On a multispectral satellite image of the West Bank, Ramón Bieri, an analyst at SITU Research, shows me how to watch the vineyards. A box in the bottom right-hand corner displays the year, beginning in 1984. As the map moves forward in time, orange and yellow spots, inside the blue outlines, shift to deep green and eventually spill out beyond their squiggly boundaries.

Bieri explains to me the variegated colors represent vegetation signatures and the time-lapse displays olive groves, and other untended land, transforming into neatly rowed vineyards. The underlying map, he says, shows areas of the West Bank where Israeli settlers have forcibly taken over Palestinian villages. The colors I am watching are not simply a record of agricultural planning. It is, SITU Research Director Brad Samuels claims, empirical evidence of apartheid.

Prosecuting the crime of apartheid is tricky in any context, but especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. SITU believes this novel technology could finally unlock legal cases that have long eluded activists in the West Bank.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion declaring the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza illegal and suggesting that its policies and practices amounted to a system of apartheid. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, and B’tselem—not to mention Palestinian activists themselves—have drawn similar conclusions. As HBO’s John Oliver recently pointed out, even prominent Israelis, including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, as well as a former Mossad chief and a former IDF general, have deployed the term “apartheid” when describing the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Some find apartheid a harsh characterization. In a recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said the term was “appropriate” but worried the label would “shut some people’s minds down.” It leads the conversation, Klein worried, into the “technical.” The “technical” minutiae of definition may be ill-suited to the conversation Klein hopes to have, but it is fundamental to the legal mechanisms of proving and prosecuting apartheid in international courts.

The technology, an expert said, may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.

Over the past few years, a growing chorus of states, human rights organizations, and international legal bodies have applied an apartheid legal framework to the Israeli occupation, hoping to seek justice. Yet no one has successfully prosecuted allegations of Israeli apartheid in any jurisdiction.

Samuels, along with collaborators from Israeli human rights organizations Yesh Din and Bimkom, and researchers at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences, hope to change that. In his West Bank investigation, Samuels is one of many researchers attempting to actually prove the existence of a widespread, systematic regime enforcing one group’s dominance over another in a way that could be accepted by legal systems.

For the past nine months, the team used remote sensing methodologies and satellite imagery to document three hallmarks of apartheid in the West Bank: land dispossession, restriction of access, and forced displacement.

To Samuels, the body of evidence they have amassed so far is moving “towards an evidentiary file” for prosecutors everywhere. It’s a proof of concept, one that he and his collaborators hope will encourage apartheid litigation across domestic and international jurisdictions.

The project began in the summer of 2023. Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and activist with Yesh Din, met up with Samuels in New York while on an advocacy trip in the United States. The two had known each other since 2009, when Sfard enlisted Samuels to help him with the case of Bassem Abu Rahma, an unarmed Palestinian man attending a nonviolent protest in the West Bank whom the Israeli military killed with a tear-gas canister. 

Over breakfast, the two discussed a legal opinion Sfard had published on apartheid. As a litigator, Sfard could easily point to evidence of apartheid in law books and testimony. But Samuels, an architect and visual investigator, was curious whether apartheid in the West Bank had any spatial representations. In other words, how can we see apartheid? 

Spatial representations of apartheid aren’t new: photographer Johnny Miller’s famous drone footage, for example, shows the legacy of South African apartheid and segregation through stark aerial images of wealthy, verdant neighborhoods on one side of an invisible line, and crowded plots of shacks on another. But the legal fight has been more complex. 

No one has ever been prosecuted for apartheid—not even in South Africa. As international law scholars Gerhard Kemp and Windell Nortje wrote, “There remains a significant accountability deficit pertaining to this crime against humanity.”

Defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is not only specific but multilayered. It is “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

These specific elements can put successful litigation of the crime out of reach even for skilled prosecutors in favorable jurisdictions. “You have to prove things like a special intent of domination by one racial group over another,” Kemp told me, “which is more difficult than, say, using the same facts to prosecute war crimes.” Then there’s the added challenge of collecting evidence under an occupation that limits outside access and keeps Palestinian institutions weak—all in the midst of war. 

Sfard told Samuels that even with dossiers of testimony evidence, it can be nearly impossible to get remedies for their Palestinian clients in domestic Israeli courts. “Justice for Palestinians whose lands were taken does happen—but at the rate of miracles,” Sfard said. “It’s not a neutral court. We’re not in the Hague. We’re not in some Swiss Tribunal. It’s the court of the occupier.” 

For decades, legal systems have grown more skeptical of subjective human accounts in general, as scientific approaches and forensic evidence became the “evidentiary holy grail,” said Sfard. This is especially true of Palestinian testimony in Israeli courts. To prove apartheid in court, Sfard explained, this meant olive groves could be key. In the West Bank, settler expansion is all about land. “When settlers take over Palestinian land, they uproot it and plant their own stuff,” Sfard said. “And I told Brad this is, for example, one thing we can see.” 

There are exceptions, but typically Palestinian farmers cultivate olive groves using traditional methods, and settlers build industrially irrigated vineyards. Samuels and Sfard hypothesized that this distinct cultural approach to agriculture could serve as a reliable proxy for land dispossession—one of the essential components of the apartheid system—and that remote sensing technology could detect these changes over time from space.  

Documenting this is not as simple as firing up Google Earth Pro. Satellites can produce imagery with a resolution high enough to make out neat rows of grape leaves versus patches of olive trees. But this documentation only dates back a few years—long after the point in the late-1970s when the settler land grab dramatically increased. Other restrictions, such as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, also limited the quality and availability of US satellite imagery over Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 1997 until the law was repealed in 2020.

Samuels and his team brought the puzzle to Adam Maloof, a professor in Princeton University Department of Geosciences, and Ryan Manzuk, a researcher who recently obtained his PhD from Maloof’s department. Though access to satellite imagery with high spatial resolution was limited, they realized that one particular US government satellite called Landsat provided free access to high spectral resolution imagery, which uses colors and wavelengths undetectable to the human eye. With Landsat’s Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the team could track differences in vegetation health and lushness over time, allowing them to differentiate vineyards from olive groves in areas of the West Bank dating back to Landsat’s launch in 1975.

Landsat had another advantage: evading the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restrictions. “It’s a blind spot,” Samuels said. “The government scrambled US space agency satellites that had high spatial resolution, but not high spectral resolution, probably because they didn’t perceive Landsat as a threat.”

The team then narrowed their investigation to three villages that illustrated different aspects of apartheid: land dispossession, restriction of access to land, and forced displacement. “There are all different kinds of ways in which settler expansion presents itself,” Samuels said. “And the fact that we focused on three really was a function of time, resources, and fit, in terms of remote sensing.”

When Samuels and his team presented their initial analysis to Sfard and Yesh Din, there was a long silence. “This is remarkable,” Sfard remembered a colleague finally saying. “This is science fiction come true.”

Still, he could not help but feel the remarkable dissonance between believing Palestinians and having to show it on a map: “We already know all of this,” he said. The maps could corroborate testimony in a scientific, clinical way. “It was like a new set of glasses was placed on our eyes, and we suddenly saw more,” he said. But, with it, there was still a realization that Palestinian voices would not be believed without overwhelming evidence.

Sfard hopes that with this new tool, the courts, both Israeli and non-Israeli, will also start to see more—or at least differently. Now, when alleging that the Israeli government declared a parcel of land as state property and allocated it to settlers, “it’s not just the head of the village that is telling you this and making this allegation,” Sfard said. “We have scientific proof that this is the history of it.” 

Apartheid has been firmly established as a crime against humanity for decades. And some hope to expand it, including new distinctions like gender apartheid. “But the difficulty,” Kemp explained, has been “to apply the legal standard to the facts on the ground. And this is where the project comes in.” Kemp said that SITU and Yesh Din may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.

The ultimate goal is for prosecutors to apply this new approach in courtrooms, but the project faced its first test in a German museum. On October 8—just a day after the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks—the project premiered as one of several case studies in a new exhibition called “Visual Investigations: Between Advocacy, Journalism, and Law” at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich. SITU’s corner of the exhibition centers around a giant map of the West Bank, sprawled across a 25-foot long wall, with time lapses of land dispossession, archival photographs of olive groves and Palestinian farms, videos, and a lengthy methodology section.

“I wanted to make clear that this is a super-focused, very specific, and rigorous unpacking of the question of the manifestation of apartheid,” Samuels said. “And not just an ideological rant.”

After Samuels walked a crowd through the findings and dense methodology on opening day, an Israeli student who had concerns about the project during its planning phase approached him. In an emotional exchange, she expressed her gratitude over the fairness and rigor with which Samuels and his collaborators approached the investigation. 

Exchanges like that one make Sfard hopeful about the investigation’s potential, but he is careful not to let forensic analysis eclipse the human element.

“Palestinian accounts of the crimes committed against them are of utmost importance,” he said. “While I’m ecstatic about the project, and I think that its fruits are extremely important, they do not replace the direct Palestinian account. I hope that this project will not only allow us to prove in a court of law that certain land was dispossessed, but will also give Palestinians a stage to tell their story.”

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 generous government 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 +972 Magazine 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 Ruger rifles 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 yearly olive 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.”

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.

Sidhwa has spent the past six months speaking widely about his time in Gaza. He went to the Uncommitted movement panel at the Democratic National Convention, wrote an article for Politico about what he’s seen, and organized a group of nearly 100 doctors to sign a letter to President Joe Biden begging him to stop sending weapons.

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.

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 ceasefire offers 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 Netanyahu and 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 Journal she 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.

Dozens of countries are condemning Israel’s attacks on United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Israeli forces reportedly struck the UN mission in Lebanon—known as UNIFIL—in recent days, injuring multiple peacekeepers, according to the mission. As UNIFIL points out, deliberate attacks on peacekeepers violate international law.

A joint statement by 34 UNIFIL-contributing countries, initiated by , urges to protect @UNIFIL_ peacekeepers.
We condemn recent incidents, call to respect UNIFIL's mission & ensure the safety of its personnel.
pic.twitter.com/66q46Pu1RR

— Poland in the UN (@PLinUN) October 12, 2024

Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch have condemned the reported attacks and called for UN investigations. In a statement posted on X on Saturday by the Polish Mission to the United Nations, a joint group of signatories said that they “condemn recent incidents, call to respect [the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’s] mission & ensure the safety of its personnel.”

Netanyahu’s unwillingness to call for a full-scale stop of IDF interactions with UNIFIL has drawn scorn. The prime minister of Ireland—one of the signatories of the letter which the BBC reports has more than 370 troops in Lebanon as part of the peacekeeping mission—said during a visit to Washington, DC this week that the attacks were an “extraordinarily concerning development.” Spain, France, and Italy have also condemned the attacks in a joint statement, calling them “unjustifiable.” And President Biden on Friday said Israel should “absolutely” stop striking the UN peacekeepers.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the country “condemns Netanyahu’s position and the Israeli aggression against UNIFIL, renews its commitment to international legitimacy.”

The Israeli Defense Forces have claimed that Hezbollah “operates from within and near civilian areas in southern Lebanon, including areas near UNIFIL posts.” On Friday, the IDF acknowledged that two UNIFIL personnel were reportedly injured in a strike on a post near an unnamed “threat,” adding that the Israeli military had instructed UNIFIL personnel to shelter in protected spaces while the attack was unfolding. The IDF also said that on Yom Kippur, which fell on Saturday and marks the holiest day of the Jewish year, Hezbollah fired more than 300 projectiles “towards Israeli civilians.”

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF regrets the harm done to UNIFIL personnel but said they should withdraw from the area, alleging that Hezbollah was endangering them by being stationed nearby. A spokesperson for UNIFIL told AFP Saturday that the peacekeepers will not withdraw: “There was a unanimous decision to stay because it’s important for the UN flag to still fly high in this region, and to be able to report to the Security Council,” Andrea Tenenti told the French news agency.

Dozens of countries are condemning Israel’s attacks on United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Israeli forces reportedly struck the UN mission in Lebanon—known as UNIFIL—in recent days, injuring multiple peacekeepers, according to the mission. As UNIFIL points out, deliberate attacks on peacekeepers violate international law.

A joint statement by 34 UNIFIL-contributing countries, initiated by , urges to protect @UNIFIL_ peacekeepers.
We condemn recent incidents, call to respect UNIFIL's mission & ensure the safety of its personnel.
pic.twitter.com/66q46Pu1RR

— Poland in the UN (@PLinUN) October 12, 2024

Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch have condemned the reported attacks and called for UN investigations. In a statement posted on X on Saturday by the Polish Mission to the United Nations, a joint group of signatories said that they “condemn recent incidents, call to respect [the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’s] mission & ensure the safety of its personnel.”

Netanyahu’s unwillingness to call for a full-scale stop of IDF interactions with UNIFIL has drawn scorn. The prime minister of Ireland—one of the signatories of the letter which the BBC reports has more than 370 troops in Lebanon as part of the peacekeeping mission—said during a visit to Washington, DC this week that the attacks were an “extraordinarily concerning development.” Spain, France, and Italy have also condemned the attacks in a joint statement, calling them “unjustifiable.” And President Biden on Friday said Israel should “absolutely” stop striking the UN peacekeepers.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the country “condemns Netanyahu’s position and the Israeli aggression against UNIFIL, renews its commitment to international legitimacy.”

The Israeli Defense Forces have claimed that Hezbollah “operates from within and near civilian areas in southern Lebanon, including areas near UNIFIL posts.” On Friday, the IDF acknowledged that two UNIFIL personnel were reportedly injured in a strike on a post near an unnamed “threat,” adding that the Israeli military had instructed UNIFIL personnel to shelter in protected spaces while the attack was unfolding. The IDF also said that on Yom Kippur, which fell on Saturday and marks the holiest day of the Jewish year, Hezbollah fired more than 300 projectiles “towards Israeli civilians.”

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF regrets the harm done to UNIFIL personnel but said they should withdraw from the area, alleging that Hezbollah was endangering them by being stationed nearby. A spokesperson for UNIFIL told AFP Saturday that the peacekeepers will not withdraw: “There was a unanimous decision to stay because it’s important for the UN flag to still fly high in this region, and to be able to report to the Security Council,” Andrea Tenenti told the French news agency.

Editor’s note: One year after the slaughter of more than 1,200 people in Israel and taking of 254 hostages by Hamas on October 7, 2023—and the commencement of retaliatory strikes and invasions by Israel—the situation remains fraught. Gaza lies in rubble. The Gazan health ministry reports that Israel’s military activities have killed more than 42,000 Palestinians to date, including more than 11,000 children, and have wounded nearly 100,000. The true toll, when uncounted and indirect deaths are factored in, is likely far greater. Some 1.9 million people—about 90 percent of Gaza’s population—are displaced, and relatively few have made it out of the territory. This is the story of one family that did. The events described took place in February 2024. Owing to the uncertain legal status of the family members, who remain in Egypt, the names herein, and that of the author, are pseudonyms.

It’s nearing 9 p.m. by the time we finally agree on Papa John’s. Six pizzas for the 12 of us. Youssef calls in the order. At 16, he’s shed the sweet voice I remember from our calls to Gaza over the years. The total will be $16 at Cairo’s black market exchange rates. The manager calls back a minute later. For such a large amount, they will send someone to take a deposit. Youssef relays the message and someone translates. We laugh at the concept of a down payment on pizza.

My brother-in-law Kamal, Youssef’s father, walks in, and another plastic chair appears as we readjust our circle to accommodate him. My husband, Samer, and I have traveled halfway across the globe from California to help 10 family members—relatives I’m finally meeting in person after 25 years of marriage—settle temporarily in Egypt after escaping the devastation in Gaza.

They are here under precarious conditions—some of the more than 115,000 displaced Gazans in Egypt, many of whom managed to wrangle (and overstay) a 45-day tourist visa before Israel shut down the border. But despite their good fortune in escaping the war zone, they have no status outside of it. Neither refugee nor resident, they exist in a legal no-man’s land that prevents any of them from enrolling in school, getting a job, or securing health coverage.

Three family members remain trapped in Rafah—two of my husband’s brothers and one of their daughters. They are everyone’s priority right now. Our seats spill out of the cramped living room into the hall, entranceway, and kitchen of the basic, hastily rented apartment. It doesn’t compare to the three high-rise units in Gaza City the families had to flee, but it is worlds better than their other stops along the refugee railway—sleeping on the floor of their pharmacy supply business, which the Israelis later blew up, and then at the house of a cousin in Rafah shared with 40 others.

Everyone is acutely aware of the hour as we chat about our day, cellphones heavy in our hands. Papa John’s calls back to apologize. It won’t require a deposit after all. The rules always seem to be shifting here. Indeed, why one child was denied exit while six others were not is yet another nonsensical piece of a broader, even more nonsensical puzzle.

 

Israeli forces commenced bombing in Gaza on October 9, 2023.

Five days later, Gaza City residents were told to evacuate.

About a quarter of all structures have been destroyed, per the UN, and two-thirds damaged.

 

Ali Jadallah/Anadolu/Getty

My husband and I came to Egypt to do whatever we can to help. And tonight, like so many families in Gaza or Cairo, across Europe and the United States, we are awaiting the Daily List. Thousands of families are trying desperately to get loved ones out of Gaza, though relatively few are successful. The list of people approved for exit by the Egyptian border authority—no more than 250 names a day, a mere trickle—appears on Rafah News, a privately maintained Facebook page that is updated nightly. The family members in Rafah await our call. With no reliable internet, they depend on the diaspora for news of their fate.

All at once, everyone’s phones start pinging with alerts from their social networks, and all heads bow to scour the list. Our Egyptian fixer has assured us that the names will be on it tonight, “100 percent.” This is the sixth day of such assurances, for which my husband and I have paid $21,000. That would buy 7,894 Papa John’s pizzas in Cairo.

Mona, 17, flicks her index finger on her screen, seeking the names of her father, sister, and uncle. She was with them a month ago when her own name appeared on the list. From the comfort of our home in San Francisco, my husband—as the eldest, the de facto patriarch—made the decision on his brother’s behalf: She would be safer risking the journey alone than staying in Gaza. And so Mona was sent by herself across the border, across the Sinai Peninsula.

Tonight, from the group’s downcast eyes, the huddle of their shoulders, no translation is needed. The names are not there.

I had tried to convince my husband that I wasn’t needed on this trip. I don’t speak Arabic and I’d never met his Gazan family. I’d be a woman in Egypt, with little to offer but my patently American optimism. But Samer insisted I was needed for “moral support.”

In Cairo, he assigns me “aunt duty.” My job is to spend time with our nieces, assess them for trauma, and begin to get to know them.

On a Monday, Yasmine, 19, is the first to arrive at our hotel for some one-on-one time. Her mother had said the teen was having trouble sleeping, so I decide yoga might help. I’m no guru, but I know my way around the yoga app on my iPad. One of the routines is set to the music of Queen, but Yasmine has never heard of the band—nor Taylor Swift. Little Mermaid yoga draws a blank, as do the Beatles, so I give up and select a classic rock theme. We find an open studio in the hotel fitness center and lock the door so she can remove her hijab.

I make small talk as I load the class onto my device, remarking how pretty Yasmine is and asking when she’ll get her braces off. She doesn’t know, she says. Her orthodontist is dead, she tells me. Her uncle, too. One day, her cousins, also still in Gaza, were parched, and their father had gone out looking for potable water—snipers shot him in the head. A week later, her grandfather died of a stroke because no hospital had the capacity to take him. I yearn to know more—about others she’s lost and what it’s like for someone so young to endure such brutal circumstances—but I refrain.

The next morning, Yasmine tells me she slept eight hours for the first time in months. I give her my favorite pen and tell her to keep writing in her journal.

Every day, I pluck one or two of my six nieces from their monotony and uncertainty to enjoy a day out with Aunt Allie. Today is Tuesday, and my task is to bring Samira to try a gym where we’ve offered to buy the girls a membership. They desperately need things to do. A month earlier, the last of Gaza’s 12 universities had been destroyed in what the UN has termed a “scholasticide.” Samira has been spending the days of what should be her sophomore year in Cairo, watching endless YouTube videos.

Samira is also 19, and her skittish persona emerges in nearly inaudible whispers. When she does volunteer conversation, her English is excruciatingly halting. Its very simplicity seems to evoke an almost savant-like deeper meaning: “Does Zane ask how we are?”

Zane is my 19-year-old son, her elder cousin by a mere 41 days. The juxtaposition of her life of deprivation with his life of peace and abundance couldn’t be more striking. Samira has lived through four wars and the countless daily indignities Americans rarely hear about—like the Israeli blockades that result in shortages of basics such as clothing fabrics, pens, spices, and toothbrushes; the youth unemployment rate of up to 75 percent; and the throttled electricity, available only about 10 hours a day even prior to the hostilities.

“Does he know us?” Samira’s tone is meek, as though she’s talking to herself, but her persistence signals a certain determination: “Does he know my name?”

I realize she is only inquiring about her cousin, cocooned away at a small liberal arts college in New England, but something in her simple poetry evokes something broader: Despite Gaza’s moment as a global cause célèbre—the hastily produced kaffiyehs, protest encampments, and solidarity marches—much of the world exhibits little interest in learning what a typical childhood in Gaza is like. As Samira might put it, “Do they know about us?”

It was 2 a.m. in Rafah and Israeli bombs were falling. Tamir wanted his big brother on the line. I gripped Samer’s hand as we listened to sounds of destruction over his cellphone speaker.

My husband had warned me about the Islamic dress codes, but the lightest long pants I own—a pair of cargo tights—aren’t nearly light enough for the gym’s 80-degree heat. They do, however, have side pockets perfect for carrying the stacks of $100 bills we brought to Cairo, where everything revolves around wads of cash. In a dark parking lot, we swapped our Benjamins for a backpack full of Egyptian pounds, which we emptied at one point onto the apartment’s coffee table, bringing to mind Scrooge McDuck or a B-movie drug deal.

I dispatch some of the pounds on a personal training session for Samira and a short-sleeve shirt to replace her heavy sweatshirt. She’s never been on a treadmill. I recall her saying she missed Gaza’s beaches, so I ask the trainer to put on a beach-themed background video. The beaches aren’t the only thing she is missing. Her twin sister, Amal, is one of the three relatives who remains in Gaza. The sisters have been separated for over three months. How or why or who decides, we have no idea.  

Later, after a shower, changing back into our street clothes, Samira realizes she’s forgotten her brush. She looks at me in utter confusion and asks what to do. I fish a ponytail holder out of my bag and hand it to her. In the few days I’ve known her, I’ve found her often in moments like this, lost and frozen, utterly overwhelmed—perplexed by her circumstances and, I suspect, all she has been through. She can’t grasp my suggestion of a quick finger brush. She asks if I will buy her a new one. I leave and return minutes later with a two-pack. “One is for Amal,” I tell her.

“I feel happy just hearing her name,” Samira says.

As we exit the gym, the shops in the adjacent mall are putting out special goods and decorations for Ramadan. I consider an advent-like calendar with flavored dates behind perforated cardboard doors. Twenty-four days until Ramadan. I wonder if Samira is counting them down.

A member of Israel’s war cabinet had promised that Rafah would be invaded if the remaining hostages weren’t freed by the start of the Muslim holy month. (The invasion ultimately would commence May 6, some two and a half months later.) Back in California, we’d had a preview of what that might look like. Tamir, one of my husband’s brothers, had called just as we were about to set out on a pretrip shopping expedition. It was 2 a.m. in Rafah and Israeli bombs were falling. Tamir wanted his big brother on the line. I gripped Samer’s hand as we listened to sounds of destruction coming over the cellphone speaker.

The dialogue was sparse: “Did you hear that?”

“Something has fallen in the yard in front of the house.”

“The windows have all shattered.”

At some point, Tamir said his throat was dry from the dust—and fear. “Can you stay on the line with Amal while I go look for a drink?” he said.

I was grateful the conversation was in Arabic, as I wouldn’t have known quite what to say to his teenage daughter. Samer kept asking her questions that felt absurd, given the situation: “How are you?” “Are you still there?” Amal replied she was “fine,” as though exchanging pleasantries with an acquaintance at the supermarket.

We had an oversized suitcase back at home waiting to be loaded with shoes, winter coats, and T-shirts with random slogans, so we took the call on the road. By the time we arrived at the store, the apocalyptic soundtrack had receded, and Tamir traded the comfort of our voices for an attempt at sleep.

Back in Cairo, after our workout, Samira and I join the other nieces for lunch. I suggest McDonald’s, which doesn’t exist in Gaza—a golden arches meal is practically a bucket-list item for kids there. I realize I’m being provocative. Given the US military support for Israel, some Egyptians have boycotted American franchises, and many of the displaced Gazans have joined them.

Just as US businesses showed support for Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s onslaught, so businesses in Cairo have incorporated the Gazan cause into their marketing. Palestinian flags adorn takeout coffee cups and storefronts. Our Papa John’s pizza boxes have stickers reading, “Fresh,” atop a silhouette of historic Palestine, which encompasses most of Israel in addition to Gaza and the West Bank.

The sticker makes me uneasy, as I grew up supporting Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. But that support obviously does not stretch to the eradication of my lunch companions—or Lebanese civilians or anyone else just trying to live their lives. One would be hard pressed to create a sticker that accurately depicts today’s Palestinian territory. The Gaza Strip is a speck on the sea. The West Bank, a 90-minute drive to the northeast, resembles a piece of Swiss cheese—a pocket of enclaves picked apart by an expanding cycle of illegal Israeli settlements and the buffer zones set up to protect them. Between the two lies the inaccessible state of Israel.

We settle on an outdoor restaurant where I entertain the girls by ordering in Arabic. A commercial airliner flies overhead, and Laila nudges Noura to look up, as though she’s just spotted a double rainbow. Laila is 17, Noura, 12. In Gaza, they only ever saw military jets—even during times of relative peace.

The girls ask me endless questions: Do I like hummus? Why don’t I eat meat? Have I ever seen snow? Where will they go after Egypt? I stick to the short term, reminding them that our priority now is on getting everyone safely out of Gaza: “After that, when your fathers get here, we will talk as a family.”

The reality is that everything they know has been shattered—literally, fragments of cinder and glass strewn across the trappings of their childhoods. The circumstances may call for optimism, but they want to know what is next. For now, I can only offer the girls our financial support, do desperate Google searches for “countries accepting Gazan refugees” (answer: none), and insist that they order dessert.

Still, the afternoon at the mall boosts our spirits, and we bring a sense of optimism back to our nightly chair circle—hope amid despair. The fixer has upped his “100 percent assurance” with a confident promise of “a million dollars” if the names don’t appear tonight. We’ve extended our stay until the weekend, but I feel in my bones that this is the day.

It’s Wednesday now, and I’m taking Laila and Noura on an outing to distract them from the reality of yet another day estranged from their father. Neither the names nor the million dollars made an appearance last night.

The girls come to meet me at our hotel and can’t stop craning their heads around. They’ve never been in a hotel. I watch as they take selfies, the charcoal black of their French braids a perfect contrast to the ornate lobby’s white marble. Laila, who is perpetually smiling, wears a sweatshirt with “So Happy to Be Here” written across the chest.

Between Israeli “security” measures and extremist Islamic censorship, the nieces also grew up without movie theaters. It’s as though the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas have colluded to deprive Gazan kids of the simplest pleasures. The girls and I have pinky sworn that I will get to have the honor of taking them to their first silver screen experience, but a secondary promise has us agreeing to wait for Amal. So today, we’re headed back to the shopping mall.

Like actors playing people in normal circumstances, we chat about fashion. “We can’t wear short skirts because we are Muslim,” says big sister Laila, who tends to speak for the two of them. I ask them why they don’t wear headscarves. The girls wrinkle their noses in distaste. “In the public schools, we’re required to wear hijab, so we begged our parents to send us to private school.”

Noura bobs her head in agreement. Laila gestures to her own jeans and sweatshirt, modest yet fashionable. She could pass for one of my son’s California friends. “In Gaza, people sometimes look at us funny because of how we dress.”

Western dress can be considered quite rebellious in Gaza. “Here, in Egypt, no one cares!” Laila’s smile could melt mountains of the snow she’s never seen. Noura nods emphatically, echoing the sentiment.

At H&M, Laila beelines toward a tight, short dress. Her eyes go wide as she asks whether she can try it on, and we giggle as she admires herself in the sanctity of the dressing room. Noura dons a more conservative sweater. Absent of her baggy sweatshirt, I notice her sagging jeans and protruding ribs. “We all lost weight in Rafah,” Laila explains casually. “There wasn’t enough to eat.”

In the third or fourth store, maybe the fifth, Laila spots a navy-striped sweater: “I had one just like this at home.”

She’d shown me “home” the day before. A neighbor’s video walkthrough revealed exterior walls with cavernous openings, carpets of shattered glass, and belongings heaped in piles amid the wreckage. Next to Laila’s neatly made-up bed stood a blown-open wardrobe, a stuffed Sesame Street Ernie hanging from its door handle. I watched her watch the footage of a bedroom she would never see again. Miraculously, she was still smiling, dimples as deep as the craters in the walls of her room.

I offer to buy her the navy-striped sweater, but she politely declines. She does accept a multipack of earrings. We pick out an extra pack for Amal, hopeful that her name will make tonight’s list.

It does not.

Back at the hotel, the turndown service has left my husband and me a three-tiered silver cake stand overflowing with bite-sized pieces of baklava, petits fours, and macarons. We call the airline and push our departure back another two days, even though we’ve mostly resigned ourselves to leaving without getting Tamir, Nabil, and Amal to safety. Hope is an aberration in the deserts of Gaza.

I try to imagine what Amal is doing. I know she’s in a house with perhaps 30 others, windows long shattered, but at least they have four walls and a roof. The food is ample, but canned. Water is sparse. I also know the border is tantalizingly visible from that roof—so close that an Egyptian SIM card allows her to message her sisters in Cairo.

It’s Thursday and I’m killing time with Yasmine and her mother at the apartment.

As the 9 o’clock hour nears, the rest of the family joins us. We’re nibbling nervously at a mound of dolmas when I see Mona’s head bend toward her phone. A former neighbor has sent over a copy of the Daily List via WhatsApp. All three names are on it!

There is no dancing, whooping, or jubilatory squealing. It’s as though we have opened a small crack for our pent-up tension to escape slowly, like air from an improperly knotted balloon. Quiet, broad smiles emerge on our faces. Relief proves stronger than jubilation.

Displaced Gazans wait at the border crossing between Rafah and Egypt in November 2023.

Israel shut down the crossing in May 2024.

Abed Rahim Khatib/DPA/ZUMA

The trio’s journey from Gaza to Cairo is arduous but uneventful. We follow their progress via incoming texts.

      In line on Gaza side.

      Through Rafah gate.

      In departure hall.

      In line for bus.

      On bus to Egyptian side.

      In line at arrival hall.

      Crossed to Egyptian side.

      In line for bus.

      Crossing Sinai.

Their 200-mile trip takes nearly as long as our 7,500-mile flight from San Francisco. My husband and I have decided to give each family subunit the freedom to reunite in private. We spend the day making arrangements for our return and setting up a GoFundMe page to help defray our fixer costs and cover the families’ living expenses for the next six months to a year.

Some friends of ours who are GoFundMe veterans have advised us to put lots of specifics in the postings, but there are few to be had: Everything from schools to housing, even the question of whether our relatives can be technically classified as refugees, is up in the air, and it all could take months or years to sort out—if it’s even sortable. No nation has yet embraced the fleeing Gazans. When I inquire with a refugee agency about a US family reunification visa for my brothers-in-law (not even including their families), I am informed me that the average wait time is 15 to 20 years.

On Saturday morning, Tamir, Nabil, and Amal, our new arrivals, come to visit at our hotel. I stand on tiptoes to hug Nabil, who is 6-foot-7. I bend down for Amal. Born with severe scoliosis, she’s barely 5 feet tall, and my arms overlap around her tiny frame. I’m three times her 19 years and yet, given what she has been through, I feel humbled in her presence. My words feel clichéd: “It’s so, so good to see you! I’m so sorry this took so long.”

“I’m the one with the black-sheep bad luck in the family,” she says. Her nose crinkles when she laughs, and her eyes sparkle with mischief.

We escort the trio down the hotel’s imperial staircase for an expansive breakfast buffet. My brothers-in-law pile their plates high with a potpourri of cheeses—cheese and eggs, they say, are the foods they missed the most. Servers circle the room with drink refills and fresh bread, and the contrast of the scene with their existence in Rafah just 24 hours before is as ludicrous as it sounds.

Standing at an omelet station, Tamir apologizes for his hastily purchased sweatshirt, explaining that he hadn’t changed his clothes in 90 days. Six feet away, Amal is practically frozen by all the food choices. I wonder aloud what it must have been like for her to wear the same thing for so long. Tamir dismisses me with a smirk. Amal, he says, organized an exchange with other teens in the house—they traded “new” clothes constantly.

Today will be her day for pampering. I clumsily offer a variety of options, punctuating each with, “but I understand if it might feel like too much for you.”

“I’m up for everything!” she assures me, downing her third glass of juice.

I suggest another shopping trip—a practical choice, as her suitcase of cherished possessions was lost in the chaos of war. “I’ve decided I’m going to reinvent myself,” Amal declares, now onto a fourth juice. Her optimism is surreal, almost unsettling. I’d half-expected to meet a girl traumatized, hysterical, dirty—lacking hope. Instead, she smells of soap. I’m infected by her radiance, humbled by her resilience. She can’t wait to return to her college studies, she tells me, and she dreams of being an embryologist.

At the mall, we meet up with Samira, her twin. I’ve brought along so much Egyptian cash today that I can barely zip my fanny pack. But Amal is again overwhelmed by possibilities. After multiple loops around the mall, Samira points out that her sister’s hands are cracked and dry from her months in Rafah. Minutes later, we are testing body lotions and scents.

Amal’s thirst resurfaces and she asks me if we can grab a coffee. I hesitate to suggest Starbucks—which is just around the corner, but she spots the sign and shushes Samira’s boycott-busting hesitation with a “Don’t be ridiculous!” She grabs her twin by the hand, leads her through the door, and orders each a caramel macchiato.

The night before my husband and I head home, I finally introduce all six nieces to the joy of cinema. I go full throttle, buying each a bucket of popcorn, a box of candy, and a slushie. The girls are captivated by Madame Web, oblivious to the nearly deserted theater and the film’s 11 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Watching their rapt faces, I think about how complex their lives have been, and how surprising their multidimensionality. The way they crave opportunity, not pity. How I came here intent on rescuing them, and instead, I fell in love.

It’s dusk as we leave the theater, the setting sun a gradient of purples, oranges, and pinks—like the colors of Amal’s ruined bedroom. We snap more pictures as she holds aloft the shopping bags with the costumes of her reinvention.

She pulls me close, conspiratorially, her tongue dyed bright blue from the slushie. “This wasn’t how I had hoped it would happen,” she confesses. “But I told you I would get out of Gaza!”

Last November, I asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and the most renowned Palestinian American historian today, about the lack of statements from President Joe Biden expressing sympathy for Palestinians. At the time, I was writing an article outlining Biden’s long-standing and unusual unwillingness to challenge Israel.

“I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all,” Khalidi replied. “He sees the Israelis as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus, which is being sucked at by every element of the mainstream media.”

The professional bluntness was typical of Khalidi. Throughout his decadeslong career as an academic and public intellectual, he has not shied away from lacerating fellow elites as he uproots deep assumptions about Israel and Palestine. In doing so, he has made himself a fitting successor to Said, the late Palestinian American literary critic his professorship was named after.

Khalidi’s 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, was called a “pathbreaking work of major importance” by Said. In the early days of the ongoing war, Khalidi’s most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, became a New York Times bestseller. He is currently working on a study of how Ireland was a laboratory for British colonial practices that were later employed in Palestine. At the end of June, he retired and became a professor emeritus.

We spoke last Wednesday—one day after Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel following a series of Israeli escalations—to assess the one-year mark of the current war.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A year ago, more than 1,100 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 attack. At least 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza in response. Now, Israel has invaded Lebanon and provoked a war with Iran, which launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday. A year ago, was this a nightmare scenario?

It is a nightmare scenario, but we may be at the beginning of the nightmare. This is potentially a multiyear war now. By the time this is published, we will have entered its second year. But the risks in terms of a regional confrontation are much, much greater than most people would have assessed back in October 2023. This is potentially going to be a world war, a major regional war, a multifront war. In fact, in some respects, it already is.

An article in the New York Times this morning stated that “Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.” The US has also said it will work with Israel to impose “severe consequences” on Iran. Are you surprised that there’s been essentially no willingness by the US to use its leverage over Israel?

I have to say I’m a little surprised. Firstly, because every earlier war, with the exception of 1948, was eventually stopped by the United States, or by the international community with the involvement of the United States, much more quickly than this one. You’ve had wars that went on for a couple of months. But eventually, after backing Israel fully, the United States stopped Israel. There’s absolutely no sign of the United States doing anything but encouraging Israel and arming and protecting them diplomatically. In historical perspective, this is unique to my knowledge.

Secondly, it is a little surprising in domestic electoral terms. I don’t think Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris have a whole lot to worry about on their right. People who are going to vote on this issue in one way are going to vote for [former President Donald] Trump anyway. Whereas on his left, I think one of the terrible ironies of this—we will only find this out after the election—might be that Harris loses the election because she loses Michigan. Because she lost young people and Arabs and Muslims.

To the left, there’s a huge void where some people are going to hold their noses and vote for Harris. But some people will not vote for her under any circumstances. And if that tips the margin in favor of Trump, it will be one of the most colossal failures of the Democratic Party leadership in modern history to not understand that there’s lots of space to their left and there’s no space to their right. They have hewed right, right, right on this—at least publicly. Personally, I don’t understand that electoral calculation. 

I also go back to the first thing I said: I don’t understand how the United States doesn’t see that the expansion of this war is extremely harmful to any possible definition of American national interests. 

What do you think the Biden administration and its supporters fail to understand in terms of the cost to the United States of enabling this war?

The administration and the entire American elite is in another place from Americans, who reject the Biden policy, want a ceasefire, and are opposed to continuing to arm Israel. That’s the problem. You have this cork in the bottle. The bottle has changed. The cork hasn’t. 

The media elites, the university and foundation elites, the corporate elites, the donor class, the leaderships of the political parties, and the foreign policy establishment are way out in right field and are completely supportive of whatever Israel does. They back Israel to the hilt—whatever it does. And you are getting the same kind of mindless drivel in the foreign policy world about an opportunity for “remaking the Middle East” that we got before the 2003 Iraq fiasco. 

Israel killed the guy they were negotiating with in Tehran—[Ismail] Haniyeh. They don’t say anything. You want a ceasefire? Haniyeh allegedly wanted a ceasefire. Israel goes and kills the guy in Tehran. The US doesn’t say anything. Not a peep. This is a high-level provocation. 

[Harris] and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this.

You’re trying to bring about a ceasefire on the Lebanese border? The Israelis kill the person they’re negotiating with. Not a peep. The US says: He was a bad guy. He killed Americans. Good thing. 

I find it mind-boggling the degree to which the elite is blind to the damage that this is clearly doing to the United States in the world and in the Middle East—and the dangers that entails. I hear not a peep out of that elite about the potential danger of Israel leading them by the nose into an American, Israeli, Iranian, Yemeni, Palestinian, Lebanese war, which has no visible end. I mean, where does this stop? 

Harris has declined to break with Biden on Israel in her public rhetoric. If she’s elected, do you expect a significant shift in her approach to Israel and Palestine?

No, I do not. She had multiple opportunities to do a Hubert Humphrey—to disassociate herself from the president who just decided not to run again. To allow a Palestinian speaker at the [Democratic National] Convention, to meet with certain people, to modulate her virulent, pro-Israel rhetoric, she hasn’t taken those opportunities. I don’t expect that she will.

She and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this. They can ignore Arabs and Muslims, and then they can win the election anyway. That seems to have been their decision. That might change if their internal polling at the end of October shows she’s losing Michigan. But it would be a little bit late.

Humphrey’s speech was on September 30. So we’re already past that.

And it was too late for Humphrey.

The main success that Biden administration officials pointed to again and again was preventing a regional war. That has now completely fallen apart. You were in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion with your kids and your wife, Mona, who was pregnant at the time. How does your personal experience of that invasion influence how you see what is happening in Lebanon today?

It’s not deja vu for me. I actually feel it’s much, much, much worse. I’m following along with all my relatives in Beirut, as I have been following along with relatives in Palestine over the past year, as they report on what’s happening to them and around them. It’s similar, but it’s a lot worse. I think my kids are going through the same thing, especially my daughters, who were little children during the ’82 war.

And all of us are sitting in safety outside the Middle East. I’m thinking of the family that we have who are still in Beirut. They’ve been through war and misery and the collapse of Lebanon and various phases of this war in the past. I know they are resilient. But it’s really hard to experience it again and again and again. They went through it in 2006 and now they’re going through it again.

It’s horrifying that nobody seems to read history or understand that no good can come from this. Leave aside good for the Lebanese—obviously, nobody in the Western elite cares about the Lebanese or the Palestinians. There’s a degree of insensitivity, which is shocking, but we’re used to it. But nobody even cares about the Israelis. They are putting their head into a buzz saw in both Gaza and Lebanon: a tunnel without end.

What do the Americans think they are doing, pushing, allowing, arming Israel to do this vis-à-vis Iran, vis-à-vis Yemen, vis-à-vis Lebanon, vis-à-vis the Palestinians? Where does this end for Israel? They are getting themselves into a minefield out of which they will not be able to extract themselves without enormous, terrible results for them—and obviously infinitely more devastating results for Lebanon and the Palestinians. 

I don’t understand the blindness of the United States in basically encouraging Israel to commit harakiri. This cannot end well for them. It’s not going to end well for anyone else. I’m not minimizing the horror. It’s going to end worse, obviously, for Palestinians and Lebanese. But what can they possibly be thinking in Washington? Or, for that matter, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?

Perhaps the most horrifying result of the 1982 invasion was Sabra and Shatila, when Israeli soldiers assisted Lebanese Christian militants as they slaughtered thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims inside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. You and your family were staying in a faculty apartment that Malcolm Kerr had found for you after American and international troops pulled out of Beirut. Could you talk about what you saw from the balcony of that apartment?

What we witnessed was the Israeli military firing illumination shells over Sabra and Shatila after they had introduced militias that they paid and armed to kill people on the basis of an agreement between [Israeli Defense Minster Ariel] Sharon and the Lebanese forces. We were a little shocked because the fighting had stopped a couple of days before. The Israelis had occupied West Beirut. There were no Palestinian military forces at all in Beirut. No fighters, no units, nothing. The camps were defenseless, and the Americans had promised the PLO that they would protect the civilian populations left behind when the PLO evacuated its forces. 

So, we were quite perplexed. What is going with these illumination shells being fired when it seemed completely quiet? We went to bed not knowing the massacre had started. When we woke up, we found out from Jon Randall and Loren Jenkins, who were working for the Washington Post, what they had just seen.

When we spoke in November, you held up your phone so that I could hear pro-Palestine demonstrations passing by you in Morningside Heights. Edward Said had the opposite experience decades before.

He said he was radicalized by being in New York during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and talked about hearing someone in Morningside Heights ask, How are we doing? It drove home that Arabs and Palestinians effectively did not exist. What do you make of the significance of that shift?

I was in New York in June 1967, and I remember people collecting money for Israel in bedsheets outside Grand Central station. The same fervor that Edward witnessed, I witnessed in ’67. There’s been an enormous shift in American public opinion. The polling numbers are unequivocally opposed to this war, opposed to Biden’s policy, opposed to continuing to arm Israel.

We’ve seen it on campus. The campus has been shut down in response to last year’s protests. We call it Fortress Columbia. You can’t get a journalist onto the campus without two days’ notice, and even then, it doesn’t work. Columbia has sealed the campus and installed checkpoints to prevent the people of the neighborhood from walking across the campus on what should be a public thoroughfare on 116th Street. 

The protest movement has been shut down by repression, but the sentiment is I’m sure still there. Most young people have an entirely different view of this war—and of Palestine and Israel—than their grandparents have. The difference is enormous and striking, and I think it may be growing. The invasion of Lebanon will do nothing to change the way people see things. I think it will just reinforce it.

I’ve seen a sea change in the past couple of decades that I was at Columbia. I arrived there in 2003, and sentiment was not favorable to Palestine overall. I still had the sense that I had when I was an undergraduate many decades ago that I was swimming against the tide of opinion among students and faculty. That’s not the case anymore. Two-thirds of the arts and sciences faculty voted no confidence in the president because of her position on the protests. I couldn’t have imagined something like that happening 25 years ago.

Do you ever fear that the shift is arriving too late? That by the time America potentially decides to hold Israel accountable, there might not be a Palestine left to save because the West Bank has been annexed and Gaza has been leveled?

Gaza has been leveled, and the West Bank has long since been annexed. It’s been incorporated into Israel in practice for decades. Israeli law operates in the West Bank for Israelis only. Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller Bantustans, and Israel is encouraging them to leave. But that doesn’t mean that Palestine is gone. You still have as many Palestinians as Israelis within the frontiers of Palestine. That’s not going to change. 

They still have a problem. How do you establish an entity involving Jewish supremacy in a country where at least half of the population are not Jews? I don’t see how they get out of that conundrum just because they’ve devastated Gaza or just because they’ve annexed the West Bank. 

They’ve created that conundrum and there’s no way out for them. They either entirely annihilate the Palestinian population or drive it out, which I don’t think is possible in the 21st century, at least I hope not, or they come to terms with it. They’re not willing to do that right now. They’re even less willing to do that after October 7. Public opinion has hardened in Israel for reasons that are perfectly understandable.

But do I see that this is too late? No. I worry that no matter how consequential the shift in public opinion is, the elite will hold on stubbornly. And that it will take even longer than it took for public opinion opposing the Iraq war or public opinion opposing the Vietnam War to force elites that were dedicated and committed to mindless, aggressive wars abroad to finally change their course. It took years and years on Vietnam, and it took years and years on Iraq.

That’s what I’m afraid of—that the anti-democratic intent of the elite, and of the party leaderships, of the foreign policy establishment, and of the donor class will prevent a shift for many more years than should be the case. If we had a really democratic system, if we had a system where public opinion had as much of an effect as money—which it doesn’t, unfortunately—then you would have seen a change already. There’s no indication that there will be a change for quite a while, regardless of who is elected in November.

A consequence of timing this interview to coincide with the one-year mark of the war is that it can obscure what came before. How should the reality of daily life in Gaza in the decades leading up to October 7 shape how we understand what has happened in the past year?

The people who have been fighting Israel in Gaza, for the most part, are people who grew up as children under this prison camp regime imposed on them by the Israelis and on the southern border by the Egyptians. Most of them have never been allowed to leave Gaza. Most of them have had all kinds of restrictions on everything they can do and buy and say for their entire lives. And they’ve lived under an authoritarian Hamas regime, which was quite unpopular in Gaza before October 7. 

The people who have been fighting the Israelis are the people who Israel’s prison camp has created. And what Israel has done in the last year is far, far worse than anything it did in the preceding 17 years of the blockade. They killed over 2,300 people in 2014. They’ve killed probably well over 50,000 in the past year, if we count those buried under the rubble. The number is 41,600 as of today. The numbers are hard to process.

The kids growing up now are going to be the successors to today’s fighters, given that nobody’s offering them a future, given that they’re going to live in misery for a decade if not longer, given that Israel will dominate their lives in even more intense ways than it had before. The people who grow up in that situation—some of them are going to turn into even more ferocious fighters resisting Israel.

The same thing is happening in South Lebanon. People grew up in South Lebanon being bombarded by Israel, and they became the fighters in the ’82 war. There’s a picture of [former Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah fighting in ’82 as a young man. That experience of constant Israeli attacks and the occupations of South Lebanon in ’78 and ’82 created Hezbollah. Even Ehud Barak admitted as much. 

I’ve seen not one mention of the fact that the United States helped Israel kill 19,000 people in Lebanon in 1982. And that might have been a factor as important as what Israel was doing in creating Hezbollah and in it turning against the United States. They considered the United States responsible for Sabra and Shatila because it had promised to protect the civilians—that no harm would come to the civilians the PLO left behind. 

I fear that the United States’ full-throated support for what Israel is doing may have the same effect in the 2020s and 2030s, unfortunately. I’m not happy about any of this. I consider all of these things disastrous. But I’m looking at them coldly. The things that I’m talking about have produced what has passed, and what we’re seeing now will produce, heaven forbid, possibly even more horrible things in the future. Those who don’t read history and don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, but in a much worse way, I’m afraid. 

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. 

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been directly financed by the United States, which supplies 69 percent of Israel’s weapons imports.

Monetary Cost

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. 

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been directly financed by the United States, which supplies 69 percent of Israel’s weapons imports.

Monetary Cost

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.”

It seemed US politicians were inching towards a cross-partisan embrace of Israel’s reported “de-escalation through escalation” strategy.

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.”

It seemed US politicians were inching towards a cross-partisan embrace of Israel’s reported “de-escalation through escalation” strategy.

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

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) September 27, 2024

“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. 

"נצח ישראל לא ישקר"
חזק ואמץ ראש הממשלה

— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) September 27, 2024

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. 

On September 24, ProPublica revealed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly ignored two different reports from within the Biden administration concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking aid into Gaza. Only days after receiving detailed memos explaining exactly how the Israeli military was blocking humanitarian aid, Blinken told Congress that US does not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Now, the Secretary of State is facing calls for his resignation. “[Blinken] lied. People went hungry, and some died. He needs to resign now,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich) wrote this morning. Tlaib, who is the only Palestinian-American in the US House, is the first member of Congress to call for Blinken to resign. 

Blinken has not, as of the time of publication, responded to Tlaib’s comment. He justified his response to the reports on CBS this morning, saying his response was “actually pretty typical.”

The US government is legally required to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of humanitarian aid. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration each gave reports to Blinken concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking aid from the starving people of Gaza.

“USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct,” ProPublica reported. “The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.”

As recently as August, the US approved a $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel, including fighter jets, tank shells, and missiles.

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

The US government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The US Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death—likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede US provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy—along with Lew’s decision to undermine them—reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The US gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime—money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

The US government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The US Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death—likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede US provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy—along with Lew’s decision to undermine them—reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The US gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime—money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

After 50 days, Gaza European Hospital, one of the few trauma centers serving the Gaza strip, reopened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospital has been a vital part of the crumbling medical infrastructure in the region. It reopened earlier this month.

In August, I told the story of two medical students who worked at Gaza European Hospital before it was shuttered and forcibly evacuated on July 1st. The medical center remained closed amid bombardment in the area for over a month. Each student told me harrowing stories of their time suddenly propelled to the job of full-time doctors amid the devastation of the medical system in Gaza.  

You can read the full piece, here:

Now, the students are back to work. Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, a dental student I interviewed via WhatsApp in August, returned to European Hospital on September 9th. He said things are different there now. 

Before the July evacuation, he slept at the hospital. Now, he commutes back and forth from his family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, a trip that takes him three or four hours a day. It is only about a seven-mile journey. But in Gaza, it can be treacherous.

Normally, he takes a hospital-provided bus to work. Last Friday, though, “I was a little late for the bus and I was forced to go by car,” he said. On his journey, he passed a destroyed World Health Organization warehouse, a torched mosque, and innumerable teetering husks of buildings and dust-covered tents. “I took three cars on my way to get from my tent to the hospital and I walked through many destroyed streets on foot.” 

In some areas of eastern Gaza, there are no cars at all. The trip, he said, cost him 25 shekels, or about eight dollars, thanks to the lack of fuel entering Gaza. Before the war, transportation wouldn’t cost a thing. 

Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, another student volunteer, hears the zanana—Gazan slang for the incessant buzzing of drones overhead—on her way to the hospital. “It was not easy to reopen it, because all the hospital’s property was stolen,” she said. The hospital is still not fully equipped, she explained, but medical teams are doing their best to work with what they have. 

Once the students arrive, they see “mostly burns and fractures,” Abu Ghalyoon said. Every day, there are patients requiring skin grafts. 

Another change: there are now fewer international delegations than before. The flow of international medics into the Gaza strip has slowed to a trickle. The Israeli military has hit international aid workers like those from World Central Kitchen, after a vehicle from the group was bombed in April, and UN workers, like those from the World Food Program, whose vehicles were struck in August. Supply shortages are ongoing. As Abu Ghalyoon put it: “There is a very, very severe shortage of all medicines. The medical equipment is old and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.”

On September 12th, the World Health Organization released a report estimating that over 22,500 people in Gaza have suffered “life-changing injuries” since Israel’s offensive in Gaza began. Most of these injuries—about 13,000 to 17,000—are what the WHO report calls “severe limb injuries,” and at least 3,000 are amputations.

“The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Patients can’t get the care they need. Acute rehabilitation services are severely disrupted and specialized care for complex injuries is not available, placing patients’ lives at risk. Immediate and long-term support is urgently needed to address the enormous rehabilitation needs.” 

After 50 days, Gaza European Hospital, one of the few trauma centers serving the Gaza strip, reopened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospital has been a vital part of the crumbling medical infrastructure in the region. It reopened earlier this month.

In August, I told the story of two medical students who worked at Gaza European Hospital before it was shuttered and forcibly evacuated on July 1st. The medical center remained closed amid bombardment in the area for over a month. Each student told me harrowing stories of their time suddenly propelled to the job of full-time doctors amid the devastation of the medical system in Gaza.  

You can read the full piece, here:

Now, the students are back to work. Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, a dental student I interviewed via WhatsApp in August, returned to European Hospital on September 9th. He said things are different there now. 

Before the July evacuation, he slept at the hospital. Now, he commutes back and forth from his family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, a trip that takes him three or four hours a day. It is only about a seven-mile journey. But in Gaza, it can be treacherous.

Normally, he takes a hospital-provided bus to work. Last Friday, though, “I was a little late for the bus and I was forced to go by car,” he said. On his journey, he passed a destroyed World Health Organization warehouse, a torched mosque, and innumerable teetering husks of buildings and dust-covered tents. “I took three cars on my way to get from my tent to the hospital and I walked through many destroyed streets on foot.” 

In some areas of eastern Gaza, there are no cars at all. The trip, he said, cost him 25 shekels, or about eight dollars, thanks to the lack of fuel entering Gaza. Before the war, transportation wouldn’t cost a thing. 

Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, another student volunteer, hears the zanana—Gazan slang for the incessant buzzing of drones overhead—on her way to the hospital. “It was not easy to reopen it, because all the hospital’s property was stolen,” she said. The hospital is still not fully equipped, she explained, but medical teams are doing their best to work with what they have. 

Once the students arrive, they see “mostly burns and fractures,” Abu Ghalyoon said. Every day, there are patients requiring skin grafts. 

Another change: there are now fewer international delegations than before. The flow of international medics into the Gaza strip has slowed to a trickle. The Israeli military has hit international aid workers like those from World Central Kitchen, after a vehicle from the group was bombed in April, and UN workers, like those from the World Food Program, whose vehicles were struck in August. Supply shortages are ongoing. As Abu Ghalyoon put it: “There is a very, very severe shortage of all medicines. The medical equipment is old and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.”

On September 12th, the World Health Organization released a report estimating that over 22,500 people in Gaza have suffered “life-changing injuries” since Israel’s offensive in Gaza began. Most of these injuries—about 13,000 to 17,000—are what the WHO report calls “severe limb injuries,” and at least 3,000 are amputations.

“The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Patients can’t get the care they need. Acute rehabilitation services are severely disrupted and specialized care for complex injuries is not available, placing patients’ lives at risk. Immediate and long-term support is urgently needed to address the enormous rehabilitation needs.”