What Israeli Soldiers’ Social Media Videos in Gaza Reveal - The New York Times

What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans

"An analysis of social media videos found Israeli soldiers filming themselves in Gaza and destroying what appears to be civilian property. The footage provides a rare and unsanctioned window into the war.

2m ago

Feb. 6, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET

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An Israeli soldier gives a thumbs up to the camera as he drives a bulldozer down a street in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, pushing a battered car toward a half-collapsed building.

“I stopped counting how many neighborhoods I’ve erased,” the caption reads on the video posted to his personal TikTok, accompanied by a militaristic anthem.

Since Israel’s invasion in October, soldiers have shared videos from Gaza on social media, offering a rare, unsanctioned look at operations on the ground. Some have been viewed by small circles of people; others have reached tens of thousands.

The New York Times reviewed hundreds of these videos. Some show unremarkable parts of a soldier’s life — eating, hanging out or sending messages to loved ones back home.

Others capture soldiers vandalizing local shops and school classrooms, making derogatory comments about Palestinians, bulldozing what appear to be civilian areas and calling for the building of Israeli settlements in Gaza, an inflammatory idea that is promoted by some far-right Israeli politicians. 

Some of the soldiers’ posts violate regulations of the Israel Defense Forces that restrict the use of social media by its personnel, which specifically forbid sharing content that may “affect the image of the I.D.F. and its perceptions in the eyes of the public,” or that shows behavior that “harms human dignity.”

In a statement, the Israeli military condemned the videos filmed by soldiers featured in this story.

“The conduct of the force that emerges from the footage is deplorable and does not comply with the army’s orders,” the military said in a written statement. It added that the “circumstances” were being examined.

But new videos like these from the ground continue to appear online, a reminder of the many ways social media is changing warfare. In Russia and Ukraine, soldiers now share videos directly from the battlefield, frequently posting footage of combat, at times even giving a first-person perspective from helmet-mounted cameras. Videos have also been posted showing torture and executions.

With ​Israel’s war in Gaza under intense scrutiny, many of the soldiers’ videos shot in Gaza have fueled criticism. One was screened and five others were also cited as evidence in the case that South Africa brought to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, a charge Israel has categorically denied. 

The Times traced more than 50 videos back to Israel’s military combat engineering units, showing the use of bulldozers, excavators and explosives to destroy what appear to be houses, schools and other civilian buildings.

Human rights experts have raised concerns about the scale of this type of destruction in areas under Israeli military control, noting that international standards of warfare require a clear military necessity to destroy civilian property.

The videos in this story have been verified by determining the dates and locations where they were recorded, or by confirming that the soldiers appearing in them and their units were in Gaza around the time the footage was uploaded.

None of the soldiers who shot and posted the videos responded when asked for comment.

More than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since an Israeli bombardment and invasion of the enclave began, according to the health authorities in Gaza. The Israeli offensive followed the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.

The base at ‘Nova Beach’

After its ground invasion in late October, the Israeli military established bases along the northern coast of Gaza. The area, called Nova Beach by soldiers, a reference to the music festival where 364 people were killed by Hamas and its allies on Oct. 7, is the backdrop for many of the social media videos reviewed by The Times.

Before the war, the area was made up of homes belonging to Gazan families, vacation properties, greenhouses and agricultural fields. A damaged Gazan house on what is now a coastal Israeli base is the setting for a video posted in November by a reservist who is also a D.J.

The clip was paired with a parody version of the Israeli song “This Was My Home,” which was featured in an Israeli comedy sketch and has spread online in recent months among Israeli social media users making fun of Palestinians.

“This was my home, without electricity, without gas,” the song goes as a soldier makes himself at home in the rubble of the damaged house before heading to the window and gesturing at a scene of destruction outside. The house was destroyed in late December, satellite imagery shows.

“It’s heartbreaking, inhumane,” Basel al-Sourani, an international human rights lawyer with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization based in Gaza City, told The Times, “and just demonstrates that the Israelis want you basically out of your home, the Gaza Strip.”

Using another popular meme, the same soldier also posted a video in mid-November to the sounds of a remix called “Shtayim, Shalosh, Sha-ger” or “Two, Three, Launch.” In the widely shared clip, soldiers dance on camera, and when the word “launch” is heard, the video cuts to a shot of a building being blown up.

Shortly after The Times asked TikTok about the videos featured in this story, the clips were removed from the platform. A representative from TikTok said the videos violated company guidelines, including its policies around hate speech and behavior.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to a request for comment.

A window into demolitions

Some of the most active accounts reviewed by The Times belonged to soldiers from units of the Israeli military’s Combat Engineering Corps, which uses heavy machinery, including bulldozers, to clear pathways for the military, discover and destroy tunnelsand raze structures. The Times recently documented controlled demolitions carried out by engineering units throughout Gaza.

In a video filmed on the outskirts of Khan Younis in southern Gaza in early January, combat engineering soldiers can be seen smoking hookah pipes before explosions take down residential buildings in the background. They then raise glasses to toast each other.

In some of the combat engineers’ videos, Israeli soldiers mock Palestinians as they destroy structures and property. In others shared widely on social media, soldiers dedicate the destruction of buildings to victims of the Oct. 7 attacks and to family members. In one TikTok video, soldiers dedicate the bulldozing of a building to Eyal Golan, an Israeli singer who has called for the complete destruction of Gaza. South Africa cited this video as evidence of what it called “genocidal speech by soldiers” in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

As the bulldozer drives into the remaining walls of a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis, soldiers shout, “Eyal Golan, our dear brother, we love you,” and add: “This house is for you.”

A destroyed landscape

One combat engineering soldier shared a photograph on Dec. 12 to his TikTok account with three armored bulldozers and a destroyed landscape near the Israeli base on the northern coastline of Gaza.

An image of the cleared beach in Northern Gaza posted on TikTok by the combat engineer on Dec. 12, 2023.

“This is after a lot of work — the whole place was covered in greenery and houses until we got there,” the caption reads.

About a mile south along the coast, similar destruction can be seen in satellite imagery captured in late December, showing that at least 63 buildings, including homes, had been cleared within a quarter mile of the base. At the time, the area was about 1.5 miles from the boundary of Israeli-controlled territory, according to maps published by the Institute for the Study of War.

Satellite images of residential buildings in northern Gaza from before the war on July 4, 2023, and then on Dec. 31, 2023, after Israeli troops had demolished many civilian buildings near one of their beach bases.The New York Times, Source: Planet Labs

The visible building rubble is consistent with clearing methods used by combat engineering units seen in videos filmed elsewhere in Gaza and analyzed by The Times. Israel has used bulldozers to clear vast amounts of land and property throughout Gaza since late October.

The Times sent the coordinates for each of the 63 structures to the Israeli military and asked for comment on the military necessity for their destruction. In a written response, the military stated that Israel “was currently fighting a complex war” and that “there are difficulties in tracing back specific cases with a specific coordinate at this time.”

Four legal experts reviewed the social media videos and satellite imagery near the base and said the imagery could be used to show unlawful destruction, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Dr. John B. Quigley, a professor emeritus of law at Ohio State University specializing in international human rights law, said in an email that “the scope of destruction of residential buildings in Gaza suggests that the I.D.F. is using a standard for protection of private property that does not comply with international standards for warfare.”

In response to questions about soldiers’ bulldozing of civilian homes, an Israeli military spokesman, Maj. Nir Dinar, said that the military acts upon “operational necessity” and follows laws of war. “The houses that are being dealt with are buildings that pose a threat to forces operating or they are a military target of some sort,” he told The Times by phone. “Every target that is being eliminated, there is a good reason for that elimination.”

Israel is also conducting controlled demolitions along the length of Gaza’s 36-mile land border in order to create a “buffer zone.” Legal experts have questioned the legality of these demolitions, noting that it is unlikely that all of the destroyed buildings posed an immediate military threat.

Riley Mellen and Neil Collier contributed reporting from New York, Johnatan Reiss and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem and Mohammed Almajdalawi from Gaza. Alexander Cardia contributed production.

Aric Toler is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times where he uses emerging techniques of discovery to analyze open source information. More about Aric Toler"

What Israeli Soldiers’ Social Media Videos in Gaza Reveal - The New York Times

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The Crafts and Healys fled slavery. Are their descendants related? - The Washington Post

Two daring slave escapes, two descendant families and a DNA mystery

"The Crafts and Healys fled slavery. Their descendants just met. Are they actually cousins?

Left, a daguerreotype believed to be of Mary Eliza Healy. (Courtesy of Tom Riley) Right, an engraving, based on a photograph, shows Ellen Craft in her disguise as a White man, which she used to escape slavery with her husband. (Boston African American National Historic Site/National Park Service) 

Just before Christmas, Tom Riley, 80, and his daughters, Kate, 51, and Erin, 48, did what many families do around the holidays: They exchanged greetings with their cousins over Zoom. Gathered at Erin’s Albuquerque home, they saw the squares on the computer screen filled by Gail DeCosta, 75, in Charleston, S.C.; Vicki Davis Williams, 73, also in Charleston; and Williams’s sister Julia-Ellen Craft Davis, 74, who logged in from her daughter’s home in New Jersey.

For two hours, they tried to answer a question that historians have long debated: Are they, in fact, cousins?

Williams and Davis and their first cousin, Gail, are great-great-grandchildren of William and Ellen Craft, a couple who achieved world renown for their dramatic escape from slavery in Georgia in 1848. Ellen, who was light-complexioned, disguised herself as a Southern gentleman traveling north with William, “his” enslaved servant. The Crafts became active abolitionists in the North, ultimately settling in England to avoid recapture under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Martha Healy, Tom Riley’s great-grandmother, fled the same region of Georgia during the same era as the Crafts. Martha’s mother, Mary Eliza, was the common-law wife of her enslaver, Michael Healy, a major Jones County landowner. Georgia law prohibited Healy from freeing his wife and children, so Healy sent his children north, both to liberate them and to educate them.

The Healy children would become the first known African American Catholic bishop, university president, Mother Superior and captain of a U.S. government ship. The Healys, who could pass for White, did not acknowledge their African heritage.

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“Our side of the family was seriously passing right through my grandmother’s generation,” said Riley on the Zoom call. Riley was brought up White and Irish Catholic outside of Boston. Williams, Davis and DeCosta have always identified as Black.

This Zoom call, arranged by The Washington Post, may mark the first time these families have met in about 150 years. It also coincided with the 175th anniversary of the Crafts’ escape from Georgia at Christmas, a time when some enslavers granted passes to allow enslaved workers to leave their estates for the holiday.

The call was not marked by the usual mirth that accompanies a family reunion. These cousins – or likely cousins — were strangers, warm and cordial, but mostly curious to find out whether the other family had passed down any stories that suggested the blood relationship established by historians.

“There aren’t any family stories on our side of it,” Riley said on the call.

Gail DeCosta, Julia-Ellen Craft Davis and Vicki Davis Williams. (Sydney Holmes)

Martha, Riley’s great-grandmother, was one of six Healy siblings who chose a life of devotion within the Catholic Church, before she left the convent to marry. While the family’s African American heritage had long been the stuff of rumor among clerics and the congregations to which the Healys ministered, it was Albert S. Foley, a Jesuit priest and historian, who publicized the family secret in “Beloved Outcaste,” his 1954 book about Martha’s brother, James Healy, bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Maine, from 1875 to 1900 and the first Black priest in the United States.

“I remember Father Foley coming to the house,” said Riley, who was 8 when his grandmother reluctantly granted an interview to the meddlesome priest in her Waltham, Mass., home. Riley was left in the dark until an aunt told him at 16 about his mixed-race heritage.

Foley made no mention of the Crafts in his 1954 book, but in “Dream of an Outcaste,” his 1976 book on the bishop’s brother, Patrick — president from 1873 to 1882 of Georgetown University, whose flagship building bears his name — Foley asserted that Mary Eliza, the clerics’ mother, was a sister to the famed abolitionist Ellen Craft. The journalist and historian Dorothy Sterling repeated the claim in her 1979 book “Black Foremothers.”

“I went deep down the Sterling and Foley rabbit hole,” said Ilyon Woo, author of “Master Slave Husband Wife,” her 2023 bestseller on the Crafts. Woo had drafted an entire chapter on Mary Eliza but abandoned it when she could not verify Foley’s claim that she was Ellen’s sister.

“[Foley and Sterling] clearly did an incredible amount of really obsessive research, [but] they were horrible footnoters,” Woo said. Still, she sensed, “They never said anything that they didn’t feel like they could back up.” She went in search of their elusive sources.

At the Josephite Archives in D.C., which housed some of Foley’s papers, she learned that the relevant box of documents had been thrown out. In Harvard’s Houghton Library, she found a handwritten 1893 letter from S.T. Pickard, the editor of the Portland Transcript, to a historian chronicling Maine’s Underground Railroad. Pickard said he had met Ellen when she visited the home of Portland abolitionist Lydia Dennett, then wrote:

“The Roman Catholic Bishop of this Diocese, Bishop Healy, is her cousin. … I doubt if it would do to publish these facts, for Healy does not acknowledge them. But Ellen Crafts (sic) told me it was so — and she called on him and was recognized.”

Pickard repeated that claim in an 1895 letter, specifying that Ellen was Healy’s “first cousin.”

That would make Mary Eliza the aunt of Ellen and not her sister, as Foley and Sterling had declared.

What ultimately gave Woo the confidence to state in her book that Mary Eliza was Ellen’s aunt were the materials she discovered at the Craft family archive at the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston, which suggested a family relationship.

“It just comes up again and again,” she said.

In 2011, Davis and Williams donated to Avery a photo album that Ellen Craft started in England. Captions reading “Bishop James A. Healy” and “Rev. Sherwood Healy,” indicate where photographs of the Healys once appeared among the cartes des visitesof Frederick Douglass, Harriet Martineau and other luminaries the Crafts knew.

Julia Ellen Craft DeCosta, the grandmother of Davis, Williams and DeCosta, had been the custodian of that album. She, along with Davis’s and Williams’s mother, visited Bishop Healy’s burial place in Portland around 1977, Davis told the Rileys.

“Why would they do that,” Riley wondered aloud, if they were not related?

A few weeks after the call, Williams shared a picture of her mother and grandmother at Healy’s grave site, featuring a towering stone Celtic cross.

William and Ellen Craft themselves may have cryptically referred to the Healys in their 1860 book, “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” They devote 10 pages to a story of “a very humane and wealthy gentleman, that bought a woman, with whom he lived as his wife.” This Jones County couple “brought up a family of children, among whom were three nearly white, well educated, and beautiful girls.” That describes Martha and her siblings exactly. While the story departs from the Healy history in some key respects, William, whose voice the book adopts, announces at the end of this story that the enslaved woman he described was “my wife’s own dear aunt.”

“It seems pretty likely their story was an embroidered version of the Healy story,” said Woo, noting that sharing the full story would have blown the Healys’ cover, as they were passing for White. It could have also complicated the book’s anti-slavery narrative, since the Healy children, as beneficiaries of their father’s estate, profited from the labor and eventual sale of their father’s enslaved workers after his death.

“You know, a DNA test would help a whole lot with some of this,” Davis told the Rileys on Zoom.

“I’d love to do it,” Tom Riley said. “And just sort of see where we are connected.”

DNA testing may confirm the two families are related. But it’s unlikely to provide definitive answers about how Ellen and Mary Eliza were related and who the families’ common ancestor is.

“We have the gift of DNA [testing] but it can also be confounding,” said Mary Helen Thomspon, a volunteer genealogical researcher at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. DNA results, she said, can tell us only so much, if there is no other context, like a family tree. Even then, the accepted family history may mask the true story, given how often official records and family documents did not acknowledge children of White men and enslaved women. In the absence of trustworthy records, she said, “oral history counts for a great deal.”

Erin Riley wondered if their family connection might prove too remote. She asked the group on Zoom, “Would Ancestry do it? Is it powerful enough genetics?”

Davis responded that a test would still probably register shared DNA. She did an AncestryDNA test more than a decade ago, and it confirmed that she, Williams and DeCosta had third cousins in England, descendants of the Crafts’ son William Ivins Craft, who returned to England after the Crafts came back to the United States. Williams held up a picture for the Rileys of Davis, DeCosta and herself with their British cousins at a UK reunion.

“They are, for all appearances, White,” DeCosta told the Rileys, the result of generations of intermarriage with White Britons. When DeCosta and her first cousins visited the U.K. in 2022, a couple of their British cousins said they had not been aware of their ancestry until they were adults. “It had not been shared with them.”

A few weeks after Christmas, Tom Riley spat into a vial and sent his DNA off to a lab for analysis. In mid-February, during Black History Month, he will learn whether his Black heritage includes the Crafts; and Williams, Davis and DeCosta will learn whether science backs their received oral history that the trailblazing Healys were part of their family. Two families in the history books for achievements in their own right may soon write the next chapter together."

The Crafts and Healys fled slavery. Are their descendants related? - The Washington Post

After Speedy Start, Appeals Court Slows Down on Trump Immunity Decision - The New York Times

After Speedy Start, Appeals Court Slows Down on Trump Immunity Decision

"The implications have started coming into focus with the scrapping of March 4 as the start date for the former president’s federal trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Feb. 3, 2024Updated 9:11 a.m. ET

Trump Federal Election Case

Lawyers argued their claims nearly a month ago before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock

In December, when a federal appeals court agreed to hear former President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping claims to be immune from charges of plotting overturn the 2020 election, it laid out a lightning-fast briefing schedule, asking the defense and prosecution to file their papers on successive Saturdays during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit also moved with unusual alacrity in setting up a hearing for arguments on the issue, scheduling the proceeding on Jan. 9, just one week after all of the papers were submitted — a remarkably short window by the standards of the judicial system.

But after sending up what appeared to be clear signals that they intended to swiftly resolve this phase of the immunity dispute — which lies at the heart of both the viability and timing of Mr. Trump’s trial on the election subversion charges — the appeals court judges have yet to issue a decision.

The implications are already coming into focus. On Friday, the Federal District Court judge overseeing the election case, Tanya S. Chutkan, formally scrapped her plan to start the trial on March 4. She was bowing to the reality that time had run out to get the proceeding going by then, mostly because of the wrangling over Mr. Trump’s immunity claim, and said she would set a new date “if and when” that matter is resolved.

The disconnect between the expectations set up by the panel’s early moves to expedite the case and the weeks that have now accumulated without a ruling has captured the attention of some legal experts who are closely watching the case.

It has also caught the eye of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who have been watching from the sidelines with something akin to quiet glee. Each day that passes without a ruling bolsters their strategy of seeking to postpone the trial until after the presidential race is decided.

Takeaways From Trump’s Indictment in the 2020 Election Inquiry

The indictment portrayed an attack on American democracy. Smith framed his case against Trump as one that cuts to a key function of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. By underscoring this theme, Smith cast his effort as an effort not just to hold Trump accountable but also to defend the very core of democracy.

Trump was placed at the center of the conspiracy charges. Smith put Trump at the heart of three conspiracies that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to obstruct Congress’s role in ratifying the Electoral College outcome. The special counsel argued that Trump knew that his claims about a stolen election were false, a point that, if proved, could be important to convincing a jury to convict him.

Trump didn’t do it alone. The indictment lists six co-conspirators without naming or indicting them. Based on the descriptions provided, they match the profiles of Trump lawyers and advisers who were willing to argue increasingly outlandish conspiracy and legal theories to keep him in power. It’s unclear whether these co-conspirators will be indicted.

“It is surprising, given how quickly they moved to have this appeal briefed and argued, for the court to not yet have issued a decision,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a University of Texas at Austin law professor who specializes in federal courts. “It’s surprising both just because of how fast they moved and because of the broader timing considerations in this case — both the March 4 trial date and the looming specter of the election.”

It is impossible at this point to gain real insight into what is going on among the members of the panel, which is composed of two judges appointed by President Biden and one placed on the bench by President George H.W. Bush.

The latter judge, Karen L. Henderson, had previously dissented from expediting the immunity appeal and has voted in Mr. Trump’s favor in several previous politically charged cases. As the panel’s senior jurist, Judge Henderson has the authority to write the opinion if she is in the majority. And she faces no deadline to complete the job.

Professor Vladeck said that many people in the legal community had been speculating about what Judge Henderson’s role in the delay might be, though he also noted that no formal rule prevented the other two judges on a panel from moving ahead in issuing a ruling on their own.

While that would be a “breach of judicial decorum,” he said, Judge Henderson’s colleagues — Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs — could in theory release a decision without her.

One possibility behind the delay is that the panel is deadlocked on the issue of immunity, though that would seem unlikely given that all of three jurists expressed some skepticism about Mr. Trump’s claims at the hearing in Washington last month.

It could also be that the judges agree that Mr. Trump does not enjoy immunity from prosecution but are struggling to reach a consensus on how to frame their decision on one of the most momentous questions about presidential power that courts have considered in years.

Professor Vladeck said the panel would benefit — if only in terms of public opinion — by reaching a unanimous decision both in reasoning and outcome. The virtues of avoiding the appearance of a divided panel, he noted, are likely worth taking “a few extra days — or even a few extra weeks.”

The appeals process began in early December, when Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked the appeals court to reverse Judge Chutkan’s denial of his immunity claims. Judge Chutkan also froze the underlying case, imperiling the trial’s proposed start date.

Even if the immunity issue is resolved in the coming weeks, it is not clear how quickly the case could go to trial. Judge Chutkan has scheduled another trial in her courtroom, which could last a week or so, starting on April 2. And she has hinted in court papers that, in the interest of fairness, she wants to ensure that Mr. Trump’s lawyers get the time to which they are entitled to prepare for trial.

The timing is also likely to be determined by the Supreme Court, assuming one side or the other appeals the ruling of the three-judge panel to the justices.

The Supreme Court could decline to hear the question and allow the appeals court’s ruling to stand — a move that may hold attraction for the justices. They are already embroiled in another politically fraught issue involving Mr. Trump, the question of whether states can disqualify him from the ballot this year for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

But if the court picks up the immunity appeal, it will have to make the equally important decision about how to fast to move in hearing it.

Depending on the justices’ actions, the election interference case could go to trial in Federal District Court in Washington as early as April or it could be delayed until after the election. If that occurs and Mr. Trump wins, he could ask his Justice Department to throw the charges out. Even if the charges were left in place, the proceedings against him could be frozen for as long as he is in office, under a longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecution a sitting president.

Judge Henderson has generally shown herself to be more willing than some of her colleagues on the appeals court to rule in ways favorable to Mr. Trump.

In November 2019, she was among the dissenters in an 8-to-3 decision by the full appeals court that Mr. Trump’s accounting firm must turn over eight years of his financial records to Congress.

She was also part of a panel that ruled in February 2020 that Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, was immune from being subpoenaed to testify before the House. Several months later, the full court reversed that decision.

And in June 2020, Judge Henderson was part of a panel that ordered a district court judge to immediately dismiss a case against Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. That would have blocked the district court judge’s plan to scrutinize the circumstances by which the Trump-era Justice Department sought dismissal of the case even though Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty. The full appeals court reversed that decision over her objections, too.

In August 2022, Judge Henderson did join a ruling that delivered a setback to Mr. Trump. The decision allowed the House to gain access to Mr. Trump’s tax records. But in a separate opinion, she expressed unease about “Congress’s potential and incentive to threaten a sitting president with a post-presidency” request for tax returns “to influence the president while in office.”

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.  More about Alan Feuer"

After Speedy Start, Appeals Court Slows Down on Trump Immunity Decision - The New York Times

Fani Willis SHUTS DOWN Trump’s Attack, BEATS HIM DOWN in Filing

In the West Bank, Palestinians Struggle to Adjust to a New Reality

“The volatile mix of violence, tensions and Israeli restrictions has had a stultifying effect on the West Bank.

Feb. 2, 2024

A Palestinian man walks near the Qalandiya checkpoint in the West Bank in November. Some Palestinians say the Israelis have made it more difficult to cross into Jerusalem from the West Bank.Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

A Palestinian man walks near the Qalandiya checkpoint in the West Bank in November. Some Palestinians say the Israelis have made it more difficult to cross into Jerusalem from the West Bank.Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

By Yara Bayoumy and Rami Nazzal

Reporting from multiple cities in the West Bank

At one of the main checkpoints between the West Bank and Jerusalem, only two of four lanes were open recently and the hours of operation were shortened to 12 hours a day.

Haneen Faroukh, 26, said she now had to wait for hours to run simple errands. Israeli soldiers had sown panic among ordinary Palestinians who make the crossing frequently to reach jobs, doctors, relatives or just their homes.

“They yell at us all the time,” said Ms. Faroukh. “We’re too scared to say anything.”

For many Palestinians, life in the West Bank, already hard under years of Israeli occupation, is now subject to ever more onerous restrictions and an increased military presence since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that killed an estimated 1,200 people.

Israeli authorities have created new choke points for travel, throttling traffic. They have stopped allowing many Palestinians to work in Israel, a lifeblood for the local economy. And they have increased the intensity of raids and arrests in West Bank neighborhoods.

The Israeli military says there has been a “significant increase in terrorist attacks” in the West Bank since Oct. 7, necessitating the need for the additional security measures and raids.

Many Palestinians who spoke to The New York Times say these measures, at times humiliating, have provoked frustration and anger. They have watched in horror as an estimated 26,000 people, including friends and relatives, have been killed under heavy Israeli bombardment in Gaza, while facing worsening conditions at home under Israeli authority and attacks at the hands of Jewish settlers.

Israeli soldiers checking a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance at the entrance of the Tulkarem refugee camp in Tulkarem, in the occupied West Bank, this month.Marco Longari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the extreme, it has translated into violence by Palestinian factions. Last month, two Palestinian men stole cars and ran over Israelis in a suburb of Tel Aviv, the Israeli police said. One person was killed and 17 others were injured, according to emergency officials. Both men were residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank — which includes a number of Palestinian cities interlaced with Israeli settlements — have long had to reckon with an Israeli occupation that largely dictates their lives.

Israel controls access to most of the water in the West Bank, restricts Palestinian access to several roads and decides who can enter Israel for work. Israel has continued to authorize the construction of thousands of new buildings on Jewish settlements, while making it extremely difficult for Palestinians to obtain building permits in the areas of the West Bank that Israel directly administers, a fact that blocks most Palestinian development in those areas.

Before the war, more than 100,000 Palestinians in the West Bank were working in Israel and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to Raja Khalidi, who leads the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has canceled the majority of those work permits. And the steady flow of workers from the West Bank who usually cross the border has been reduced to a trickle.

For a few weeks after the Hamas-led attack, buses from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the West Bank were only allowed to drop off passengers as far as the checkpoint, forcing passengers to take different forms of transportation.

Charlie Gabajee, 47, said he worked as a delivery man between Israel and the West Bank until his permit was revoked.

“Life is so restricted now,” he said in his car as he inched his way through the checkpoint to take his 85-year-old mother, Claire, to the hospital.

He explained how Israeli soldiers regularly check cars with their guns trained on the passengers. He fears that it could get worse in the West Bank.

“I think there is a plan for the Israeli government that, after they finish in Gaza, they’ll come here to the West Bank and try to shut it down even more,” he said.

By the middle of December, the number of “access and movement restrictions” Israeli forces established in the West Bank, including checkpoints and road blocks, rose to 694 from 645, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The economic shock waves have rippled through the West Bank.

Israel collected tax money in Gaza and the West Bank and gave the funds to the Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in the occupied West Bank. After Oct. 7, Israel withheld funds earmarked for salary and pension expenses in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, in turn, refused to accept the partial transfer, which led to many Palestinian civil servants having their wages cut. The Israeli government recently approved a plan for the frozen tax funds to be held by Norway.

With the money frozen, Palestinian banks face increased risks of default on loans to Gazans, Palestinian workers in Israel and to salary-squeezed employees of the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian Authority was forced to take out a $400 million loan in December to keep itself afloat. This brought the Palestinian banking system’s overall public debt load to $2.5 billion, Mr. Khalidi said.

“I don’t want to use the phrase ‘perfect storm,’ because it seemed appropriate for Covid, but it’s much worse than that,” Mr. Khalidi said. “The overall blow to aggregate demand and consumption in the economy is being felt through the West Bank, while the collapse in Gaza is seen as a worst case that may yet befall the West Bank.”

Some public schools in the West Bank have shut down because teachers have stopped receiving salaries from the Palestinian Authority. Even if schools are open, some parents are too scared to send their children out of fear they may get caught in an Israeli raid.

“I send my daughter to school but I feel like she’ll die at any moment. I’m on my nerves,” said Manal Hamade, 42, who runs a women’s salon in the Balata neighborhood on the outskirts of Nablus.

“The Israelis used to carry out raids at night, but now at any moment they come in,” she said.

Her anxiousness and wariness reflected the mood of the neighborhood, where residents keep watch for any signs of outsiders that could signal an Israeli raid on the camp.

Across the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah says, at least 380 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7 by Israeli forces.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it “conducts nightly counterterrorism operations to apprehend suspects, many of them are part of the Hamas terrorist organization. In addition, as part of the security operations in the area, dynamic checkpoints have been put up over different places.”

Even before the Hamas attacks, settler violence was hitting its highest levelssince the U.N. began tracking it in the mid-2000s. According to U.N. figures in November 2023, there was an average of one incident of settler violence a day in 2021. Since Oct. 7, the average is seven incidents per day. Extremist settlers have been attacking Palestinian homes and businesses in the West Bank. They have burned down the tents of seminomadic Bedouin herders and shot people, witnesses have said.

On Thursday, President Biden ordered broad financial and travel sanctions be imposed on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Hadya Sidr, 42, lives in the city of Hebron with her husband, Abed, and four children and stepchildren. They said they had gotten used to occasional harassment from settlers living nearby. But since the Oct. 7 attacks, they said, the settlers have felt more emboldened.

Most evenings, Ms. Sidr said, settlers throw stones, trash and empty wine bottles to harass them.

“We were living normally before, you could go out and about, but now, it’s not possible. It’s just too scary,” she said.

Her husband added that the settlers also yell profanity at them: “Muhammad is a pig,” referring to the Prophet Muhammad.

“After 4 or 5 p.m., we do not leave our homes. Why? Because we’re worried that a settler sees us and shoots at us,” he said.

The Sidrs, like many Palestinian families living in the West Bank’s numerous refugee camps — many of which are built-up areas that were established decades ago — said the declining economy had hit them particularly hard.

“In normal times, we’re barely able to get enough food,” said Mr. Sidr, who sews Palestinian embroidery on various textiles. “There is no more living here. Everyone who had some money hidden away has spent it.”

“After the war, we’re going to be forced to beg from people,” he added.

Gabby Sobelman, Hiba Yazbek and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.“

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Trump spent more than he took in during 2023

“His total legal bill is staggering. And it left one of his primary committees with little cash on hand.

Save America paid for the legal expenses in part via more than $42 million in refunds it received in 2023 from a third group, Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC to which Save America had given money during the 2022 election cycle. The super PAC raised just shy of $48 million in the second half of the year, and spent more than $20 million on ads supporting Trump in addition to the refunds to Save America.

As Trump barrels towards the Republican presidential nomination, he faces 91 felony counts across four criminal cases that have put his political and legal calendars on a collision course and siphoned off a significant amount of resources from his 2024 efforts. Among those resources is his time. Trump spent several days in the lead up to the votes in Iowa and New Hampshire in courthouses rather than on the campaign trail.

Trump’s joint fundraising committee, which serves as the primary fundraising vehicle for both Trump’s campaign committee and Save America, took in more than $75 million during the second half of the year, up from $54 million in the first six months. But the committee also reported significant fundraising expenses, including $8.8 million on digital consulting, ads and list rentals, as well as $7 million on direct mail, $4.1 million on merchant merchandise fees and $1 million on text message advertising.

Over 47 law firms and attorneys are reflected in the Save America filing, including The Binnall Law Group, Dhillon Law Group, Habba Madaio and Associates, John Lauro, Steven Sadow, Blanche Law, Brand Woodward Law, and Chris Kise and Associates. John Lauro, Steven Sadow, and Chris Kise are among the attorneys representing Trump in his civil and criminal cases. Brand Woodward Law is currently representing Trump valet Walt Nauta, a co-defendant with Trump in the classified documents case. Both Trump and Nauta pleaded not guilty.

Save America continued to make monthly payments of $18,000 to Hervé Pierre Braillard, a French-American fashion designer based in New York for “strategy consulting.” The designer is close with former first lady Melania Trump, and designed her inauguration ball gown.

Trump has also attracted the support of major donors who have filled the coffers of MAGA Inc. The super PAC’s largest contribution came from Timothy Mellon, a transportation company executive and heir to the Mellon family banking fortune, who gave $10 million. WWE founder Linda McMahon, who served as Small Business Administration head during the Trump administration, was the second-biggest donor at $5.25 million.

Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.“