Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.
Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.
Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.
“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.”
“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”
As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.
Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.
Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.
In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
This is more than just bluster. Reutersreported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.”
In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”
“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”
Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.
Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.
After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.)
“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”
One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.
“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.
The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.
“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”
Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.
“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.”
What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place.
“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.”
Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.
Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.
In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
This is more than just bluster. Reutersreported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.”
In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”
“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”
Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.
Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.
After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.)
“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”
One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.
“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.
The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.
“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”
Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.
“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.”
What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place.
“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.”
In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a strongly worded letter to top Israeli officials. In the note, they made clear the United States was aware of Israel’s blocking of aid into the north of Gaza. They demanded that Israel improve humanitarian conditions by letting in 350 trucks of food aid per day, ending the forced evacuation of north Gaza, and opening more crossings into the territory. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United Nations ambassador for the US, said such moves were necessary to combat a “policy of starvation.” If Israel failed to do so within 30 days, Blinken and Austin threatened, the US would consider enforcing arms-transfer laws which prohibit sending weapons to nations that block humanitarian aid.
“30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
Yesterday, thirty days later, Biden administration officials declared they would not be enforcing their own deadlines. Military aid to Israel will not end, despite the fact that even data from Israel’s own government finds the amount of aid entering Gaza decreased between September and November.
In a November 12th State Department press briefing, officials were unable to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not Israel managed to hit that 30-day deadline. “We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law,” department spokesperson Vedant Patel said.
In their October 13 letter, Blinken and Austin said the Israeli government must reaffirm “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.” This, also, has not happened. Instead, an Israeli Defense Force general told the media last week that civilians who have fled the north will not be allowed to return to their homes.
COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, told reporters Tuesday that “Israel allowed a daily average of 76 trucks over the past 30 days.” The United Nations stated that the number is closer to 50—far lower than the 350 the US said would be needed to stave off widespread starvation, and a minuscule fraction of the 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza every day prior to October of 2023.
Last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 fighter jets produced in the United States.
On Tuesday, Reporter Matt Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Patel why the letter contained so many specific provisions if vague assurances of “improvement” in Gaza would be enough to satisfy the United States.
“Why did you bother to put in 350 trucks a day if it didn’t matter?” Lee asked.
“I’m not gonna speak to that,” Patel said.
“We didn’t give the Israelis 30 days, you guys did,” Lee responded. “And now those 30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said. “We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.” Some conditions, he said, are improving: a new border crossing was opened in central Gaza, and a limited number of people were allowed to move inland instead of being trapped on the beach in tents in winter.
On that same day, though, eight humanitarian organizations issued a report demonstrating that, per aid workers and international observers on the ground, the Biden administration’s conditions for continuing military aid had not been reached.
“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight organizations, including Oxfam and MedGlobal, wrote. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
Nonetheless, the State Department has not indicated that they will follow through on their threats to suspend arms shipments: and, in fact, just last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 new fighter jets produced in the United States as part of continuing aid.
In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a strongly worded letter to top Israeli officials. In the note, they made clear the United States was aware of Israel’s blocking of aid into the north of Gaza. They demanded that Israel improve humanitarian conditions by letting in 350 trucks of food aid per day, ending the forced evacuation of north Gaza, and opening more crossings into the territory. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United Nations ambassador for the US, said such moves were necessary to combat a “policy of starvation.” If Israel failed to do so within 30 days, Blinken and Austin threatened, the US would consider enforcing arms-transfer laws which prohibit sending weapons to nations that block humanitarian aid.
“30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
Yesterday, thirty days later, Biden administration officials declared they would not be enforcing their own deadlines. Military aid to Israel will not end, despite the fact that even data from Israel’s own government finds the amount of aid entering Gaza decreased between September and November.
In a November 12th State Department press briefing, officials were unable to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not Israel managed to hit that 30-day deadline. “We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law,” department spokesperson Vedant Patel said.
In their October 13 letter, Blinken and Austin said the Israeli government must reaffirm “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.” This, also, has not happened. Instead, an Israeli Defense Force general told the media last week that civilians who have fled the north will not be allowed to return to their homes.
COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, told reporters Tuesday that “Israel allowed a daily average of 76 trucks over the past 30 days.” The United Nations stated that the number is closer to 50—far lower than the 350 the US said would be needed to stave off widespread starvation, and a minuscule fraction of the 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza every day prior to October of 2023.
Last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 fighter jets produced in the United States.
On Tuesday, Reporter Matt Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Patel why the letter contained so many specific provisions if vague assurances of “improvement” in Gaza would be enough to satisfy the United States.
“Why did you bother to put in 350 trucks a day if it didn’t matter?” Lee asked.
“I’m not gonna speak to that,” Patel said.
“We didn’t give the Israelis 30 days, you guys did,” Lee responded. “And now those 30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said. “We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.” Some conditions, he said, are improving: a new border crossing was opened in central Gaza, and a limited number of people were allowed to move inland instead of being trapped on the beach in tents in winter.
On that same day, though, eight humanitarian organizations issued a report demonstrating that, per aid workers and international observers on the ground, the Biden administration’s conditions for continuing military aid had not been reached.
“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight organizations, including Oxfam and MedGlobal, wrote. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
Nonetheless, the State Department has not indicated that they will follow through on their threats to suspend arms shipments: and, in fact, just last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 new fighter jets produced in the United States as part of continuing aid.
As the sun set over the New York Times building on election night, the Times Tech Guild—the union of workers that power the infrastructure for the company’s news, games, and cooking—closed out their second day on the picket line. Their strike, an attempt to push for a deal they’ve negotiated for over two years, might bring down tonight one of America’s most beloved and beloathed election-night prognosticators: the Needle.
As reporter and polls expert Nate Cohn explained on X, the tech team “built and maintain the infrastructure that feeds [the Needle] data and lets [the Times] publish [it] on the internet.” As of the time of publication, the Needle is up. But it’s unclear if without the guild’s work it will last.
The Tech Guild wants pay equity, remote work protections, and—top of many minds on Tuesday night—protection from being arbitrarily fired, known as “just cause.”
The 173-year-old Times has over the past several years transformed into something more like a tech company with the news as a key, but not singular, component. Its games and cooking apps drive subscriptions; it has expanded into audio and sports. With that transformation has come a change in how workers organize at the company. Now, alongside their newspaper and advertising workers’ unions, the paper hosts one of the largest tech unions in the country.
Kathy Zhang, unit chair for the New York Times Tech Guild, has had “probably hundreds of conversations” with her fellow workers leading up to this moment. I asked her about the picket line, the Needle, and why workers are striking.
What would you normally be doing on election day if you weren’t on the picket line?
I am a senior analytics manager on the audience team at the New York Times, which means that I pull data around traffic trends, and I look at how people are listening to audio and engaging with our coverage.
This will be my third presidential election here. I’ve been at the Times for nine years. In 2017, on January 20th, inauguration day, I was the person who stayed up past 1 a.m. waiting for our data to come through to let our editors know what election traffic looked like. Election day is one day, but election season is a long time, and we spend a long time prepping for it. It’s unfortunate the management let it drag out this far.
I know you all have been saying this could happen for some time, right?
We have been bargaining for almost two and a half years. We started bargaining in July of 2022. It was September 10 when we passed a strike authorization vote with 95 percent support. We told management the very next day, we gave them two months in advance. We were in bargaining all last week, but on Sunday night, management decided to walk away from the table. So the ball is literally in their court.
Online, I’ve seen right-wing media focusing in on some unusual concerns they claim you’re bargaining over stuff, like pet bereavement leave, trigger warnings on political topics, that kind of thing.
The most important issues that are unresolved right now are just cause—meaning that we can’t be fired for no reason whatsoever—and flexible work, so that people who have caretaking responsibilities or live hundreds of miles away aren’t forced to come into the office. We’re a unit in which, you know, our members see a lot of inequity in how we’re paid. We want to be paid fairly.
Management, instead of talking about the actual issues at play, has been seeding talking points to right-wing media. It’s actually pretty depressing coming from a newspaper that’s supposed to care about independent journalism; they’re putting misleading talking points out there.
I saw a clip on Fox News that said we were looking for job security for illegals. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time working on the visas and immigration proposals that we have on the table. I don’t know what job security for illegals means, because it’s literally about people with visas, right? We care about people getting notice about whether they’re going to get their visas sponsored.
I myself am an immigrant, I am a naturalized citizen, and I care about democracy—that’s why I’m out here in a union! It was a complete mischaracterization of our proposal. It brought up stuff that was maybe on the table two years ago, for maybe seven minutes, and hasn’t been talked about since. I think it’s really telling that the company would rather talk about things they think make us look like we are being unreasonable, rather than talk about the fact that this company has authorized $400 million in stock buybacks, which is money that goes directly into shareholders’ pockets, not to workers.
It doesn’t do anything other than make rich people richer, and they’d rather threaten election night coverage than come to a fair deal with their workers.
If this continues, how is the strike going to affect coverage during and beyond election night?
There are so many interconnected systems that power what we work on, I couldn’t even tell you all the things that could go wrong or could maybe not go wrong. And there are systems that readers aren’t gonna see that will cause a lot of problems for us.
But we have a lot of support from our colleagues in the newsroom and in advertising. They’ve written letters to management telling them that they need us. Our newsroom colleagues are the people who supplied our lunch today—some of them are on the picket line right now in their free time before their shift starts or after they’ve already worked a whole day.
This is the biggest tech-worker strike that I’m aware of in American history. What makes you all different from other tech unions? What’s helped you get this far?
We are the largest “high-tech” union in the country with bargaining rights, but we had a lot of support and solidarity from other tech workers who have been unionized.
I think part of it is, that the New York Times is a newspaper company, but what other newspaper has six or seven hundred tech workers in the company? Sometimes, power comes down to the sheer number of people that you have. We have hundreds of people, and that’s hard to organize! But it also means that when people are standing together in solidarity, when we are out here fighting, we know that we can get through this.
So, right now we’re fighting to make sure that we have more pay equity. We’re fighting to make sure that people just don’t get fired for no reason. That’s really all we’re fighting for.
One of the most amazing things that I’ve seen is people that I knew voted against unionization and voted against the strike authorization vote, are on the picket line today. Because when it comes down to it, which side are you on, right?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This year, America’s largest stateis primed to play a key role in deciding who controls the House of Representatives.
Incumbent Mary Peltola (D-Alaska)—the state’s first Native woman elected to Congress and the first Democratic representative in 50 years—will defend her seat in a close race against challenger Nick Begich III. Begich is a software developer, part-owner of a conspiracy-theory publishing company, and the surprise Republican heir to a several-generation Democratic political lineage.
Peltola’s win was a surprise upset in 2022. She beat former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on a campaign of “fish, family, and freedom,” promising to “ignore Lower 48 partisanship” and focus on solutions. In Congress, she has been a member of the new “Blue Dog Democrats,” a loose group of 11 Democratic members who push centrist policies.
Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. So, while the winner will almost certainly be Peltola or Begich, the secondary selections of voters who chose minor-candidate voters will matter, too. (The process will also slow down ballot tabulation, meaning we may not know the outcome on Election Day itself.)
In Alaska, rural areas tend to hew to the Democratic Party line, while cities vote red. It’s a place where the top issues aren’t the “culture wars you’ll see downstate,” as Michelle Sparck, director of the nonprofit Get Out The Native Vote, put it. “60 percent of Alaskans do not identify for one party or another.” Instead, the things people are likely to hinge their vote on are much more concrete: fisheries regulation, oil policy, and electric subsidies.
Overall, Peltola has anchored her campaign on keeping the issues local. At an October 10th debate, she turned a question about immigration into an answer about “outmigration.” For the past 12 years, more Alaskans have left the state than moved there—pushed out by high prices and limited job opportunities.
“We do need immigration reform,” she said, but “I don’t think that this is necessarily an Alaskan problem. This is definitely a lower 48 problem…Alaska is desperate for workers and we have an outmigration problem in Alaska.”
Peltola has spent most of her time in Congress working on issues immediately relevant to her base: the funding of broadband internet in Alaska’s rural areas, and, of course, fish. Throughout much of the state, subsistence hunters are facing “salmon scarcity” in warming waters, and the state’s fishing industry is losing billions per year.
And while abortion wasn’t always an issue that could be tackled from the center-leaning position Peltola occupies, she’s made it a cornerstone of her re-election campaign. “Being pregnant and delivering a baby is one of the most lethal things a woman can do in her lifetime,” she said recently. “Myriad things can go wrong, and it is not anyone’s place in DC or in the state legislature to get between a woman and her doctor.”
Nick Begich and Peltola have a lot in common: they both support military spending in Alaska, the development of a trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline, and Second Amendment rights.
Begich, however, has also said he will not support federal funding for abortions, and has, like many Republican candidates, spent time during debates criticizing the size of the federal budget. The longest paragraph on Begich’s policy-positions webpage is about cryptocurrency’s importance to the future of Alaska. While he talks a lot about the Second Amendment, Peltola is the candidate who’s been endorsed by the National Rifle Association.
John Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party, whose platform includes abolishing all taxation, will likely receive some small percentage of Alaska’s 600,000 votes. And Eric Hafner, who is currently imprisoned in New Jersey for bomb threats, is also running as a Democrat in Alaska, though he has never been there. (Hafner also ran for Congress in Hawaii in 2016 and Oregon in 2018, the latter campaign while on the run from the law.)
Neither the taxation abolisher nor the imprisoned man have much likelihood of winning the race. They might, however, be part of tipping the scales towards Begich, as Republican consultant Matt Shuckerow speculated to the New York Times recently. “The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real,” he said. “This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count.” If voters pick Howe first and Begich second, for example, their second-place vote would count for more than their first-place one.
Begich is loyal to his party, and in a state that is technically majority-Republican, that might be enough to win. That technical majority, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. In the 86 percent of Alaska communities that aren’t connected by roads—generally, majority-Native —residents aren’t likely to declare a party affiliation. “Long-term investment in party politics is really the privilege of a road-system people.” Michelle Sparck of Get Out The Native Vote says. Those communities, too, could sway the election.
But disinvestment in the infrastructure of voting in rural, majority-Indigenous districts can mean low turnout. In 2020, the Northwest Arctic Borough, where 83.8 percent of voting-age residents are Indigenous, had a turnout of only 38 percent. In many cases, counting those votes requires flying ballots into the cities from small, isolated villages in bush planes. “Even if weather wasn’t a barrier, there’s all kinds of systemic barriers that are at play that create a chronic polling problem for a lot of our rural villages,” Sparck said. In Bethel, Peltola’s hometown, 56 percent of voters turned out in 2022. It is a town of 6,000 with only one polling location.
Alaska’s race is one of only a few that will determine control of the House of Representatives. Since the state only has one House seat, it can’t be gerrymandered—making it a true toss-up in a way few other House districts can be.
On the final day before the election, Peltola’s social media posts were less focused on Democratic control of the house, though, and more on, once again, fish. “Tomorrow, we choose the future of our fisheries,” Peltola wrote. “Do we work to get back to abundance and keep our communities food secure for generations to come, or do we see our fisheries collapse?”
“When Mary and I were kids, our rivers were lousy with fish,” Sparck, of Get Out The Native Vote, remembered. “We don’t have that anymore. If we had crickets in Alaska, all you’d hear is crickets out there. And it’s a crying shame that we don’t even have enough fish coming up our rivers anymore for reliable subsistence. It’s literally under our feet, what is happening with the world.”
It was Friday, September 6, in the town of Beita, and just like on many Fridays in the West Bank, Mariam watched as people gathered to pray and protest the construction of an Israeli settlement.
For Mariam (whose name has been changed to protect against retribution from Israeli settlers and police), the routine was normal. A few dozen people gathered at midday in a garden at the foot of Mount Sabih: old men, young boys, and international “protective presence” activists like her. A new volunteer, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, was with Mariam. A recent graduate from the University of Washington, it was only her third day in the West Bank. It would be, Mariam realized, Eygi’s first demonstration.
For decades, settlers have expanded into the West Bank, taking Palestinian land. Over the past several years, Beita has become a bulwark of Palestinian civil resistance against the Israeli outpost of Evyatar, which was built on a nearby hilltop in 2021. In July, the United Nations’ top court declared that settlements in the West Bank—housing over 500,000 Jewish Israelis, buoyed by religious fervor and generousgovernment tax breaks—are illegal under international law. But that same month, Israel’s government moved to formally authorize Evyatar and four other settlements rather than push settlers to withdraw as the International Court of Justice ordered.
Before the protest began, international activists and Palestinians shared coffee and dates; photos from that morning show Eygi grinning in a bright purple shirt and sunglasses. She was one of many international volunteers who have traveled to the West Bank since the early 2000s to accompany Palestinians—mostly in villages under threat from settlers—throughout their day-to-day lives to document instances of violence, home demolition, and displacement.
It began as one of the “calmer days,” Mariam remembers. Then, there was a push up the mountain by protesters and tear gas thrown by Israeli forces. Palestinian protesters had barely finished praying when soldiers advanced on them, Oren Ziv, an Israeli journalist with the outlets +972Magazine and Local Call, told Mother Jones. “The army was dispersing the demo with tear gas and live ammunition at the start”— soldiers firing bullets from the very beginning.
Mariam, Eygi, and another volunteer ran downhill to take shelter behind olive trees. A group of teenage boys farther up the road shouted at the soldiers on top of the hill. What was left of the protest, Mariam said, dispersed, and things quieted down as protesters cleaned tear gas out of their eyes.
About 20 minutes later, shots rang out once more. A bullet reportedly hit a Palestinian teenager in the leg. Another hit Eygi in the head.
Mariam rode in the ambulance with her to Rafidia hospital in Nablus, where, according to the hospital director, Eygi was declared dead. “We were just standing there, clearly visible to the Israeli army,” Mariam said. Because women from Beita rarely come to the protests, it was, to Mariam, clear to the soldiers that Eygi was an international volunteer. She thinks the purpose was obvious: “It was an intentional shot.”
The United States has not made that same determination. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the government takes “the safety and security of American citizens incredibly seriously.” Shortly after Eygi’s killing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest.”
But US government statements have stopped short of criticism of Israel. The State Department has said it will wait for Israel to investigate and determine what happened that day. An initial press release from the Israel Defense Forces suggested that the gun was not aimed at Eygi, but at an “instigator” of what they describe as a “violent riot.” The IDF has said it is conducting a formal investigation and has not said when findings might be available.
“She was a human being. She wasn’t a symbol. She had a life. She has people that are in deep pain because of what’s happened, and the inaction of our government only deepens that pain.”
“I mean, the secretary of state himself called Aysenur’s killing unprovoked and unjustified,” Eygi’s husband, Hamid Ali, told Mother Jones. “Why are we allowing the country that admitted to killing my wife to conduct their own investigation on themselves? In what situation does that make sense?”
A month after Eygi’s death, I began to speak with her fellow protective presence activists, many of whom have remained in the West Bank as the olive harvest—always a season of increased violence—begins. The US government response has disillusioned them. It is now clear, they say, that the US has no interest in protecting them if doing so would mean critiquing Israel and perhaps would rather that they just go away.
“The Israeli authorities now are just trying to get rid of us,” Mariam said.
Noah, another volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement—the activist group that brought Eygi to the West Bank—says they feel similarly horrified by the US response. (Noah’s name, like Mariam’s, has been changed for their safety.) Noah helped Eygi coordinate her travel, texting her about picking out a SIM card and planning her flights. After the shooting, Noah was left to notify Eygi’s family when she died.
“They murdered Aysenur,” Noah told Mother Jones. “And somehow, they’re getting away with it because the United States is not willing to take a stand for Aysenur or for all the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered by Israel.”
The first time President Joe Biden addressed Eygi’s death, he said, “Apparently, it was an accident.” (A Biden administration official told Mother Jones, “He did not misspeak, that’s what the Israeli investigation concluded.”) A day later, he called the death “unacceptable,” a “tragic error”—but he promised the Israeli army would investigate its own soldiers. Turkey, the country where Eygi spent her early childhood and held dual citizenship, has pushed for an independent investigation. In the month since, there has been little further US response.
Over the past four years, at least 15 Palestinian protesters have been killed on that hillside where Eygi was shot.
Ziv, the Israeli reporter, called the US response naive. “The army doesn’t really want to investigate itself,” he said. “If they were under real pressure, they would have published something like, ‘We detained a soldier, we investigated a soldier, we took their weapons,’ [and] I think, if there was real pressure from the US, they could have done that.”
For Eygi’s family and supporters, that is not enough. More than 100 members of Congress, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adam Smith. (D-Wash.), are pushing the US government to conduct an independent investigation to determine whether what happened that day constitutes a homicide. “I have had numerous briefings with State Department officials, and I have been in close touch with Eygi’s family, as her father is my constituent,” Jayapal wrote in a statement October 9. “I am frankly appalled with the lack of movement on this case.”
The State Department has been in contact with Eygi’s family since her death, and a Biden administration official told Mother Jones on Monday that the White House had reached out to her family. Earlier this year, Biden said, “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But as of Thursday, Eygi’s husband said he has heard nothing from Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We were expecting to hear from either the president or the vice president by now, especially since they have expressed, from their statements, that this was something that shouldn’t have happened,” Ali told Mother Jones. “It’s kind of hurtful to have not heard from them.”
IDF violence against Palestinians and their supporters in the West Bank is rarely investigated. The Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit Yesh Din reports that between 2017 and 2021, the Israeli military received 409 reports alleging a soldier killed a Palestinian. Only three resulted in indictments.
Protective presence activists know their work is dangerous. “But it’s not a suicide mission,” Noah told me. “You don’t go there expecting to be killed.”
Noah often thinks about how when soldiers and settlers do harm to Americans in the West Bank, they might be using American guns to do so. “Every time someone’s shot in the West Bank, it’s almost certainly weapons that were…originally purchased from the US or purchased with money from the US,” Noah said.
Although it’s unclear what type of gun was used to kill Eygi, IDF soldiers have over the years shot at other protesters with .22-caliber Rugerrifles manufactured in the United States and used for “riot control.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza expands into Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank are getting less attention—even as they increase their violence. International Crisis Group, a think tank that monitors conflict globally, stated in a major report that there have been over 1,000 documented instances of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in the past year in which over 1,300 Palestinians have been driven from their homes.
“We do hope that, with our presence, there’s a bit less violence from the army,” said Mariam, the volunteer who was with Eygi as she died.
But the Palestinians of Beita tell her to be mindful that her international status is not a cure. “They always warn us to be careful, and they don’t want us to get injured, because they know that once you’re in the West Bank, the Israeli army doesn’t really differentiate,” she said.
Eygi was not the only American shot by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year. Tawfic Abdel Jabbar and Mohammad Alkhdour—both 17-year-old US citizens—were killed in the West Bank in 2024. On each occasion, the US government has condemned the killings without launching investigations. Daniel Santiago, a teacher from New Jersey volunteering with the protective presence group Faz3a, was shot in the leg on August 9 in Beita. Over the past four years, at least 15 Palestinian protesters have been killed on that hillside where both Santiago and Eygi were shot, according to human rights research group Al-Haq; thousands more have been injured.
Santiago is now back home recovering from his wounds. He wrote in a recent op-ed that his hopes for an official US reprisal for his injury by a foreign army are vanishingly slim: “Through the power of our passports and our phones, we hoped to document their crimes and provide a buffer between Palestinians and Israeli forces. But as we’ve seen over the last year, the blood of non-Israelis is not only meaningless, it is praised and humored. International outrage is either non-existent or fleeting to the point of insult.”
Joshua,a PhD candidate studying settler violence, traveled to the South Hebron Hills—a few hours’ drive from where Eygi was killed—in February of this year with the protective presence group the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. Since October 7, 2023, Joshua says, the distinction between settler and soldier has faded: These days, he refers to the armed men in IDF fatigues who patrol the West Bank as settler-soldiers, eliding the distinction altogether. Some are active-duty soldiers, others reservists—or even heavily armed civilians living in the West Bank’s settlements and outposts.
“Something new is happening,” he said, “which is that the near-complete immunity granted to nonstate settler actors [has] allowed them to basically do anything they want, including put on military garb and patrol the place and arrest people and harass people with no consequence.”
Israeli politicians have continually said foreigners in the West Bank are the ones creating the violence, calling them violent anarchists or terrorists. That rhetoric, promoted by ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir—who established a new police team specifically to monitor left-wing activists in April, calling it “the team for handling the anarchists”—was used not only to threaten the foreign activists, but the Palestinians they work with. “Settlement emergency squads” and civilian settlers have been furnished with military-grade weapons by Ben-Gvir’s decree.
“If you come back with these anarchists, we’re going to shoot you,” Joshua remembered a settler threatening a Palestinian friend. He wondered if that meant his presence was making the village safer or putting it in more danger.
With the yearlyolive harvest underway, the violence has not slowed down. On October 15, two American activists with Faz3a were arrested, charged with entering a closed military zone and “identifying with a terrorist organization,” and slated for deportation, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The next day, Hanan Abd Rahman Abu Salameh, a 59-year-old Palestinian woman, was killed while harvesting olives by someone in IDF fatigues. (Reporters initially were unable to clarify whether the killer was or was not an active-duty soldier.) Patel, the State Department spokesperson, called her death “incredibly concerning” but once again did not call for an independent investigation. An IDF spokesperson said that the incident is under investigation and that “the commanding officer present during the incident has been suspended from her duties.”
Palestinians going about their daily life are much more likely to end up on the wrong end of a soldier’s gun than American solidarity activists. The color of Eygi’s passport brought her death into the news—but that same day, not far from Beita, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Bana was killed by Israeli soldiers, too.
Eygi was given a hero’s funeral in Palestine. Back home in the US, her family is still waiting for a full response from the government. “What we’re asking for is not uncommon,” Ali said. “Americans were killed on October 7. Each one of their deaths was investigated, as it should have been. We know this is possible, and it’s something that should happen; I’m glad that it happened. It seems to be not as much of a priority to investigate Americans that are killed by Israel.”
Ali continued: “She was a human being. She wasn’t a symbol. She had a life. She has people that are in deep pain because of what’s happened, and the inaction of our government only deepens that pain.”
On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it.
The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment.
The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.
The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”
McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.
It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.
In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.
Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.)
Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.
The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.
On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it.
The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment.
The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.
The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”
McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.
It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.
In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.
Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.)
Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.
The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life.
“There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?”
With international journalists banned from Gaza and Palestinian journalists openly targeted by the Israeli military, international medical aid workers have become some of the few people able to tell the world about the toll of the war.
When the New York Times approached Sidhwa to write for its opinion section about what he saw in Gaza—widespread starvation, collapsed sanitary systems—he took it as an opportunity. He went beyond writing from his own experience and corroborated his account with 64 other doctors. In particular, he was haunted by something he saw again and again: children shot in the head.
“Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die,” he wrote. At first, he thought this was an anomaly, the work of “a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby.” But when he asked other health care workers, he found that dozens were seeing the same thing.
After his essay in the Times was published, prominent right-wing accounts on X and Instagram, as well as publications like the New York Sun and Israel Hayom, began insisting that the CT images included in Sidhwa’s essay—showing bullets embedded in children’s skulls—had been photoshopped and that Sidhwa was a propagandist desperate for the fall of Israel.
The New York Times did something unusual in response: It released an editors’ note defending its own fact-checking process. “While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos—of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck—were too horrific for publication,” Times editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote. “We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.”
Sidhwa found the pushback odd. “I don’t really care about Palestinian nationalism. In fact, I don’t really care about any nationalism as a concept,” he told me. The issue, he said, is simpler than that: “My government, meaning me, is involved in major crimes, and I don’t want that.”
On October 18, as reported by the Washington Post, Israel banned six medical aid organizations—including the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), which Sidhwa has worked with—from entry to Gaza going forward. The WHO received no explanation from Israel as to why.
I spoke with Sidhwa by Zoom between surgeries about his work in Gaza, his advocacy since then, and why he’s still hoping—even now—that the US government might be pressured to change course.
Let’s go back to before all the media attention. How did you end up going to Gaza?
So a very large number of physicians, and especially surgeons, have been killed and probably about an equal number have fled.
Mark Perlmutter, he was involved in a telemedicine project with Gazans. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He was looking at pre- and post-op X-rays, and he was like, “What on earth is this stuff? Who’s doing these operations?” He found out it was just junior residents or sometimes medical students. And he asked, “Where’s your attending?” And they said, “Well, he’s dead.”
We said: Well, we will go provide that service.
I was at European Hospital from March 25 to April 8. At that time, European Hospital was easily the best-resourced city block in all of Gaza—and it was still a total disaster. There were 10,000 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital. I walked the hospital grounds several times. I was able to find four toilets, so 10,000 to 15,000 people, four latrines, one water spigot.
Feroze Sidhwa
I got the chance to go to Rafah, before it was obliterated, and drive through Khan Younis. And while we’re driving through, there was a group of four boys, probably like 10 to 12 years old. Young kids. They’re going through a garbage heap, trying to find anything, and they’re working together to do it. It’s pretty obvious that this wasn’t the first time they had done this.
On the way through Khan Younis, I told the driver to stop. He said it’s not safe, but I asked him to stop, just for a second. I got out and I looked around.
I don’t think, if I grew up at this intersection, I would know where I am. There weren’t any buildings that were more than 3 feet tall anymore. It looked like an atomic bomb hit the place.
Since your New York Times article came out, you’ve been the subject of a backlash campaign, with people claiming to be former law enforcement officers suggesting that the X-rays of children with bullets in their skulls embedded in the article were fabricated. What’s your reaction to those claims?
The article polled 65 American health care workers—doctors, nurses, one paramedic—and gathered their experience in the Gaza Strip. How many of them saw children who had been shot in the head? How many of them regularly? How many of them saw malnourishment and easily treatable infections? How many of them saw infants die from malnutrition or dehydration? How many saw such extreme, universal psychiatric distress in small children, to the point that small children were actually suicidal?
It’s 65, which represents, as far as I can tell, about half of the health care workers in the US that have been to Gaza since October 7 [of 2023].
The New York Times fact-checking process is fanatical. It’s beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. I don’t know if people realize it took months to write this. It was an incredible effort of time and resources, on my part and theirs—the team of four people working on it.
So then when all this manufactured nonsense from people claiming to be either doctors or ballistics experts, none of whom are either one of these things, came up…
I asked them: Guys, how are we going to prove that? They’re like: Oh, Feroze, we have photographs of these kids. We have the entire CT image on video. Like, there’s no question. I saw 13 kids who had been shot in the head. So there were almost certainly more kids who came in when I wasn’t in the ER, got shot in the head, died, and were sent directly to the morgue.
On the occasions where the child survived, and I think this only happened once, honestly—on the occasion when the child survived long enough and there was family available in the ICU the next day to ask what happened—they would say, the kids were just playing. I never heard from a family that they were in a crossfire, that there was lots of fighting and the bullet went through the window; I never heard that.
What do you think people are getting out of ignoring the evidence here? When you spoke at the Uncommitted press conference at the DNC, you referenced the book Slavery by Another Name and talked about what Douglas Blackmon calls “moral rationalization”—when people know something’s wrong and illegal and continue to do it anyway. Is that part of what’s happening here?
The book is about how slavery was resurrected in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. And it’s quite literally chattel slavery was just reinstituted in the South, maybe on a smaller scale, but nevertheless reinstituted. And this is under Northern occupation, with the Northern judicial systems, you know?
It’s interesting, because you read through it and you think, how could this have happened? Like, slavery was a large part of the reason for the war, and then after the war…the whole society just knew when to lie and when to tell the truth. They knew who to beat up and who not to beat up. They knew who to kill, who not to kill, who to torture, who not to torture.
I don’t remember the exact words I used at the DNC, but I said something like, lying became a virtue. It just turned all of our normal moral values on their head when the whole society committed to this transparently and obviously immoral enterprise.
It’s hard not to see that here.
I hope the fact that this piece was published in the New York Times—and you gotta remember that the Times opinion section reached out to me, I didn’t go to them—I hope that it represents a change in the elite consensus around Gaza.
I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding. They say, “Oh, look, the mainstream is becoming pro-Palestine.” I seriously doubt that. I think there’s a recognition that the Israelis have kind of gone nuts in Gaza and that American objectives there have been achieved. And the extent of what has been done to Gaza—it takes about 10 minutes just to describe the actual extent of destruction and devastation of the Gaza Strip in any accurate form.
How does it feel to see people online refusing to believe these images are real?
I think that’s just, it’s completely amongst die-hard believers.
I’m not Israeli, I’m not Jewish, I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Arab, I’m not Muslim, I’m not Christian—like, I don’t know how much further away I can get from the conflict. It’s just got nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I’m an American.
After this is done, we Americans need to take a long, hard look at ourselves. What does it say that the United States doesn’t have a mainstream political party for which genocide is just a no-go?
The US entered four or five caveats to its signing of the of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So it basically immunized itself from the convention. And yeah, that was [under then-President Ronald] Reagan. But still, we don’t have a mainstream political party that is opposed to genocide on principle.
That’s very scary, given the power of the state that we live in. My intention in writing the piece was to bring people to such realizations. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
Beyond your media work, you helped lead this effort to send Joe Biden a letter signed by, I think, 99 volunteer medical professionals who served in Gaza. And in that letter, you all asked him to meet with you and support an arms embargo. Have you received any response to that letter from the administration?
No, nothing, which is quite frustrating. I don’t know how often almost a hundred doctors send a letter to the president of the United States, but it doesn’t happen very often. So I’m kind of surprised that we received literally no response whatsoever.
I’m not that important of a person, I understand that. But I mean, on that letter are veterans, are reservists, are people whose names don’t sound scary like mine: Monica, Nina, Mike, Mark, Adam. It’s not just people that you can dismiss, and yet they’re dismissing them. It’s a little scary to see the American elite kind of ignoring its own. You kind of wonder how extreme that can get.
There’s no shortage of information about this. It’s not like Brett McGurk [the White House coordinator for the Middle East] and people like him and [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken—they know what’s going on. They’re not idiots. They can read English, just like I can. There’s no way they didn’t see that New York Times piece, or at least one of their aides did and told them about it.
If I could, I’d say: “Mr. Biden, the Israelis have decided to turn Gaza into a howling wilderness, and there are a million children there. You don’t have to let the Israelis keep spitting in your face like this. You can just tell them the money’s gone, the arms are gone. Withdraw from Gaza, withdraw from the West Bank, remove the settlements.”
Did you stay in touch with the folks you met at European Hospital? What have you been hearing from them?
There was a young man whose name was Abdulrahman Al-Najjar. And he was a third-year med student, a smart kid. If he was born in the US, he really would have gone far. He was probably 21 or 22 when I met him. The medical students were all at European Hospital because it was the safest place to be, and they had all been displaced from Gaza City and were living in tents just like everybody else. But they would come to the hospital, and they would help run the ER. Even the first-year med students, who know literally nothing about anything, they just came and did their job, and these are 18- and 19-year-old kids.
But Abdulrahman, he was a good kid. He wanted to be a plastic surgeon or maybe a neurosurgeon. And I remember when I left, he said: “Don’t remember Gaza like this. Come back when there’s no war, and we’ll go to the beach and we’ll have tea. And that’s how you should remember Gaza.” He’s a sweet kid, smart, you know?
He was killed in an airstrike on August 31. That’s the same day Hersh Goldberg-Polin is thought to have been killed. The 23-year-old Israeli American guy who was taken hostage at the music festival and was found dead in a Hamas tunnel, probably executed before he could be rescued.
When I saw the pictures of him in the news, I thought, good lord, he looks exactly like Abdul. If you look at them side by side, they’re almost identical human beings. They have the same smile. They have the same ears, the same nose. And I didn’t find out Abdul was dead until the day after.
I’m still in touch with some people. They don’t have much cell service. And my Arabic is as close to zero as you can imagine, so it’s hard.
As you know, six medical aid groups were banned from sending doctors to Gaza, including PAMA, the group that you’ve worked with. What was your reaction to that?
It’s kind of wild. COGAT, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories—the part of the Israeli government that’s supposed to coordinate between humanitarian groups and the military—COGAT apparently provides nothing to the WHO in writing. I couldn’t believe that. I was like, this is insane, what are you talking about? All of this is just by word of mouth. It’s actually not even clear how many organizations have been banned or who they are. So who the hell knows?
They were western NGOs—some were American, some were Canadian, and one was from Australia or New Zealand. But they have Arab boards. That’s all it is. Arab names on their boards. It’s just outrageous. They knew they could get away with it, and they did. No one even claims that there has ever been a security incident associated with any of these people that any of these groups have brought to the territories.
It tells you something about our own society. I just got an email five minutes ago from the [Kamala] Harris campaign saying, oh my God, Michigan is in play, and we’re so screwed. Like, yeah, that’s your fault. I’m sure everybody wants to vote because they’re so frightened of Donald Trump. I mean, it’s a sensible thing to be frightened of; I am, too.
But all she would have to do is get on TV and say, “Israel has banned several Arab-led western NGOs, I find this totally unacceptable, and when I’m president, I will tell the Israelis they have to reverse that immediately.” If she did that, she’d probably get, like, 90 percent of that Arab vote back. She won’t even do that. It’s pathetic. It’s so crazy how committed this administration, including very clearly its vice president, is to this insane project of just obliterating Gaza. It’s just a fanatical dedication to this project, and it’s weird.
There’s been some speculation that the ban might’ve had to do with how doctors like yourself are serving as these sort of de facto international spokespeople. What do you think about that?
I’ve had several people tell me this is my fault, for the New York Times article. And I have to tell them, honestly, you might be right. I don’t think you are, but it’s entirely possible, you know? They were trying to help people. They feel like that’s been cut away from them. They’re angry about it. If they want to blame me for it, that’s understandable.
The Israelis have always had veto power over who goes in when. I suspect that this has been in the works for a while, and the timing probably just is happenstance, but I can’t prove it. I don’t know.
You mentioned wanting to go back. Why do you want to go back to Gaza?
I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t want to leave. I think it’s kind of a universal thing. Everybody, as they exit, suddenly has an existential crisis, like, why do I get to leave and these people have to stay?
And then you’re thinking, man, I’ve got to come back somehow. These people need help, they need protection. They need a hand to hold. They need—anything.
When the vans were coming to pick us up, we had all gathered there at 8 in the morning, 7:30 in the morning. The sun’s just come up. And there was this security guard who was there with his one-and-a-half-year-old, 2-year-old son, just kind of playing with him, babying him, you know. I remember Mark, like, force-feeding the kid all the candy he had left over. At one point, the conversation stopped, and we all just kind of looked at each other, and then we looked at that kid, and we were all thinking exactly the same thing. Why does this kid have to live in this Hobbesian hellhole of violence and hunger and fear and terror, and we just get to leave?
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
On Wednesday, during a routine operation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—seemingly stumbling into realizing a major military objective. Despite over a year’s worth of efforts, Israeli soldiers appear to have found Sinwar by accident. After killing three people during a normal operation, they apparently realized that one of the men resembled the Hamas leader. The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death on Thursday.
“I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”
Israel and the United States have been trying to find and kill Sinwar since last October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast his death as one of the main reasons for Israel’s unceasing bombardment of Gaza, saying a main war objective is “eliminating” Hamas leadership.
With this objective met, Sinwar’s death could present a chance to end what has become a regional war. Vice President Kamala Harris said after the killing that Sinwar’s death gave “us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.” But it seems unlikely that Israeli and American leaders will fully press in this moment.
A former Biden administration official said they do believe that Sinwar’s death will be viewed by the administration as “somewhat of an opportunity to secure an end to the conflict,” particularly ahead of the elections as they try to win back votes that they “certainly have lost.” The problem, the former official explained, is that “I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”
The next move from Israel’s government, at the moment, is unclear. On Thursday, Netanyahu stated that “the mission ahead of us has not been completed.” In an initial statement Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that while Sinwar’s death is a vital goal it would not mean the end of the war in Gaza.
Sinwar was killed just over a year after he orchestrated the October 7 attack in which Hamas killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. In response, the Israeli military has leveled Gaza, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. (The full death toll is feared to be more than double that number, according to some public health experts.)
Sinwar’s death comes at a time when ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza have effectively fallen apart and the conflict has expanded throughout the region.
Israel recently launched a major invasion of Lebanon, where more than 2,000 people have now been killed. And Israel is on the verge of striking Iran in response to the ballistic missiles it launched against Israel on October 1. Iran’s decision to strike Israel came after a series of increasingly aggressive Israeli escalations in Lebanon—including extensive bombardment of residential areas in Beirut—that seemed all but guaranteed to provoke an Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah officials supported multiple ceasefireoffers in early October, none of which Netanyahu accepted. (The US is not currently pushing publicly for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel.)
The Biden administration could use Sinwar’s death as leverage to push for an end to what is now a regional war. This would build on a letter the United States recently sent to Israel that gave Israel 30 days to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, or face potential restrictions on US weapons exports to Israel. “I don’t think [the Israeli government] will be responsive to the letter,” the former Biden official said. “I don’t think they take our threat seriously. I don’t think the US government would withhold weapons. I think this is a signal that won’t be followed through on.” (Human rights groups, according to a report in Politico, voiced similar concerns that “rules don’t apply” to Israel.)
Israel has now killed the top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah: Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, and in July, Israeli is widely understood to have assassinated Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (Haniyeh, who was Hamas’ key ceasefire negotiator, was considered to be more moderate than Sinwar.)
Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble following one of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in modern history. The IDF has dropped at least 75,000 tons of bombs on the territory, killed at least one out of every 55 people in Gaza, and has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid. Its actions in Gaza have reportedly violated international human rights law and—along with Hamas’ actions on October 7—constitute potential war crimes in the view of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A case in the International Court of Justice asserting Israel is actively committing a genocide is proceeding as well.
Both Iran and Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, have signaled they would like to avoid a full-scale war with Israel that could potentially further involve the United States. The question remains whether the Biden administration is willing to use its extensive leverage as Israel’s primary weapons supplier to force an end to the conflict.
Update, October 17: This post has been updated to reflect a new statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuand a new statement from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yesterday, Axios reporter Barak Ravid published a copy of a letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israel urging the country to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza—and, in a rare move for the Biden administration, backing that request up by publicly threatening to remove some military aid.
“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM-20,” Blinken and Austin wrote, suggesting that the US could withhold money from Israel if the country does not: enable 350 aid trucks to enter daily, reinstitute “humanitarian pauses” in their military operations, allow Palestinians to move inland before winter, and open an additional aid crossing within thirty days.
“Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account.”
The State Department confirmed the veracity of the letter. And Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative to the United Nations, today said the effort was to ensure there was not a “policy of starvation” for a region that has received zero food or medical aid since October 1st.
Israeli press reported that 50 trucks of food aid entered North Gaza today, likely in response. But it still is not clear yet whether the administration will actually back up its words with action before the election and pull military funds if Israel continues blocking aid.
NSM-20, the policy directive Blinken and Austin reference in their letter, is based on an amendment filed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in December of 2023. The policy requires that the provision of US “security assistance” comply with international law, and that countries receiving US weapons and military funding—of which Israel has received over $17.9 billion in the past year—do not also obstruct the provision of humanitarian aid. This past spring, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid; Blinken rejected the reports, according to ProPublica.
“As the humanitarian situation in Gaza has gone from horrible to catastrophic, the Biden Administration has failed in its ongoing duty to apply the law and terms of NSM-20,” Van Hollen said Tuesday. “Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account in meeting the requirements set forth in the secretaries’ letter.”
Annelle Sheline, a Quincy Institute analyst who resigned from the State Department in April over Biden’s Gaza policy, wrote on X that the letter, which expresses “concern” that Israel is impeding the movement of civilians within Gaza and prohibiting nearly all aid from entering the strip, is also a “clear acknowledgement” that section 620I of the foreign assistance act is being violated. 620I—which prohibits the provision of military aid to foreign governments which restrict humanitarian aid—“has never been systematically implemented,” according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts since the war began a year ago. The United Nations said that Israel blocked all food aid from entering north Gaza between October 1st and October 14th. Health officials at North Gaza hospitals say food, medicine, and even water are running out.
The letter’s 30-day deadline means any threats it contains won’t be enforceable until after the US presidential election. And Austin announced on October 13th, just days before the letter, that the US would send another THAAD missile defense battery—along with about 100 soldiers to operate it—to supplement Israel’s pre-existing air defenses.
Annelle Sheline, the ex-State-Department official, told the Wall Street Journalshe suspects it’s a strategy to gain Arab and Muslim votes in key swing states like Michigan for Harris, rather than a real attempt to shift Israel’s policy long-term. “It’s very convenient that the deadline is after the election,” she said.
On October 7, 2024, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released two new reports. One report from the military-research group details how much the United States government has spent aiding the Israeli military between October 2023 and September 2024. The other gathers and evaluates previously published data to estimate the human cost of this past year’s unrelenting violence.
In both cases, the researchers show staggering new findings.
The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.
Human Cost
To estimate the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, researcher Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins started with the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of confirmed deaths, which has now surpassed 41,615.
Beyond that, an estimated 10,000 people are buried under rubble. Over the past year, 60 percent of buildings and nearly all road-systems in Gaza have been destroyed, making the retrieval of dead and injured people near-impossible. Adding an estimate of those who have died by starvation—about 62,413 people—brings the total estimated death toll to 114,000, or about 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Those likely death-by-starvation numbers come from a letter 99 physicians who served in Gaza sent President Joe Biden last week.
“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” the physicians wrote to Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
Still, as Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell told Mother Jones, factors like the destruction of water infrastructure and sanitary facilities mean the real loss may be incalculable for years to come. Savell said that the numbers used here are a “really solid, conservative minimum number of deaths.”
Given the depletion of Gaza’s medical system, thousands more have likely died due to lack of care for their chronic illnesses. (Cancer care, for example, has been unavailable in Gaza, as has most prenatal care. Women are dying in childbirth without adequate care, and are reportedly undergoing cesareans without anesthesia: “A big portion of death tolls from war comes in deaths of newborns, and pregnant mothers,” Savell said.
Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel one year ago on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200, Israel has imposed a severe blockade on food entering Gaza. “96 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse,” the Costs of War Project researchers reported, noting that Israel’s government has limited humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza that might alleviate that hunger or bring in medical supplies. (A recent ProPublica report found that officials with the US State Department were aware that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza, which would have triggered a potential end to arms shipments to the close ally; Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly rejected the findings.)
Researchers at Brown cited the metric for estimating indirect deaths used by the authors of a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet in July, that warned deaths might be much higher in Gaza than currently reported: four “indirect deaths”—that is, preventable deaths from starvation, or untreated illness, for example—for every direct death in a war. In this case, though, “It seems to me that ratio might be much higher,” Savell said.
Costs of War Project researchers Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler calculated that the United States government has spent $17.9 billion providing military supplies—including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, bombs, and jet fuel—to the Israeli army over the past year.
Those weapons have come through a variety of channels, including commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Financing (which provides grants for countries to buy from US defense contractors), and a program providing excess military equipment no longer needed by the US military to ally nations for a steep discount.
“There are different degrees of public information available on each of these arms channels, and there have also been efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” the researchers explained.
In addition to the $17.9 billion going directly to Israel, the US Navy is spending at least $4.86 billion in the region, “primarily defending maritime shipping against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.” The Navy is currently operating two carrier strike groups present in the area, each of which costs $8.7 million per day to operate. (This led to a particularly odd moment when Vice President Kamala Harris boasted on the debate stage that there are no US troops present in conflict zones.)
The amount of taxpayer money sent to Israel this year was not easy to calculate, or perfectly precise. The Pentagon has not been releasing regular reports on weapons transfers and military loans to Israel. Researchers were forced to rely on news reports instead. “The patchwork government reporting on U.S. military aid to Israel contrasts sharply with the treatment of military aid to Ukraine, where dollar amounts, channels of delivery, and specific systems supplied (including how many) are routinely reported in government-supplied fact sheets on a regular basis,” Blimes, Hartung, and Semler wrote.
This year’s $17.9 billion sum is by far the most the US government has spent on Israel’s military since the country’s founding in 1948, the researchers said, adding that the spending “exceeds the historic amounts of military aid approved for Israel following the Camp David Accords in 1978 and, before that, the start of the October War of 1973.” Though this number is unusually high, Israel has throughout its history received more US military aid than any other country, benefiting from $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959.
“All of us have an obligation to…put the pieces of the picture together, and to look at not just the money that’s spent on war, but its toll on human lives,” Savell said.
On October 7, 2024, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released two new reports. One report from the military-research group details how much the United States government has spent aiding the Israeli military between October 2023 and September 2024. The other gathers and evaluates previously published data to estimate the human cost of this past year’s unrelenting violence.
In both cases, the researchers show staggering new findings.
The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.
Human Cost
To estimate the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, researcher Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins started with the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of confirmed deaths, which has now surpassed 41,615.
Beyond that, an estimated 10,000 people are buried under rubble. Over the past year, 60 percent of buildings and nearly all road-systems in Gaza have been destroyed, making the retrieval of dead and injured people near-impossible. Adding an estimate of those who have died by starvation—about 62,413 people—brings the total estimated death toll to 114,000, or about 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Those likely death-by-starvation numbers come from a letter 99 physicians who served in Gaza sent President Joe Biden last week.
“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” the physicians wrote to Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
Still, as Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell told Mother Jones, factors like the destruction of water infrastructure and sanitary facilities mean the real loss may be incalculable for years to come. Savell said that the numbers used here are a “really solid, conservative minimum number of deaths.”
Given the depletion of Gaza’s medical system, thousands more have likely died due to lack of care for their chronic illnesses. (Cancer care, for example, has been unavailable in Gaza, as has most prenatal care. Women are dying in childbirth without adequate care, and are reportedly undergoing cesareans without anesthesia: “A big portion of death tolls from war comes in deaths of newborns, and pregnant mothers,” Savell said.
Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel one year ago on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200, Israel has imposed a severe blockade on food entering Gaza. “96 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse,” the Costs of War Project researchers reported, noting that Israel’s government has limited humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza that might alleviate that hunger or bring in medical supplies. (A recent ProPublica report found that officials with the US State Department were aware that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza, which would have triggered a potential end to arms shipments to the close ally; Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly rejected the findings.)
Researchers at Brown cited the metric for estimating indirect deaths used by the authors of a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet in July, that warned deaths might be much higher in Gaza than currently reported: four “indirect deaths”—that is, preventable deaths from starvation, or untreated illness, for example—for every direct death in a war. In this case, though, “It seems to me that ratio might be much higher,” Savell said.
Costs of War Project researchers Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler calculated that the United States government has spent $17.9 billion providing military supplies—including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, bombs, and jet fuel—to the Israeli army over the past year.
Those weapons have come through a variety of channels, including commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Financing (which provides grants for countries to buy from US defense contractors), and a program providing excess military equipment no longer needed by the US military to ally nations for a steep discount.
“There are different degrees of public information available on each of these arms channels, and there have also been efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” the researchers explained.
In addition to the $17.9 billion going directly to Israel, the US Navy is spending at least $4.86 billion in the region, “primarily defending maritime shipping against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.” The Navy is currently operating two carrier strike groups present in the area, each of which costs $8.7 million per day to operate. (This led to a particularly odd moment when Vice President Kamala Harris boasted on the debate stage that there are no US troops present in conflict zones.)
The amount of taxpayer money sent to Israel this year was not easy to calculate, or perfectly precise. The Pentagon has not been releasing regular reports on weapons transfers and military loans to Israel. Researchers were forced to rely on news reports instead. “The patchwork government reporting on U.S. military aid to Israel contrasts sharply with the treatment of military aid to Ukraine, where dollar amounts, channels of delivery, and specific systems supplied (including how many) are routinely reported in government-supplied fact sheets on a regular basis,” Blimes, Hartung, and Semler wrote.
This year’s $17.9 billion sum is by far the most the US government has spent on Israel’s military since the country’s founding in 1948, the researchers said, adding that the spending “exceeds the historic amounts of military aid approved for Israel following the Camp David Accords in 1978 and, before that, the start of the October War of 1973.” Though this number is unusually high, Israel has throughout its history received more US military aid than any other country, benefiting from $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959.
“All of us have an obligation to…put the pieces of the picture together, and to look at not just the money that’s spent on war, but its toll on human lives,” Savell said.
On October 1, 2024, as Israel began a ground incursion of Lebanon and Iran prepared to fire missiles into Israel, Foreign Affairs published a piece from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “America’s strategy for renewal” in a “new world.”
Like policy adviser Jake Sullivan’s essay in the same magazine a year ago—boasting of a “quiet” Middle East—Blinken’s manifesto had an ironic twist. It was published right as fighting broke out.
A different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of the big war to change the Middle East.
In the essay, Blinken promised a way forward that was actively failing. Over the past fifteen days, the Biden administration’s putative plan to avoid regional war has collapsed. Here is how Blinken described (in one long-winded sentence) the goals of US foreign policy in the Middle East:
The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza, find a diplomatic solution that enables Israelis and Lebanese to live in safety on both sides of the border, manage the risk of a wider regional war, and work toward greater integration and normalization in the region, including between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Every single thing Blinken said the administration is working “tirelessly” for is the opposite of what is happening: There is not a ceasefire, nor an end to suffering in Gaza; there is more conflict between Israel and Lebanon; there is a growing likelihood of a full regional war; and Saudi Arabia has now said it won’t normalize diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestinians get a state (something Israel has no plans to allow).
As Blinken’s plans have failed—and Israel has ignored stern warnings from Biden that did not carry consequences—an old hope has returned. In the three days since the Secretary of State’s essay, a different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of a potential big war to change the Middle East.
After the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, the US has seen a rhetorical push—from background administration sources, former government officials, op-ed columnists, and TV pundits—for a reshaping of the Middle East through large conflict (and away from the immediate goal of just stopping the death in Gaza). The war hawks are back in full force. In newspapers and speeches, there has been a return of neoconservative talking points and even repeated requests for Israel, or the United States, to attack Iran.
Politico reported that top Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk privately supported Netanyahu as he shifted Israel’s strategy towards “reshaping the Middle East.” Jared Kushner, current son-in-law and former adviser to Donald Trump, had a similar idea. He called Israel’s actions in Lebanon “brilliant, rapid-fire technical successes” and said that “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade [Hezbollah] was possible.” Kushner began to see the possibility of a total reconfiguration of the Middle East in the wake of the bombings, he said on X.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what Israel’s plans in Lebanon were,” John Bolton, famous war enjoyer, said Tuesday, “but their plans should not be for a limited incursion.”
In the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested that America “absolutely” should escalate directly and attack Iran. (He then proceeded to name specific missile complexes he believes Biden should be planning to destroy.) Stephens said he is looking forward to when Israel “completes Hezbollah’s decapitation in Lebanon and Hamas’s evisceration in Gaza.”
On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) seemed to suggest that the Biden administration should stop calling for ceasefires altogether. He described Biden’s current position as deeply self-contradictory: “On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel. On the other hand, they’re constantly telling Israel: ceasefire. That’s very, very strange.”
Other Republicans chimed in on which places to bomb first. “I would urge the Biden Administration to coordinate an overwhelming response with Israel, starting with Iran’s ability to refine oil,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested. “This is a moment of choosing for the free world regarding Iran.”
“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” a source in Gaza texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”
Much of this began in mid-September, when official Israeli Defense Force messaging shifted from “return the hostages,” to “regain control of northern Israel.” It was then that Israel blew up hundreds of pagers and cell phones in Lebanon and Syria, killing both Hezbollah members and civilian children. The attacks injured thousands. In the following week, Israel dropped hundreds of bombs on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continued launching missiles at Israel, attacking further south, aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv.
On September 26th, the US and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire with Lebanon. Netanyahu scuttled the plan. The following day, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech at the UN in which he made it clear that “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory.”
That same day, Israel reportedly dropped more than eighty bombs on four residential buildings in Beirut. They announced that they’d killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the process. Within days, Israeli forces went further and entered Lebanon.
But this escalation has not brought de-escalation. On Tuesday, Israel formally began a ground “offensive” in Lebanon, and Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel (most of which were reportedly intercepted by the US and Israeli militaries). The only person killed in the attack was a Gazan laborer with an Israeli work permit who spent the past year stranded in the West Bank. Damage was also reported at a school in central Israel. In Lebanon, officials say over a thousand people have been killed, and one million displaced.
Throughout all this, the Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza continues. As bombardment in the city of Khan Younis increased, I received panicked messages from Palestinians in European Gaza Hospital who were hearing F-16s outside and witnessing mangled corpses arriving at the emergency room. (“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” one person texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”)
Indeed, global attention is shifting away from Gaza toward everywhere else in the region. At this point, at least four other countries are involved in Israel’s war that began with a goal of eliminating Hamas: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Netanyahu’s government is expected to directly retaliate against Iran soon.
Now, the question is whether America will merely fund that barrage, or more actively join in. The hawks—from background sources to Bolton—seem eager to broaden the violence.
Sullivan, the same man who once called for “red lines” in Rafah and hailed a “quiet” Middle East right before October 7th, spoke from the White House mid-day Tuesday of “consequences” for Iran; and not just doled out by Israel, but potentially levied by the United States and the Biden administration.
“We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” he said. “We have made it clear that there will be consequences—severe consequences—for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.”
On October 1, 2024, as Israel began a ground incursion of Lebanon and Iran prepared to fire missiles into Israel, Foreign Affairs published a piece from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “America’s strategy for renewal” in a “new world.”
Like policy adviser Jake Sullivan’s essay in the same magazine a year ago—boasting of a “quiet” Middle East—Blinken’s manifesto had an ironic twist. It was published right as fighting broke out.
A different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of the big war to change the Middle East.
In the essay, Blinken promised a way forward that was actively failing. Over the past fifteen days, the Biden administration’s putative plan to avoid regional war has collapsed. Here is how Blinken described (in one long-winded sentence) the goals of US foreign policy in the Middle East:
The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza, find a diplomatic solution that enables Israelis and Lebanese to live in safety on both sides of the border, manage the risk of a wider regional war, and work toward greater integration and normalization in the region, including between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Every single thing Blinken said the administration is working “tirelessly” for is the opposite of what is happening: There is not a ceasefire, nor an end to suffering in Gaza; there is more conflict between Israel and Lebanon; there is a growing likelihood of a full regional war; and Saudi Arabia has now said it won’t normalize diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestinians get a state (something Israel has no plans to allow).
As Blinken’s plans have failed—and Israel has ignored stern warnings from Biden that did not carry consequences—an old hope has returned. In the three days since the Secretary of State’s essay, a different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of a potential big war to change the Middle East.
After the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, the US has seen a rhetorical push—from background administration sources, former government officials, op-ed columnists, and TV pundits—for a reshaping of the Middle East through large conflict (and away from the immediate goal of just stopping the death in Gaza). The war hawks are back in full force. In newspapers and speeches, there has been a return of neoconservative talking points and even repeated requests for Israel, or the United States, to attack Iran.
Politico reported that top Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk privately supported Netanyahu as he shifted Israel’s strategy towards “reshaping the Middle East.” Jared Kushner, current son-in-law and former adviser to Donald Trump, had a similar idea. He called Israel’s actions in Lebanon “brilliant, rapid-fire technical successes” and said that “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade [Hezbollah] was possible.” Kushner began to see the possibility of a total reconfiguration of the Middle East in the wake of the bombings, he said on X.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what Israel’s plans in Lebanon were,” John Bolton, famous war enjoyer, said Tuesday, “but their plans should not be for a limited incursion.”
In the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested that America “absolutely” should escalate directly and attack Iran. (He then proceeded to name specific missile complexes he believes Biden should be planning to destroy.) Stephens said he is looking forward to when Israel “completes Hezbollah’s decapitation in Lebanon and Hamas’s evisceration in Gaza.”
On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) seemed to suggest that the Biden administration should stop calling for ceasefires altogether. He described Biden’s current position as deeply self-contradictory: “On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel. On the other hand, they’re constantly telling Israel: ceasefire. That’s very, very strange.”
Other Republicans chimed in on which places to bomb first. “I would urge the Biden Administration to coordinate an overwhelming response with Israel, starting with Iran’s ability to refine oil,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested. “This is a moment of choosing for the free world regarding Iran.”
“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” a source in Gaza texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”
Much of this began in mid-September, when official Israeli Defense Force messaging shifted from “return the hostages,” to “regain control of northern Israel.” It was then that Israel blew up hundreds of pagers and cell phones in Lebanon and Syria, killing both Hezbollah members and civilian children. The attacks injured thousands. In the following week, Israel dropped hundreds of bombs on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continued launching missiles at Israel, attacking further south, aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv.
On September 26th, the US and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire with Lebanon. Netanyahu scuttled the plan. The following day, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech at the UN in which he made it clear that “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory.”
That same day, Israel reportedly dropped more than eighty bombs on four residential buildings in Beirut. They announced that they’d killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the process. Within days, Israeli forces went further and entered Lebanon.
But this escalation has not brought de-escalation. On Tuesday, Israel formally began a ground “offensive” in Lebanon, and Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel (most of which were reportedly intercepted by the US and Israeli militaries). The only person killed in the attack was a Gazan laborer with an Israeli work permit who spent the past year stranded in the West Bank. Damage was also reported at a school in central Israel. In Lebanon, officials say over a thousand people have been killed, and one million displaced.
Throughout all this, the Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza continues. As bombardment in the city of Khan Younis increased, I received panicked messages from Palestinians in European Gaza Hospital who were hearing F-16s outside and witnessing mangled corpses arriving at the emergency room. (“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” one person texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”)
Indeed, global attention is shifting away from Gaza toward everywhere else in the region. At this point, at least four other countries are involved in Israel’s war that began with a goal of eliminating Hamas: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Netanyahu’s government is expected to directly retaliate against Iran soon.
Now, the question is whether America will merely fund that barrage, or more actively join in. The hawks—from background sources to Bolton—seem eager to broaden the violence.
Sullivan, the same man who once called for “red lines” in Rafah and hailed a “quiet” Middle East right before October 7th, spoke from the White House mid-day Tuesday of “consequences” for Iran; and not just doled out by Israel, but potentially levied by the United States and the Biden administration.
“We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” he said. “We have made it clear that there will be consequences—severe consequences—for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.”
When Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Friday morning, he looked out over a world transformed by almost a year of unabated bombing and tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza. Several delegations walked out of his speech and throngs of people outside protested his presence in the city.
The way the world views Netanyahu, and Israel, has changed. But the man’s view of the world remains seemingly unaltered.
After a year of war, global pressure to stop bombing Gaza, protests in Israel to make a peace deal bringing hostages home, and an Israeli military whose soldiers are exhausted and stretched thin, Netanyahu is not preparing for peace. Instead, he’s planning further war. “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory,” he told the UN.
As he gave his speech, reports showed Israel had bombed a neighborhood in southern Lebanon targeting, they said, Hezbollah’s headquarters. Images of destruction flooded social media. This was seemingly, as Israeli sources reportedly said earlier this week, the plan for “de-escalation through escalation.” Peace, Netanyahu told the UN, would come from war.
This stuff is so exhausting. No, Netanyahu doesn't "share the aims" of US policy in Lebanon or Gaza. He wants to bomb the shit out of both places, ignore all US concerns about civilian casualties or regional escalation, and then demand more American weapons and money. https://t.co/jj7oZHShqd
“They put a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage,” Netanyahu told the UN, casting Lebanese civilian homes as legitimate targets. “As long as Hezbollah chooses the path of war, Israel has no choice, and Israel has every right to remove this threat.”
The day before his UN speech, the Israeli Prime Minister spoke of “sharing the aims” of American policy but rejected a US-backed proposal for a ceasefire with Lebanon. That same day, the US signed off on $8.7 billion more military funding for Israel.
Netanyahu’s battles are now expanding on at least three fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank. Despite that, he is still speaking the same way he did a year ago.
In September 2023, he brought a map labeled “the new Middle East” to his UN speech, in which he spoke of two paths forward for the region: a “blessing,” in which Israel is powerful and allied with Saudi Arabia, and a “curse,” in which it is not. In 2024, as an arrest warrant from the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for war crimes hung over his head, Netanyahu spoke as though the past year simply had not happened.
Just as he did in 2023, he waved around maps as props. (Once again, the maps did not include Gaza or the West Bank—two places whose residents hardly merited a mention in his half-hour speech.) Once again, he said this was justified because of Iran, not only calling for sanctions as he did last year, but suggesting that Iran funds the protests against him: “Who knows? Maybe, maybe some of the protesters, or even many of the protesters outside this building now.”
Netanyahu spent more time berating the United Nations for antisemitism than addressing the prospect of a ceasefire with either Hamas or Hezbollah. “For the Palestinians, this UN house of darkness is home court,” Netanyahu said. “They know that in this swamp of antisemitic violence, there is an automatic majority willing to demonize the Jewish state on anything.” He dismissed his own potential ICC arrest warrant as nothing other than “pure antisemitism.”
Israeli National Security Minister and lifelong anti-Arab extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has threatened to boycott Netanyahu’s governing coalition if the prime minister signs a temporary ceasefire with Lebanon, tweeted his approval of Netanyahu’s speech minutes after it concluded.
As he gave his address, Israel launched a massive bombing campaign across Beirut, a city that only days ago the IDF told Lebanese civilians to flee to for their safety. Reports said that Netanyahu personally approved these bombings from New York, in order to target Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Netanyahu’s office released an image of him sitting in a New York hotel room before his speech, making the call for bombs to come down.
Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform, released in July, contains little in terms of tangible policy proposals.
But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the capitalization) “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to execute, unnecessary, and hard to even comprehend.
Trump has vowed to build this Iron Dome in multiple speeches. It is among his campaign’s 20 core promises. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “MADE IN AMERICA,” creating jobs, as well as stopping foreign attacks.
An expert called Trump’s Iron Dome idea “the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”
“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”
It may be more useful to consider an American Iron Dome as a bombastic businessman’s branding exercise, rather than a viable policy position, said Lewis: “The Iron Dome here has just become a kind of brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.”
The Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and American weapons manufacturer Raytheon, has been a prized part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as the name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It’s more mobile: when a short-range missile reaches Israel’s airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to blow them up before they can touch the ground.
The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.
Such a system would also be unnecessary. As of now, there are no armed groups sending missiles toward the United States from within a theoretical Iron Dome’s 40-mile interception range. Such a system “couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July.
America’s pre-existent missile defense network, which has been in place since the Bush administration, is currently made up of 44 interceptors based in California and Alaska, geared towards longer-range missiles, such as those that could be fired from North Korea. But the system has performed abysmally in tests, despite Republicans generally claiming “it works,” said Lewis. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased missile defense funding since at least the 1990s.)
“This is why it’s so hard to make heads or tails of what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?”
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