ICE’s New-Age Propaganda With its string of “wartime recruitment” ads, often featuring pop songs and familiar meme formats, the agency has weaponized social media against itself. by By Brady Brickner-Wood

Infinite Scroll

Kyle Chayka on the people and platforms that are shaping digital culture.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll

 For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

Illustration by Ariel Davis

Late last year, the White House’s social-media team lauded ICE’s torrential deportation efforts with a string of memes seemingly engineered to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, the song “all-american bitch,” by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” plays as ICE agents accost people in the streets, the lyric “Have you ever tried this one?” repeating each time a new person is detained. Another video uses the satirical song “Big Boys,” from a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring SZA, as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song—“It’s cuffing season”—flashes in all caps across the screen. Rodrigo, Carpenter, and SZA have denounced the videos as “hateful,” “evil,” and “peak dark,” respectively. (In response to Carpenter, the White House doctored a video promoting her own “S.N.L.” appearance to make it seem as if she said she would “arrest” the cast member Marcello Hernández for being “too illegal.”) Unlike other cases of Trump using musicians’ songs, against their will, at rallies or in campaign materials—Beyoncé, Adele, and Jack White, among them—these videos are not one-off inanities or easily ignorable promotional assets. Instead, they are part of a hundred-million-dollar “wartime recruitment” effort, according to an internal document obtained by the Washington Post, aimed at hiring thousands more deportation officers in the new year, a propaganda crusade intended to portray ICE as a team of Avengers valiantly defending American soil from a malevolent foreign terror. By splicing pop songs and familiar meme formats into cruel detainment footage, ICE strains to attract a younger demographic, hoping to convince people that the agency is a vibrant—and trollishly funny—organization engaged in the noble work of putting away bad guys. Oh, the pop stars got mad? Joke’s on them. Now even more people know ICE is hiring.

The Trump Administration has pledged to deport a million immigrants each year during the President’s second term—even, it appears, if the immigrants have not committed crimes or are lawfully residing in the U.S. This past summer, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress increased ICE’s budget to more than a hundred and seventy billion dollars across the next four years, netting out to an annual allocation that is more than the combined yearly budgets of all local and state law-enforcement agencies in the country. ICE has used some of this money to go on a hiring spree; the agency recently announced that it had signed up twelve thousand new officers and agents—a hundred-and-twenty-per-cent increase to its workforce... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/ices-new-age-propaganda

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"Home is everything. Everything—safety, comfort." Shamali Shamali, in The New Yorker - November 11, 2025

As Told To

In Gaza, Home Is Just a Memory

After the ceasefire, many Palestinians who were displaced during the war are still grieving the homes they can’t return to—and which they often had to evacuate in minutes.

 

By Mohammed R. Mhawish 

Illustration by Rama Duwaji

November 11, 2025

The New Yorker 

The United Nations estimates that at least 1.9 million people were displaced during the war. One of them is Shahd Shamali, who is twenty years old, and is currently living at a camp in Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip. For several weeks, we communicated via WhatsApp video calls. From my screen, I could see her sitting at a shared desk in a room, where others held their phones at chest height to catch the router’s range. When our calls dropped, as they often did, Shamali and I would switch over to text messages and voice notes...

Shamali Shamali: ".... Home

Home is everything. Everything—safety, comfort. No matter what happened during my day, I always knew I’d come back home.

There are eleven of us, in my family, and most of us lived in the apartment together. My siblings—Rawan, Dina, Rahaf, Hala, Jana, Reem, Ahmed—Mom, Dad. And then the most important member of our family, my cat, Lulu.

A typical day started with everyone gathering for breakfast. Regardless of whether one of us was sleepy or tired, we all had to eat breakfast together. After that, everyone would go off and start their days. Later, when we were back home, my little siblings and I would play music. Dad would be watching the TV. Mom and others would be using their cellphones. Still, we were all together. Being together, as a family, is very important to us.

My favorite place in our home was my room. Whenever my siblings and I felt upset, or when we wanted to escape our problems, we’d go in there and draw. We would hang the drawings on the wall. It was our safe place.... " READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/the-war-in-gaza-has-paused-but-home-is-still-gone

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“What does it say about these times that the world trusts Ms. Rachel more than the New York Times?” Mo Amer in The New Yorker

Photograph by Natalie Naccache for The New Yorker

The New Yorker Interview

Mo Amer Has Survived by Being Funny

The comedian discusses flying in Jimmy Kimmel’s jet, beefing with Jerry Seinfeld, and the “weight” of talking about Palestine on his new standup special, “Wild World.”

 

By Andrew Marantz

October 26, 2025 

On billboards for the second season of the Netflix show “Mo,” the comedian Mo Amer wears a kaffiyeh and a cowboy hat. “Mo” is a semi-autobiographical, semi-absurdist dramedy, in the tradition of “Louie,” “Maron,” and “Ramy”; in the show, and also in his standup, Amer, who is forty-four, recounts slightly heightened anecdotes from his life, which was already heightened enough. He was born in Kuwait, to Palestinian-refugee parents. When he was nine, the Iraqi military invaded, sparking the Gulf War, and Amer’s family had to flee. His father was being held mistakenly as a political prisoner, and his mother sewed wads of cash into the lining of a purse and a suitcase and led her children across the border to safety. “My mother is a gansta,” Amer says in his first standup special, “The Vagabond.”

The family ended up in Houston—hence the cowboy hat, the name of Amer’s second standup special (“Mohammed in Texas”), and Amer’s onstage persona, which combines Southern charm, streetwise acuity, and an impressive range of accents from both Gulfs. In one special, Amer tells a story about going to rural Louisiana for a standup show shortly after 9/11, and almost getting arrested; in another, he tells a story about performing for American troops in Iraq, in which he almost gets shot.

Amer told me that he has always felt an obligation to speak not only as a Muslim or as an Arab but from the more specific perspective of a Palestinian American comic... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/mo-amer-has-survived-by-being-funny

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"What Comes After Starvation in Gaza? For the severely malnourished, simply starting to eat normal meals again can cause sickness—even death." Clayton Dalton in The New Yorker

A malnourished two-year-old child at his family home in the Al-Shati refugee camp, in Gaza City.Photograph by Jehad Alshrafi / AP

"October 18, 2025

A few weeks ago, Soliman Zyad, a young health-care worker in northern Gaza, told me that his family was near starvation. On some days, he and his uncle AbdulKareem walked in search of food from 3 A.M. until the afternoon. “We swore we would not return home without finding flour,” Zyad told me. “People were ready to risk their lives for a single sack.” Almost forty per cent of the population was going days at a time without eating, according to the World Health Organization. Sometimes AbdulKareem would vomit from hunger and fatigue. His wife, pregnant with twins, was severely anemic. 

The latest food shortage in Gaza began in March, when Israel ended a ceasefire and imposed a blockade on all aid that lasted eleven weeks. After that, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was backed by Israel and the U.S., began distributing limited amounts of aid; around three thousand Palestinians were killed while seeking food. This month, a United Nations study published in The Lancet reported that more than fifty-four thousand children are malnourished in Gaza. “Every family, by now, has been affected,” John Kahler, a pediatrician and a co-founder of MedGlobal, a humanitarian organization that operates in Gaza, told me. About one in five babies was born premature or underweight. MedGlobal cared for one infant, Rafeef, who weighed just four pounds at birth. Her mother was too malnourished to breast-feed; the baby cried constantly, began losing weight, and developed ulcers and infections. On August 18th, she died.

“We live day by day,” Eyad Amawi, a father of four who works as an aid coördinator in Gaza, told me in September. “We have just enough to survive, but not enough to carry out our normal activities.” On the black market, the price of a kilogram of flour—about ten cents before October 7, 2023—had risen to thirty-five dollars, when it could be found at all. Amawi often saw malnourished children who lacked the strength to play. He worried that months of famine had already inflicted irreversible damage. “We are losing the next generation,” he said. “They will suffer for all their lives from this.”.... "READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-comes-after-starvation-in-gaza

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"After three hundred days of war, the UNRWA issued an analysis describing Gaza’s trauma as “chronic and unrelenting”—a collective embodiment of continuous traumatic stress disorder (C.T.S.D.), a condition that stems from living under relentless trauma. Unlike post-traumatic stress disorder, which sets in after a difficult experience, C.T.S.D. is what occurs when there is no end in sight. Gazans have adapted to chronic danger, living in a state of hypervigilance, emotional numbness, and dissociation amid the slow erasure of any imagined future. The effect on children has been especially catastrophic. "

 The Lede

The New Yorker

Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma

In Gaza, where displaced children play a game called “air strike” and act out death, the lack of mental-health resources has become another emergency.

 

By Mohammed R. Mhawish

 

August 1, 2025

The line outside Dr. Bahzad al-Akhras’s clinic starts to assemble before sunrise, a ripple of bodies in the half-light standing barefoot or in frayed sandals, waiting for a turn at what now passes for care. His clinic is wherever it needs to be: in a corner at a shelter compound, on the move during a walk around the yard, or behind the makeshift screen of a bedsheet pulled between two poles, if the wind allows. Often, Akhras sees patients in a tented space, tucked among hundreds of other such tents in the dense sprawl of Al-Mawasi, in the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

Akhras, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, lost his home to an Israeli strike, in early 2024. He and his family have been displaced multiple times, living in tents where the canvas sweats from too many bodies pressed into too little space. He no longer sits in a white-walled office or wears a badge. But he continues to work, seeing some fifty patients a day, most of them children. One of his regular patients is a young girl, no older than fourteen, who survived a strike that killed her entire family. She woke up in an I.C.U., alone, unable to understand where everyone had gone. Now she sits in front of Akhras in silence, until she asks, again and again, if he can bring them back. He has no answer, only a pencil stub and a coloring book, which he hopes she can use to express and process her emotions... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/treating-gazas-collective-trauma#intcid=_the-new-yorker-homepage-bkt-a_e781db88-9438-4a28-9a85-6d91dd327556_cygnus-personalized

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What Gaza Needs Now- My family is starving. My neighbors are dying. I’m compelled to share these injustices because they need to stop. Mosab Abu Toha June 12, 2025 in The New Yorker: "For the G.H.F.’s efforts to be called humanitarian, they would need to reach every city, town, and refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. They would need to deliver nutritious food to mothers, children, and sick people every day. They would need to take place far from any soldiers and weapons."

Photograph by Mahmoud Issa / Reuters

What Gaza Needs Now

My family is starving. My neighbors are dying. I’m compelled to share these injustices because they need to stop.

By Mosab Abu Toha

June 12, 2025

On May 15th, from our home in Syracuse, New York, my wife, Maram, and I video-called her family in Beit Lahia, the city in northern Gaza where we both grew up. They were eating a small meal of plain white rice. “That’s the only type of food we’ve had for weeks,” her father, whom I call Uncle Jaleel, said. On a normal day, a similar quantity of rice would have fed about two people, but, for seventy-five days, Israel had not allowed any trucks of food into Gaza. This meal would have to feed Maram’s parents and four of her adult siblings. I could see some plates and a bowl nearby. “They have nothing in them,” Uncle Jaleel said. “We let ourselves imagine there is salad and some chicken and pickles as we chew the rice.”

Often in the past nineteen months, a situation that could hardly get any worse has gotten worse. Late that night, one of my relatives called me and said that explosions in northern Gaza sounded like the end of the world. My relatives could hear screaming, followed by more blasts. Meanwhile, my friend Sabir, who has been sheltering in southern Gaza since October, 2023, missed about ten calls because his phone had been charging. “I felt panic,” he told me. I know the feeling, because I experience it whenever my relatives call me from Gaza. When Sabir returned the calls, he learned that air strikes on his family home had killed his four-year-old nephew and his five-year-old niece. (A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces said that the I.D.F. was not aware of this strike. When asked about the bombings of my relative’s neighbor’s house, the spokesperson said that the I.D.F. had conducted a strike on “terror infrastructure,” but was unaware of subsequent bombings.)

The final death toll on May 15th was a hundred and forty-three, bringing the total since October 7th to more than fifty-three thousand, according to health officials in Gaza. I can usually tell how bad the violence is based on how many of my loved ones are affected. This time, a former colleague and a friend’s father were among the dead. Many families, including some of my relatives, were forced ... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/what-gaza-needs-now

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Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg during the Second World War. The region’s hospitals have not been spared; most are no longer functional. Clayton Dalton writes about the devastation in The New Yorker .

The view from the destroyed emergency department at Al-Shifa Hospital, in northern Gaza.Photographs and videos by the author

Letter from Gaza

Hospitals in Ruins

Doctors are delivering lifesaving care in a ravaged health-care system—and risking their own lives in the process.

By Clayton Dalton

April 18, 2025

 ".... Nasser had been the site of a major attack in February, 2024, when the Israeli military—the I.D.F.—shelled the hospital, cut off its power and oxygen, and raided the building. A doctor told CNN that he was strip-searched. “We are completely besieged,” he said. “We have been without electricity, oxygen, heating, barely any food or water.” Gaza’s health ministry reported that a dozen patients died as a result of the attack; the World Health Organization warned that “further disruption to lifesaving care for the sick and injured would lead to more deaths.”

The I.D.F. told a different story. It said that at Nasser it had found weapons, in addition to medicines meant for Israeli hostages. It also claimed that it had apprehended hundreds of suspected terrorists, including some who had allegedly posed or worked as medical staff. “The operational activity was conducted to ensure minimal disruption to the hospital’s ongoing activities and without harming patients and medical staff,” an I.D.F. statement said. “The IDF will continue to operate in accordance with international law against the Hamas terrorist organization, which systematically operates from hospitals.” At Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals, this dynamic has played out again and again. The I.D.F. has justified the bombing and raiding of hospitals, potential war crimes, by accusing Hamas of war crimes: turning medical centers into “terror hubs” and hiding behind civilian infrastructure. But Israeli officials rarely provide enough evidence for news outlets and international organizations to verify their claims. Hamas has denied using health-care facilities for military purposes...."  READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/28/hospitals-in-ruins?utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned

The New Yorker

@NewYorker

Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg during the Second World War. The region’s hospitals have not been spared; most are no longer functional. Clayton Dalton writes about the devastation.

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Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians: Palestinians returning after the ceasefire confront the destruction of their homes and the horror of President Trump’s proposal to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” by committing ethnic cleansing. Essay by Mosab Abu Toha February 12, 2025 in The New Yorker

"Who said Gazans are worried about dying? There are many people around the world who worry about dying, including some Americans who don’t have health insurance or who live in areas that are at risk of wildfires. But our worry is not about dying. Palestinians are worried about being killed by Israeli soldiers, settlers, bombs, and bullets. How do you stop people from being killed? Not by removing the people who have been shot and bombed—but by stopping the people who are doing the shooting and bombing.

Since the start of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, in late January, more than a hundred Palestinians have been killed and many more wounded."  Mosab Abu Toha

A man in Jabalia sells bread under the remnants of his bakery, which was destroyed during an Israeli attack.Photograph by Abdel Kareem Hana / AP

When I first heard that President Donald Trump was making comments about the future of Gaza, I was in New York City, at a special screening celebrating the new season of my friend Mo Amer’s Netflix show, “Mo.” Then another friend texted me: “Hideous Trump press conference in which he says America will take over Gaza. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I was shocked. But whom would the United States take Gaza from? Israeli forces levelled entire neighborhoods and then withdrew. My friend Ahmad, from Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, told me that people have returned to their neighborhoods not to resume their old lives but “to live over the rubble of their houses.” But even the rubble in Gaza has meaning to us. It is where our loved ones lived and died. When the time comes, we are the only people who will be removing what must be removed, only to reuse it to rebuild... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/gaza-must-be-rebuilt-by-palestinians-for-palestinians
 

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Could Other Countries Prosecute Soldiers in Gaza? A growing legal movement has turned to the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows national courts to take on war-crimes cases, regardless of where those crimes were committed or the nationality of the perpetrator.

By Annie Hylton

 January 11, 2025  in The New Yorker

Last spring, a video spread across social media. Filmed at night, it shows several soldiers in olive-green army fatigues transporting a group of prisoners. The captured men wear white jumpsuits and blindfolds, and they have their hands tied behind their backs. The person holding the camera begins to narrate, in French, “Did you see those motherfuckers?” Referring to a prisoner whose jumpsuit has fallen to his waist, he says, “Look, he’s pissed himself. . . . I will show you his back. You’ll laugh. They tortured him to make him talk.” In a separate clip, he points the camera at the men, including one with marks on his back, and says, “You were happy on October 7th, you sons of bitches?”

A group of European and Palestinian human-rights organizations allege that the video was filmed by a French-Israeli soldier stationed with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. Politicians in France demanded an inquiry, arguing that if this soldier was of French nationality and a potential perpetrator of torture, or had aided and abetted it, he should be tried in French courts for possible war crimes... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/could-other-countries-prosecute-soldiers-in-gaza?mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned

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Hospitals in Gaza registered 4500 amputation cases in the past 15 months. Of them were 805 children and 541 ladies.

Gaza 2025

The New Yorker Dispatch

March 2024 in The New Yorker:  The Children Who Lost Limbs in Gaza

More than a thousand children who were injured in the war are now amputees. What do their futures hold?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-children-who-lost-limbs-in-gaza

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