Back to School, in Gaza My nephews study in a big tent surrounded by bombed-out houses. They have no access to chairs or desks, so they sit on the dirt. By Mosab Abu Toha in The New Yorker

Palestinian children walk to school amid the rubble of destroyed buildings as the academic year begins in Khan Younis, on September 19th.Photograph by Bashar Taleb / AFP / Getty

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Back to School, in Gaza

My nephews study in a big tent surrounded by bombed-out houses. They have no access to chairs or desks, so they sit on the dirt.

By Mosab Abu Toha

October 7, 2026

When I was growing up, in northern Gaza, my parents took my siblings and me to a stationery store about a week before each school year started. I would pick out my favorite notebooks, pencils, sharpener, eraser, and ruler, and place them in my backpack. My parents also took us to the market, to buy jeans, shirts, shoes, socks, and a belt. The night before school began was the second most important day of my year, after Eid. I would lay out my outfit and backpack next to the mattress where I slept. Then I would tuck my new shoes under my pillow.

Most schools in Gaza are three- or four-story concrete structures with a U-shaped layout and a central courtyard for assemblies and recreation. My middle school, Al-Fakhoora School, in Jabalia Camp, was run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. It had two practical-arts rooms, where students could learn carpentry, blacksmithing, and metalworking. There was also a science lab, a computer lab, and a library. On the first day, my mother or father would accompany us while we found our classrooms and teachers. My favorite subjects were English and physical education.

Schools were where we accessed many public services. From birth until the age of fifteen, we received many of our vaccinations at UNRWA schools. I remember UNRWA teams performing comprehensive dental screenings at least twice. The agency also gave out new and used textbooks for free. (Students sometimes quarrelled over who got the new ones.) When we got home, our parents helped us fit the books with protective covers. After ninth grade, I began attending government schools, but for a year or two UNRWA continued to provide daily food rations to my younger siblings. I recall them returning home with things they hadn’t finished in class—a sandwich, yogurt, some fresh fruit, juice, nutrient-fortified milk... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/back-to-school-in-gaza

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"What we know is that, because Israel controls about seventy per cent of the territory of the Gaza Strip, some two million people are squeezed into thirty per cent of the territory. We know that eighty-one per cent of the Gaza Strip is damaged or destroyed, and more than three hundred thousand housing units were completely destroyed during the war, in addition to schools and other infrastructure, like clinics, hospitals, and mosques."

Photograph by Mohammad Abu Elseba / ZUMA / Reuters

The New Yorker

September 21, 2026 

Q. & A.

What Life Is Actually Like in Gaza Today

Nearly a year after the ceasefire, the analyst Jaser AbuMousa explains the impediments to rebuilding, and the devastation of his own family.

At least twenty-one people, many of them children, were killed earlier this week after a building collapsed in Gaza City, highlighting the dangerous conditions that still exist in the Gaza Strip. The building, like much of the remaining infrastructure in Gaza, had been damaged by Israeli strikes in the war that began after the massacre of October 7, 2023, and which has now killed seventy-four thousand Palestinians. More than thirteen hundred of those deaths have occurred since last October, when a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect, and Israel was left in control of just over half of Gaza. (Since the ceasefire, Israel has expanded its territory and now controls around seventy per cent of the strip.) The Trump Administration, which broadly supports Israeli policy, has given authority to the so-called Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction. But last month the board’s high representative for Gaza took the surprising step of criticizing Israel for its continued military strikes in Gaza, and argued that such attacks threaten both the ceasefire and the chances of Hamas ever disarming.

I recently spoke by phone with Jaser AbuMousa, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, and a non-resident policy adviser at the International Peace Institute, who was born and raised in Gaza. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what daily life in Gaza is like for Palestinians, what has and has not changed since the ceasefire, and his own family’s horrific experience throughout the past three years.

To what degree... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-life-is-actually-like-in-gaza-today 

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New Maps Show How Israel Has Thwarted Hopes for a Palestinian State

Palestinians collect belongings from their evacuated homes after the Israeli Army issued a number of short-term access permits for residents of the occupied West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarm, on June 17th.Photograph by Majdi Mohammed / AP

The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.

By David D. Kirkpatrick

 

August 29, 2026  The New Yorker

Ten years ago, Frank Lowenstein, then the United States special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, presented President Barack Obama with maps of settlements by Israeli Jews in the occupied West Bank. The maps revealed that a chronic problem had turned critical. The expansion of settlements crisscrossing the West Bank threatened the hope of establishing a contiguous Palestinian state there. As Jews and Palestinians lived in roughly equal numbers in Israel and the territories it had occupied since 1967, those settlements also imperilled Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic. By gradually accomplishing a de-facto annexation of the West Bank, the settlements would require Israeli Jews either to rule over a resentful non-Jewish population of about equal size or to surrender the Jewish identity of their state. From the perspective of the United States, either scenario would undermine the stability of the region.

Obama was in the final weeks of hinterntional lawis Presidency, and Lowenstein’s maps helped persuade him to let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution condemning the settlements, which most of the world had long considered violations of international law. (The U.S. declined to exercise its veto and abstained from the vote.) In a speech a few days later, on December 28, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry defended that decision with a stark warning that settlement expansion was “increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality.” He continued, “Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is really what is at stake.”

Ten years later... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/new-maps-show-how-israel-has-thwarted-hopes-for-a-palestinian-state    

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Why Israeli Authorities Are Encouraging Settler Violence Against Palestinians: The retired I.D.F. colonel Doron Meiner, who was arrested while trying to protect a Palestinian community from settlers in the West Bank, discusses Israel’s strategy

A Palestinian man sits next to his family’s belongings after their house was demolished by Israeli security forces in the village of Nahalin, southwest of Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on July 22, 2026.Photograph by John Wessels / AFP / Getty

 By Isaac Chotiner

August 24, 2026

Violent attacks by Israeli settlers have accelerated across the West Bank in recent weeks, adding to what has already been a horrifying year for Palestinian communities in the territory. (The United Nations found that, as of early August, Palestinians in the West Bank had faced more than fourteen hundred attacks from Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties or property damage in 2026.) And now, in the lead-up to October’s elections, the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, has suggested that the country’s police forces take control of the area. (The police are overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security, who is himself a settler and is famous for celebrating and encouraging deadly attacks on Palestinians.)

Some Israeli organizations have tried to prevent violence against Palestinian communities. Doron Meinert, a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, was arrested earlier this month while trying to protect a Palestinian community in the West Bank that was under attack from settlers. I recently spoke with Meinert about his work with the group Looking the Occupation in the Eye, and about how the situation in the West Bank has deteriorated so rapidly. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Can you tell me about your background and career?

I’m sixty-six years old. I was in the army for about twenty-five years. I’ve been a colonel in the army. I’ve been a brigade commander, and then a staff officer. But, about fifteen years ago, I retired. And then I started work as a volunteer protecting Palestinians in the West Bank.

How did you decide to do this work that you’re doing now? What caused you to make this decision?

All my life I believed that the Palestinian problem and the occupation problem were the deepest and most serious problems Israel had... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-israeli-authorities-are-encouraging-settler-violence-against-palestinians 

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“I ask—they hate it when I say this, but I can’t help myself—‘What if I know my rights, and the government knows my rights, but they just don’t care?’ ” Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump Administration says that Khalil’s statements would be lawful except that they compromise “core American interests.”Photograph by Sharif Hamza for The New Yorker

How Far Will the Trump Administration Go to Deport Mahmoud Khalil?

Khalil, a legal permanent resident, protested Israel when he was a student at Columbia. Now the Trump Administration is trying to kick him out of the country.

By Andrew Marantz

August 17, 2026

Published in the print edition of the August 24 & 31, 2026, issue, with the headline “Fighting Words.”

It may or may not be true that all happy families are alike, but it’s certainly true that any married couple with a car, happy or unhappy, must at some point decide who will do the driving. For Mahmoud Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, this was not a difficult decision. Khalil, who is thirty-one, spent his youth in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, where he didn’t have much time for driving lessons; until recently, he was on track to become a high-level diplomat, a career that usually involves not driving but being driven. Abdalla, on the other hand, was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, and she learned to drive before she could see easily over the dashboard. (She is still short enough that this seems to require some effort, though she is now a thirty-year-old dentist who until recently had a daily commute.) In the inveterate American tradition, she treats her car as a second living room. “It’s where I’m most comfortable,” she said this past fall, giving her steering wheel an affectionate pat.

It was a Tuesday in October, just after dawn, and a pink sun was rising over the oil-distillation towers of northern New Jersey. Abdalla was making good time from Brooklyn to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia, where the couple would observe oral arguments in what Khalil dryly called “one of my cases.” He sat in the passenger seat, holding a phone in each hand: his own, from which he texted members of his sprawling pro-bono legal team, and Abdalla’s, which he used to d.j. The music, mostly old Levantine folk songs, was interrupted every now and then by a notification from a navigation app, in English: “Police ahead.”

Khalil moved to Manhattan in 2022, and he adapted quickly to American culture. (In a sense, he even came to inhabit that most American of identities: an influencer.) At Columbia, where he was a master’s student in public and international affairs, he became perhaps the most visible pro-Palestine activist... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/how-far-will-the-trump-administration-go-to-deport-mahmoud-khalil

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A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue: As Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, put it, “People really effing hate data centers.”

The New Yorker Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty

Story by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

August 9, 2026

This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.

That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. “It’s time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis,” a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who is the front-runner in this Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/ai-is-now-a-major-election-issue

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How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—and Iran: Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former national-security adviser, told me, “I will say straightforwardly—we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”Photograph by Saher Alghorra / NYT / Redux

A Reporter at Large

How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—and Iran

Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.

 

By David D. Kirkpatrick

 

July 20, 2026

On March 5, 2024, five months into the war in Gaza, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, sent a confidential letter to President Joe Biden. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross holds a unique responsibility to counsel states about avoiding war crimes. In the letter, which I obtained from a former United States official, Spoljaric reminded Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” October 7th massacre of Israelis by Hamas, and remained “relentless” in pressing the group to release the hostages it had taken. But she was now appealing to Biden “with profound alarm” because Israel, which had been pummelling Gaza with heavy munitions since October, was ignoring the Red Cross as never before. “The way the hostilities are being conducted by Israel is incompatible” with the laws of armed conflict, she wrote, “particularly the obligations to protect civilians and distinguish between military targets and civilians or civilian infrastructure, to ensure dignified treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical installations and personnel, and to provide and enable access of humanitarian aid.”

Allowing the Red Cross to visit detainees during a war or an occupation is one of the brightest lines established by the Geneva Conventions. Yet, after October 7th, Israel, for perhaps the first time in its history, fully blocked the organization’s access to Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, putting it in the company of pariah states such as North Korea and Eritrea; even the warring factions in Yemen allowed Red Cross visits. Spoljaric noted that humanitarian groups and journalists had reported a “massive surge” in the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. At least a thousand had been released back into Gaza, and many of them gave accounts of torture, even though the Israeli military had concluded that they were not Hamas fighters. The Times reported that one released detainee, a law student named Fadi Bakr, described being beaten so severely that his genitals turned blue and blood still appeared in his urine weeks later. He said that Israeli guards had played music so loudly that one of his ears bled. (An Israeli military spokesman told the Times that the captors followed “Israeli and international law” and played music at a “low volume,” to prevent detainees from coördinating.) But the Red Cross couldn’t address such allegations: Spoljaric said that Israel had suspended all “legal-operational dialogue.”

To try to influence Hamas to release hostages, Spoljaric had appealed to Qatar and other patrons of the group; she now implored Biden to “bring about an immediate change” in Israel’s conduct. An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert.”

Two years after Spoljaric’s letter, President Donald J. Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in attacking Iran. Some former senior officials in the Biden Administration told me that, in certain ways, the war in Iran was an extension of the Gaza conflict... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/how-biden-emboldened-israels-aggression-toward-gaza-and-iran

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