dead and drew international condemnation.A Gaza paramedic for the Palestine Red Crescent Society who has been missing since Israeli forces ambushed a group of ambulances and other aid vehicles in late March is in Israeli custody, the Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday.Israeli forces killed 15 other rescue and aid workers in the same attack, buried their bodies in a mass grave and crushed their ambulances, their fire truck and a United Nations vehicle — actions that have drawn international condemnation and scrutiny.Witnesses have said that Asaad al-Nasasra, 47, the paramedic who disappeared after the March 23 attack, survived but was detained and taken away by Israeli soldiers. But there had been no official word of his whereabouts until Sunday, when the Red Crescent said the I.C.R.C. had notified it that he was being held by Israel.The Red Cross said in a statement that it had received information that Mr. al-Nasasra was being held “in an Israeli place of detention.”Asked for comment, the Israeli military replied with a statement that it had released last week saying that it was still investigating the attack. It has said it will not comment further until the investigation is complete.The Israeli military has offered changing explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles, first saying that they had been “advancing suspiciously” without their lights on until a video of the attack contradicted that account. It initially said nine of those killed had been operatives from Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group, before saying, without providing evidence, that six operatives were killed in the attack.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 Strikes Hospital in Northern Gaza and Captures Key Part of South

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      No one was killed but the attack hit the Ahli Arab Hospital, a mainstay of Gaza’s decimated health care system. Separately, Israel said its troops had expanded their occupation of southern Gaza.The Israeli military struck and destroyed part of a hospital in northern Gaza early on Sunday morning, shortly after telling patients and staff to evacuate the site. The attack came hours after the Israeli government announced that its troops fighting elsewhere in the territory had expanded their occupation of the southern Gaza Strip, severing links between two strategically located Palestinian cities.No one was killed in the attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital, but a child being treated for a head injury died because of the rushed evacuation, according to a statement released by the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, which oversees the medical center. The strike destroyed a laboratory and damaged a pharmacy, the emergency department and a church at the hospital compound in Zeitoun, the statement added. The scene outside of Ahli Arab Hospital on Sunday.Saher Alghorra for The New York TimesThe hospital had become one of the last mainstays of the health care system in Gaza, where medical centers have been frequently damaged and besieged during the war that began with the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel. The World Health Organization reported last month that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been damaged during the war, and only 21 remained partly functional. The W.H.O. also warned on Saturday that hospitals in Gaza face a looming medicine shortage because Israel has blocked aid deliveries for six weeks.The Ahli Arab hospital compound was first hit less than two weeks into the war, when a missile hit a parking lot on the site where dozens of displaced families were sheltering. Hamas blamed the strike on Israel, before Israel said it was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas. U.S. intelligence officials later said they had “high confidence” in the Israeli account.The Israeli military acknowledged responsibility on Sunday for the latest strike on the hospital, saying without offering evidence that the site had housed a Hamas command center. Both the military and the Anglican Church said that Israeli soldiers had called the hospital to order its evacuation before the strike. Neither the hospital authorities nor Hamas responded to questions about whether the hospital had been used by Hamas fighters.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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      in US Politics

      I’m a Jewish Israeli in the US standing up for Palestine. By Trump’s logic, I’m a terror supporter | Eran Zelnik

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      To Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation:Given recent patterns, the FBI might need to take a hard look at my actions over the years. If Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri and other recent Ice detainees are considered threats to national security, then so am I.I have committed the same acts they have committed, including publishing an article that calls the war in Gaza a genocide, participating in a protest against the genocide in Gaza, speaking and protesting in favor of BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions against Israel), participating in a sit-in at UC Davis about 10 years ago, and being vocal in general about the atrocities committed by Israel against the people of Gaza and Palestinians.Let me tell you a little more about myself and all the additional reasons you might want to investigate and perhaps arrest me. I was born in Israel and became a naturalized US citizen through my American mother. Given the administration’s recent challenges to the 14th amendment, which provides birthright citizenship, you might proceed from detaining legal residents to revoking the rights of naturalized citizens. Like other fascist regimes before you, you’ve been testing how much resistance you face in your effort to turn the United States into a fascist country. You start with the most marginalized, sending incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons, Venezuelans accused of gang affiliation to El Salvador, and detaining Arab and Muslim legal residents. But if the past is any indication, your next target might well be children of undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens. Of course, as every student of fascism well knows, the ultimate goal is to apprehend all the supposed enemies of this administration, regardless of their legal status.Furthermore, I must confess to using academic concepts that have come under scrutiny as antisemitic by the Department of Justice taskforce for antisemitism. As a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, I have come a long way. It took me many years of soul-searching to realize that I was complicit in a settler-colonial occupation force and that my best recourse to make amends for that was to be outspoken about my country’s atrocities. As I tried to better understand the terrible tragedy of Zionism – a nationalist ideology that sought to free Jews from oppression only to end up as oppressors in Palestine – I confess to describing concepts such as apartheid, settler colonialism, ethno-nationalism and more. Perhaps even more disturbing from your perspective, I recently employed such concepts as genocide, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in a book I wrote about early American history.I also confess that in the past I have targeted white supremacist allies of this administration in my community of Chico, California. Clearly employing extralegal militias is part of this administration’s fascist playbook, as Trump already proved during the events of 6 January 2021. For instance, when my house was a target of antisemitic leafleting, I sought the help of a colleague and a local investigative journalist to make this very real form of antisemitism known to authorities. In the process the journalist uncovered troubling information that there is an armed white supremacist in our community who holds deep antisemitic convictions and now knows where I work. Had you really been interested in investigating antisemitism, you might have looked into the whereabouts of that individual. But since you want people like him around so that they can be activated when needed, and since all you really want is to cynically weaponize antisemitism, you might want to arrest me instead. After all, according to your standards, I – a Jew targeted by white supremacists – was all along the biggest threat to Jews in my own community.I have long heard stories about the rise of fascism in Europe from my grandparents, all of whom fled Europe and were refugees from antisemitism. The similarities between the actions of this administration and what my grandparents have lived through are unmistakable. I tell them here so that before you choose to arrest me, you will have one more opportunity to decide whether you will go down in history as aiding and abetting the rise of a fascist regime or as someone who refused to be part of another dark episode in this country’s history. Be forewarned: even if you yourself never directly suffer for your crimes, history will judge you.My dear grandfather, Otto, may his memory be a blessing, escaped Austria by the skin of his teeth when he was only 13 after the Nazi takeover of the country. Having witnessed the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938 – the night when local mobs violently rioted against Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses across much of Germany and Austria and arrested 30,000 citizens just for being Jewish – his parents made the decision to flee to Shanghai, the only port that would accept them. Clearly, our current president’s rhetoric regarding enemies of the American nation from within and without, against immigrants, trans people and people deemed un-American in their political commitments (like myself), are eerily reminiscent of the stories my grandfather told me about the scapegoating of Jews.As I consider the memory of dear grandmother Rachel, may her memory be a blessing, who grew up in Poland and survived the Holocaust, including enduring a harrowing year in Auschwitz and the death march to Germany, I cannot shake the sense of another parallel. As Hitler and the Nazi party were consolidating power, they appointed sycophants like yourself and so many others to positions of power in the Nazi administration. The most important criterion for Hitler was not that the people in positions of power were competent or even knowledgeable, but that they would be spineless and loyal to him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAccording to the historian Ian Kershaw, this type of leadership, where all bow to the great leader, led to the Holocaust, as the people surrounding Hitler constantly sought to outdo each other in their loyalty to the Führer. Knowing Hitler’s hatred for Jews, they constantly tried to curry favor by suggesting the most radical and far-reaching policy ideas towards Jews. This dynamic, which Kershaw called “working toward the Führer”, ultimately led Hitler and the people surrounding him to decide on the “Final Solution”, the plan to exterminate all the Jews in the world on an industrial scale in death camps. This idea of working toward the leader is upon us today, as we see institutions and even some in the Democratic party bowing before the great leader and his will. Instead of standing up to the administration at every turn, institutions, businesses and politicians across the country prefer to anticipate the administration’s wrath and eliminate any behavior or materials that might come under scrutiny. Meanwhile, Republicans rush to outdo each other in flattering the great leader, as American society seems frozen with fear in face of the rising tides of fascism.So, Kash Patel, do you want to arrest me and help bring about fascism?

      Eran Zelnik grew up in Israel and came to the US 15 years ago to complete his PhD in history. He now lives and teaches in Chico, California More

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      Israeli Airstrike in Gaza City Leaves Many Dead, Health Officials There Say

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      An Israeli airstrike on a home in a neighborhood in Gaza City left a heavy death toll on Wednesday and others missing, with rescuers struggling to pull people out of the rubble with little equipment, Gaza’s civil defense service said.The Israeli military said it had been targeting a Hamas operative who it said was responsible for planning attacks. It did not name the operative or give further details.A spokesman for the Gazan civil defense service, Mahmoud Basal, said that rescuers had pulled 23 bodies from the destroyed buildings, including those of eight children, with about 20 people still missing. He said the strike had completely destroyed eight homes in Shajaiye, an already hard-hit neighborhood where Israel last week called for evacuations and which housed families who had been displaced from elsewhere in Gaza. Additional airstrikes had targeted other parts of the neighborhood on Wednesday, Mr. Basal said, but rescuers had not yet been able to respond to those strikes.The service’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.The site of the airstrike in Shajaiye on Wednesday. Israel last week called for evacuations from the neighborhood, which had already been pummeled.Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Israeli military says Hamas operatives embed among civilians. On Wednesday, it said that it had taken “numerous steps” to reduce harm to civilians before striking, using aerial surveillance, “other intelligence” and precise weaponry. A New York Times investigation has found that the Israeli military has loosened its rules on how many civilians it can endanger with each airstrike, and experts on international law note that Israel still has an obligation to protect civilians.The Gazan civil defense said that its crews were having difficulty pulling out survivors because they lacked heavy equipment to sift through the debris. 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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      Death of Palestinian American Boy in West Bank Sparks Outcry

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      Amer Rabee, 14, was fatally shot Sunday by Israeli forces in the West Bank, according to his family. On Tuesday, community leaders gathered in New Jersey to demand justice.Members of northern New Jersey’s Palestinian community gathered on Tuesday to condemn the recent killing of a Palestinian American boy by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.The boy, Amer Rabee, 14, was shot and killed in the town of Turmus Aya on Sunday, his family said. Two other Palestinian American teenagers who were with Amer at the time were shot and injured by the soldiers, the family said.Amer, who was originally from Saddle Brook, N.J., moved with his family to the West Bank around 2013. The family said that since then, it had divided its time between the West Bank and New Jersey.At a news conference on Tuesday, community leaders stood at a small wooden lectern at the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, N.J., to decry Amer’s death and call on the U.S. government to investigate the shooting. They were joined by Rami Jbara, an uncle of Amer’s, and by Amer’s father, Mohammed Rabee, who called in remotely from the West Bank.“We cannot let this horrific crime be swept under the rug,” said Rania Mustafa, the center’s executive director.“Our stories are consistently ignored,” she added. “Our people are consistently dehumanized. Our deaths are repeatedly ignored.”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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      Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and didn’t mention Gaza once. That’s no surprise | Judith Levine

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      Seven and three-quarters hours into his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker uttered the word “Gaza”. He was not talking about the war. He stepped nowhere near the 50,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli armed forces since 8 October 2023, or the US’s military and political support of the genocide.Rather, Booker was searching for a particularly ludicrous lie from a presidential administration that has told thousands. “There are lies about USAID, like, I don’t know, 5 million condoms going to Gaza or something outrageous,” he said. Considering the other outrageous things Trump has said about Gaza – such as his plan to “clean out” the strip to make room for luxury resorts – the remark felt trivializing.The word “Gaza” came up once more, when the senator mentioned his “humanitarian and peace-building work” with the UN there.It was not until hour 13, more than halfway through his oratorial marathon, that Booker engaged at any length with the subject of Israel and Palestine. This time it was not about the war, either. Instead, he was condemning the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech at universities and its summary deportation of legally resident foreign students who “espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine”.The senator recounted the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish Tufts University graduate student who was surrounded on the street by masked plainclothes agents, handcuffed and hustled into an unmarked vehicle, then shipped to a hellish Louisiana detention center, where she faces deportation – all apparently because she co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the college to divest from Israel. “Her arrest,” said Booker, “looks like a kidnapping that you might expect to see in Moscow rather than in the streets of Boston.” True.Denouncing censorship, the senator self-censored. “Certain views on topics”: he neglected to specify which views. He didn’t say that punishment is being meted out exclusively to critics of Israel and never to its supporters, or that those supporters are supplying homeland security with the names of the critics – in other words, collaborating in the very violations of constitutional rights that he decries.The atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza since the temporary ceasefire collapsed are arguably the worst yet. Trump is cheering Bibi on like a fan at a wrestling match. His support of Israel’s policies is not only unconsciously racist, like Biden’s, but blatantly racist. Yet few Democrats are saying – or, more importantly, doing – anything to stop him. In fact, a few days after the speech, Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block $8.8bn in arms sales to the Netanyahu government. Only 14 of his colleagues voted in favor.Perhaps senators are hoping their constituents won’t notice their inaction. Indeed, as the mudslide of executive orders buries immigrants, federal workers, transgender people, science, regulation, the economy, the rule of law and US democracy, it is hard for the press, or anyone else, to take their eyes off what is going on at home. Even when horrors are taking place abroad. Especially if they’re taking place in Palestine.For example: senior national security officials discussed classified military operations on the commercial message app Signal and inadvertently included a reporter on the call. The super-blunder got a name, and Signalgate was all over the news. But on the subject of that discussion – US airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen – virtual silence.Only the most tuned-in of US news hounds know who the Houthis are, let alone why we might bomb them: their attacks on ships in the Red Sea, perpetrated in support of the Palestinians. Was the US strike a good idea? Was it consonant with the US’s Middle East strategy – if there is a Middle East strategy? Do the Houthis pose a threat to national security? Is the Yemen bombing an escalation of US involvement in the Gaza war? Don’t ask the mainstream media. Fixated on the incompetence of Trump’s cabinet and the president’s laid-back attitude toward classified information, Signalgate turned a military aggression in a country against which we have not declared war into a domestic story – about Trump.As in Booker’s speech, as last spring, when university administrators called in the police to break up student Palestine-solidarity encampments, the press focused narrowly on individual Americans’ acts in relation to a response to the war in Gaza, rather than on the war itself.Antiwar activists are having a hard time catching anyone’s eyes – including the eyes of those who are sympathetic to their cause. This Saturday, at opposite ends of the National Mall in Washington, two demonstrations occurred simultaneously: the Emergency March for Palestine and the much larger Hands Off rally, one of about 1,500 taking place nationwide.At the former event, a ribbon-like white banner inscribed with the names of the Palestinian dead flowed from hand to hand above the heads of the participants, drawing the crowd together like a seam stretching into the distance. Solemn, elegant, a symbol of the interminable war and the immensity of its damage, it was the kind of mediagenic political spectacle that deserved to be broadcast widely, at least at the end of the newscast. But it can be viewed only on social media.Why did these two events happen at the same time anyway? Was there no communication between Indivisible and the other Hands Off organizers and the groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace and the Palestinian Youth Movement, that planned the Palestine action? Did Indivisible consider the war too divisive for an action seeking to attract everyone from socialists to Republicans worried about their 401ks? Or was Trump’s stance on Israel not on the bill of indictments against him?What the Trump administration is doing to the US and what he is eagerly helping Netanyahu to do to the Palestinians are of a piece. Both are criminal, immoral campaigns against domestic and international law, causing immense suffering. Yes, it’s exhausting to contend with two major catastrophes at once. But we don’t have the time or the privilege to put either one aside.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      Netanyahu discusses Gaza and tariffs with Trump at White House meeting

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      The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, met with Donald Trump on Monday for the second time since the US president’s return to office, marking the first effort by a foreign leader to negotiate a deal after Trump announced sweeping tariffs last week.Speaking alongside Trump in the Oval Office, Netanyahu said Israel would eliminate the trade deficit with the US. “We intend to do it very quickly,” he told reporters, adding that he believed Israel could “serve as a model for many countries who ought to do the same”.Trump said the pair had a “great discussion” but did not indicate whether he would reduce the tariffs on Israeli goods. “Maybe not,” he said. “Don’t forget we help Israel a lot. We give Israel $4bn a year. That’s a lot.”Trump denied reports that he was considering a 90-day pause on his tariff rollout. “We’re not looking at that,” he told reporters. “We have many, many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us, and there are going to be fair deals.”Trump also announced that the US and Iran were beginning talks on Tehran’s nuclear program. “We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started. It’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen,” he told reporters. He warned Tehran would be “in great danger” if the talks collapse.Netanyahu expressed a cautious support for US-Iran talks but insisted Tehran must not have nuclear weapons. “If it can be done diplomatically … I think that would be a good thing,” he said. “But whatever happens, we must make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons.”The comments came in the Oval Office after Trump and Netanyahu held private talks. The White House canceled a joint press conference that was scheduled to take place afterward, without offering an immediate explanation.Netanyahu, announcing the last-minute meeting on Sunday, said he was visiting at the invitation of Trump to speak about efforts to release Israeli hostages from Gaza, as well as new US tariffs.The meeting came after the Trump administration announced his trade war last Wednesday with tariffs on the US’s trading partners, including a 17% tariff on Israeli goods.The US is Israel’s closest ally and largest single trading partner. Israel had hoped to avoid the new tariffs by moving to cancel its remaining tariffs on US imports a day before Trump’s announcement.Before his meeting with Trump, Netanyahu met with the US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. He also met with the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and the US trade representative Jamieson Greer on Sunday night in Washington. The Israeli government described the latter meeting as “warm, friendly and productive”.During Netanyahu’s last visit in February, Trump shocked the world by proposing to take over the Gaza Strip, removing more than 2 million Palestinians and redeveloping the occupied territory as a “Riviera of the Middle East”, in effect endorsing the ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza.Since then, Israel has resumed its bombardment in Gaza, collapsing nearly two months of ceasefire with Hamas that had been brokered by the US, Egypt and Qatar.Nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials, taking the total death toll since the start of the war to more than 50,000. Israel has also halted all supplies of food, fuel and humanitarian aid into Gaza.Netanyahu’s visit to the US comes as he faces pressure at home to return to ceasefire negotiations and secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza.Netanyahu told reporters on Monday that he and Trump had discussed the US leader’s “bold” vision to move Palestinians from Gaza, and that he is working with the US on another deal to secure the release of additional hostages. “We’re working now on another deal, that we hope will succeed,” he said.Netanyahu also claimed that Israel is committed to “enabling the people of Gaza to freely make a choice to go wherever they want”. Last week, he said Israel was “seizing territory” and intended to “divide up” the Gaza Strip by building a new security corridor, inflaming fears that Israel intends to take permanent control of the strip when the war ends.Netanyahu arrived in Washington on Sunday night from Hungary, after a four-day official visit that marked the Israeli leader’s first visit to European soil since the international criminal court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for him over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, made it clear he would defy the court to host Netanyahu, and announced that he would take Hungary out of the ICC because it had become “political”. The US is not a member of the court. More