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Supreme Court Lets Trump Administration Cut N.I.H. Grants for Disfavored Research
The court’s order was fractured, with the justices splitting over whether individual cancellations and the policy behind them could be challenged in a federal trial court.
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The headquarters of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
by Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington
August 21, 2025
The court’s order was fractured, with the justices splitting over whether individual cancellations and the policy behind them could be challenged in a federal trial court.
Listen to this article · 6:10 minutes
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The headquarters of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
by Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington
August 21, 2025
New York Times
In a fractured ruling, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that the Trump administration could for now cancel more than $780 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health that the government said had been intended to explore topics like diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, “gender ideology” and vaccine hesitancy.
But a different five-justice majority let stand for now a lower court’s ruling that the administration’s underlying policy directing the cuts was probably unlawful and should be put on hold.
Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett was in both majorities.
The court’s order is not the last word, and the case will proceed in lower courts. The upshot of the scrambled ruling, subject to ongoing litigation, appears to be that grants already canceled will not be immediately reinstated but that recipients may be able to sue in a specialized court. Further cancellations may be barred.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Barrett wrote that challenges to individual grant terminations had probably been filed in the wrong court. But she said the challenge to the policy guidance had been filed in the correct court.
Still, she added, “whether claims about the guidance in this case will succeed is another question” but the lower court judge’s ruling could remain in place for now.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — would have blocked the policy and also restored the funding. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh would have allowed the Trump policy and the cuts to be implemented.
The mixed result was a break from the administration’s recent winning streak at the Supreme Court.
After the N.I.H. sent out boilerplate notices terminating thousands of grants, research and advocacy groups, a union, individual researchers and 16 states sued, saying the moves were arbitrary and capricious.
The forbidden research topics, the challengers said, were ill-defined and the policy of canceling grants inconsistently applied. The practical impact, they added, was devastating.
“To take just one example,” lawyers for the states told the justices, “defendants’ terminations forced the University of Massachusetts’ medical school to lay off or furlough 209 employees and to cut the incoming fall 2025 graduate class by 86 percent, from 70 students to 10.”
Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts ruled for the challengers in July, saying that the administration had justified its actions with “sparse pseudo-reasoning and wholly unsupported statements.”
Adam Liptak
Supreme Court reporter:
“I try to make the Supreme Court accessible to readers. I strive to distill and translate complex legal materials into accessible prose, while presenting fairly the arguments of both sides and remaining alert to the political context and practical consequences of the court’s work.”
Learn about how Adam Liptak approaches covering the court.
For example, Judge Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said there was “not a shred of evidence” to support the administration’s position that D.E.I. studies are “often used in support of unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, refused to pause Judge Young’s ruling while it considered the government’s appeal. Writing for the panel, Judge Julie Rikelman, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said it appeared that the terminations would set back lifesaving research by years, if not decades.
The case was similar to one from April in which the Supreme Court allowed the administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, but the N.I.H. case involves far more money. The April vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice Roberts dissenting along with the three-member liberal bloc.
Since then, the administration has prevailed in a large majority of its roughly 20 emergency applications arising from its blitz of executive orders, often with only liberal justices issuing public dissents.
In its emergency application in the N.I.H. case, the government said that the case was legally identical to the April case and that federal trial judges’ defiance of that ruling “has grown to epidemic proportions.”
The challengers said the two cases were different, partly because the earlier one concerned individual contracts rather than an overall policy. That was the issue that divided the justices.
In a page-long partial dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the policy guidance and its consequences were legally inseparable and so the funding should be restored. Judge Young, the chief justice wrote, was not required to split the case into two parts.
The court’s three liberal members joined his opinion.
Justice Jackson added her own 16-page opinion writing only for herself. She drew on the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” which features the game of Calvinball.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Justice Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
The court’s ruling, she wrote, will halt the forward march of science.
“Yearslong studies will lose validity,” she wrote. “Animal subjects will be euthanized. Lifesaving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.”
In his own partial dissent, Justice Gorsuch criticized Judge Young for not following the Supreme Court’s April ruling. “If the district court’s failure to abide by” the earlier decision “were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
But he said recent district court rulings on immigration and removal of leaders of independent agencies were also instances of what he said was judicial defiance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2025, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Supreme Court Lets U.S. Cancel N.I.H. Grants for Research. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
by Shawn McCreesh
Reporting from Washington
August 20, 2025
New York Times
In a fractured ruling, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that the Trump administration could for now cancel more than $780 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health that the government said had been intended to explore topics like diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, “gender ideology” and vaccine hesitancy.
But a different five-justice majority let stand for now a lower court’s ruling that the administration’s underlying policy directing the cuts was probably unlawful and should be put on hold.
Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett was in both majorities.
The court’s order is not the last word, and the case will proceed in lower courts. The upshot of the scrambled ruling, subject to ongoing litigation, appears to be that grants already canceled will not be immediately reinstated but that recipients may be able to sue in a specialized court. Further cancellations may be barred.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Barrett wrote that challenges to individual grant terminations had probably been filed in the wrong court. But she said the challenge to the policy guidance had been filed in the correct court.
Still, she added, “whether claims about the guidance in this case will succeed is another question” but the lower court judge’s ruling could remain in place for now.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — would have blocked the policy and also restored the funding. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh would have allowed the Trump policy and the cuts to be implemented.
The mixed result was a break from the administration’s recent winning streak at the Supreme Court.
After the N.I.H. sent out boilerplate notices terminating thousands of grants, research and advocacy groups, a union, individual researchers and 16 states sued, saying the moves were arbitrary and capricious.
The forbidden research topics, the challengers said, were ill-defined and the policy of canceling grants inconsistently applied. The practical impact, they added, was devastating.
“To take just one example,” lawyers for the states told the justices, “defendants’ terminations forced the University of Massachusetts’ medical school to lay off or furlough 209 employees and to cut the incoming fall 2025 graduate class by 86 percent, from 70 students to 10.”
Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts ruled for the challengers in July, saying that the administration had justified its actions with “sparse pseudo-reasoning and wholly unsupported statements.”
Adam Liptak
Supreme Court reporter:
“I try to make the Supreme Court accessible to readers. I strive to distill and translate complex legal materials into accessible prose, while presenting fairly the arguments of both sides and remaining alert to the political context and practical consequences of the court’s work.”
Learn about how Adam Liptak approaches covering the court.
For example, Judge Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said there was “not a shred of evidence” to support the administration’s position that D.E.I. studies are “often used in support of unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, refused to pause Judge Young’s ruling while it considered the government’s appeal. Writing for the panel, Judge Julie Rikelman, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said it appeared that the terminations would set back lifesaving research by years, if not decades.
The case was similar to one from April in which the Supreme Court allowed the administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, but the N.I.H. case involves far more money. The April vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice Roberts dissenting along with the three-member liberal bloc.
Since then, the administration has prevailed in a large majority of its roughly 20 emergency applications arising from its blitz of executive orders, often with only liberal justices issuing public dissents.
In its emergency application in the N.I.H. case, the government said that the case was legally identical to the April case and that federal trial judges’ defiance of that ruling “has grown to epidemic proportions.”
The challengers said the two cases were different, partly because the earlier one concerned individual contracts rather than an overall policy. That was the issue that divided the justices.
In a page-long partial dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the policy guidance and its consequences were legally inseparable and so the funding should be restored. Judge Young, the chief justice wrote, was not required to split the case into two parts.
The court’s three liberal members joined his opinion.
Justice Jackson added her own 16-page opinion writing only for herself. She drew on the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” which features the game of Calvinball.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Justice Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
The court’s ruling, she wrote, will halt the forward march of science.
“Yearslong studies will lose validity,” she wrote. “Animal subjects will be euthanized. Lifesaving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.”
In his own partial dissent, Justice Gorsuch criticized Judge Young for not following the Supreme Court’s April ruling. “If the district court’s failure to abide by” the earlier decision “were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
But he said recent district court rulings on immigration and removal of leaders of independent agencies were also instances of what he said was judicial defiance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2025, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Supreme Court Lets U.S. Cancel N.I.H. Grants for Research. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
by Shawn McCreesh
Reporting from Washington
August 20, 2025
New York Times
Stephen Miller pledges even more ‘resources’ for Trump’s D.C. crime crackdown.
The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance with soldiers in a restaurant at Union Station in Washington on Wednesday. Credit: Pool photo by Al Drago
President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said on Wednesday that the administration planned to add “thousands more resources” to its crackdown on crime underway in Washington.
Mr. Miller said this while standing at a burger restaurant inside a train station in the middle of the afternoon. He was with Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The three decided to drop by the Shake Shack in Union Station so they could buy burgers for and take pictures with some of the National Guard troops who are patrolling the train hall as part of the administration’s crackdown. But as the trio of top Trump officials walked through the cavernous train hall, they were heckled and booed by people in transit.
Inside the Shake Shack, Mr. Miller declared that the jeering would directly result in the administration’s throwing more resources at lowering crime rates that Mr. Trump has called “totally out of control” but that have actually fallen sharply the past two years.
“I’m glad they’re here today,” Mr. Miller said of the hecklers, “because me, Pete and the vice president are all going to leave here and, inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.”
The White House and Mr. Miller did not immediately respond to requests for comment on who would be joining the crackdown effort.
The shouting and booing provided a melodramatic foil for Mr. Miller and the other officials to cast themselves as fighting against a lawless city ruined by liberal maniacs. “All these demonstrators that you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been,” Mr. Miller said.
He cast the administration’s actions as being in the interests of the city’s Black residents, arguing that the crackdown would help people who are most affected by crime in the city. “This is not a city that has had any safety for its Black citizens for generations, and President Trump is the one who is fixing that,” he said. But so far, most of the troops have been seen near monuments and tourist zones — places like Union Station.
The train hall had fallen onto hard times during the pandemic with a rise in crime (it was seen as grim bellwether in Washington when the Starbucks in Union Station closed up shop) and has not rebounded as well as some of the other busier parts of the city.
In that way, it made for a handy backdrop for the officials’ impromptu news conference. They certainly seemed to make the most out of their clash with the yammering protesters in the station. “We’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” Mr. Miller said at one point as the defense secretary and vice president smirked.
Mr. Vance, for his turn, had this to say about the people who were booing him: “We’ve traded, now, some violent crazy people who are screaming at kids, with a few crazy liberals who are screaming at the vice president. But I think that’s a very worthwhile trade to make because we want our people to be able to enjoy our beautiful cities.”
He was asked whether the White House planned to extend the federalization of Washington’s police department beyond 30 days. Like other members of the administration who have been asked this question, he was noncommittal. “If the president of the United States thinks that he has to extend this order to ensure that people have access to public safety, that’s exactly what he’ll do,” Mr. Vance said.
A reporter pointed out to him that polls showed that most people in Washington were strongly opposed to the administration’s actions in the city.
“I don’t know what poll you’re talking about,” Mr. Vance said. “Maybe the same polls that said Kamala Harris would win the popular vote by 10 points.”
And then he said: “OK, we’re going to stop there. We’re going to grab a quick bite with some of the soldiers here in the National Guard.”
by Matthew Mpoke Bigg
August 20, 2025
New York Times
The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance with soldiers in a restaurant at Union Station in Washington on Wednesday. Credit: Pool photo by Al Drago
President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said on Wednesday that the administration planned to add “thousands more resources” to its crackdown on crime underway in Washington.
Mr. Miller said this while standing at a burger restaurant inside a train station in the middle of the afternoon. He was with Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The three decided to drop by the Shake Shack in Union Station so they could buy burgers for and take pictures with some of the National Guard troops who are patrolling the train hall as part of the administration’s crackdown. But as the trio of top Trump officials walked through the cavernous train hall, they were heckled and booed by people in transit.
Inside the Shake Shack, Mr. Miller declared that the jeering would directly result in the administration’s throwing more resources at lowering crime rates that Mr. Trump has called “totally out of control” but that have actually fallen sharply the past two years.
“I’m glad they’re here today,” Mr. Miller said of the hecklers, “because me, Pete and the vice president are all going to leave here and, inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.”
The White House and Mr. Miller did not immediately respond to requests for comment on who would be joining the crackdown effort.
The shouting and booing provided a melodramatic foil for Mr. Miller and the other officials to cast themselves as fighting against a lawless city ruined by liberal maniacs. “All these demonstrators that you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been,” Mr. Miller said.
He cast the administration’s actions as being in the interests of the city’s Black residents, arguing that the crackdown would help people who are most affected by crime in the city. “This is not a city that has had any safety for its Black citizens for generations, and President Trump is the one who is fixing that,” he said. But so far, most of the troops have been seen near monuments and tourist zones — places like Union Station.
The train hall had fallen onto hard times during the pandemic with a rise in crime (it was seen as grim bellwether in Washington when the Starbucks in Union Station closed up shop) and has not rebounded as well as some of the other busier parts of the city.
In that way, it made for a handy backdrop for the officials’ impromptu news conference. They certainly seemed to make the most out of their clash with the yammering protesters in the station. “We’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” Mr. Miller said at one point as the defense secretary and vice president smirked.
Mr. Vance, for his turn, had this to say about the people who were booing him: “We’ve traded, now, some violent crazy people who are screaming at kids, with a few crazy liberals who are screaming at the vice president. But I think that’s a very worthwhile trade to make because we want our people to be able to enjoy our beautiful cities.”
He was asked whether the White House planned to extend the federalization of Washington’s police department beyond 30 days. Like other members of the administration who have been asked this question, he was noncommittal. “If the president of the United States thinks that he has to extend this order to ensure that people have access to public safety, that’s exactly what he’ll do,” Mr. Vance said.
A reporter pointed out to him that polls showed that most people in Washington were strongly opposed to the administration’s actions in the city.
“I don’t know what poll you’re talking about,” Mr. Vance said. “Maybe the same polls that said Kamala Harris would win the popular vote by 10 points.”
And then he said: “OK, we’re going to stop there. We’re going to grab a quick bite with some of the soldiers here in the National Guard.”
by Matthew Mpoke Bigg
August 20, 2025
New York Times
Trump says he and Netanyahu are war heroes for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites.
President Trump at a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July. Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
President Trump praised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a “war hero” for ordering his country’s forces to bombard Iran’s nuclear sites — and then said that the same label should apply to himself.
In an interview aired Tuesday with Mark Levin, the conservative talk show host and author who is a prominent supporter of the president, Mr. Trump described Mr. Netanyahu as a “good man.” His words echoed the mood of self-congratulation over the strikes on Iran when the two leaders met at the White House in July.
“He’s a war hero, because we work together. He’s a war hero,” Mr. Trump said of the Israeli leader. “I guess I am too,” he added.
Israel in mid-June launched waves of airstrikes against Iran, hitting important nuclear facilities in Natanz and Isfahan. It killed much of the country’s military chain of command along with several nuclear scientists. Then, on June 22, the United States used large bombs to strike the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo, which is buried under a mountain.
A recent U.S. assessment described Fordo as badly damaged, although it is difficult to precisely gauge the extent without access to the site.
During the interview, Mr. Trump also took credit for the return of hostages held in Gaza who have been freed since his election victory in November.
Hamas freed around 30 hostages during a cease-fire that began just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, and another captive was released in May on the eve of the president’s visit to the Middle East.
They were among 240 hostages taken during the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza. About 105 hostages were freed during an earlier cease-fire, while Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president.
“I’m the one that got all the hostages back,” Mr. Trump said.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister, in November 2024, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel has rejected the accusations, and the State Department in June imposed sanctions on four of the court’s judges in response to the warrants.
Since taking office in January, Mr. Trump has frequently taken credit for resolving conflicts including those between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, between India and Pakistan and between Thailand and Cambodia. He also announced the cease-fire between Iran and Israel that ended the nearly two weeks of back-and-forth strikes in June.
In the interview with Mr. Levin, Mr. Trump said: “I’ve settled six wars, and we did Iran, and I wiped out their total nuclear capability, which they would have used against Israel in two seconds if they had the chance.” He compared that record favorably with those of his Democratic predecessors.
Iran has long said that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes. Though its ability to enrich uranium, which is needed for a nuclear weapon, was set back significantly by the U.S. and Israeli attacks, some experts believe that Tehran could eventually resume enrichment at other sites.
In response to the interview, Iran’s Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the country’s Revolutionary Guard, on Wednesday described Mr. Trump’s remarks on Iran as “incoherent.”
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/world/middleeast/famine-gaza-city-israel.html
Gaza City and Surrounding Areas Are Officially Under Famine, Monitors Say
At least half a million people in the enclave were facing the most severe conditions measured by U.N.-backed international experts: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
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Palestinians jostling for food outside a charity kitchen in western Gaza City on Friday. Credit: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
by Vivian Yee
August 22, 2025
New York Times
Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced on Friday, nearly two years into an unrelenting war in which Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip.
The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that at least half a million people in Gaza Governorate were facing the most severe conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
With rare exceptions, the rest of Gaza’s total population of two million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is made up of food insecurity experts who monitor world hunger.
For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to worsen, sending two additional governorates farther south — Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis — into an official famine by the end of September.
Bar chart shows the proportion of Gaza’s northern governorates and southern governorates that are facing different levels of food insecurity, ranging from crisis (level 3) to famine (level 5).
Note: Data is as of August 15
Source: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)
by Samuel Granados
The group said in a report published on Friday that a combination of several factors had tipped Gaza from a hunger crisis into famine: the intensifying conflict, stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, the collapse of health care, water and sanitation systems, the destruction of local agriculture and the growing number of times people had been forced to flee for new shelters.
It said that conditions in the northernmost part of Gaza were likely to be as severe, or worse, than in Gaza City, but that it had not had enough data to judge whether famine was occurring there. And it said it did not analyze Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, because most people there had been forced to leave.
The report said that famine in Gaza could be “halted and reversed” because it was “entirely man-made.”
“The time for debate and hesitation has passed,” it added. “Starvation is present and is rapidly spreading.”
Even a short delay in flooding Gaza with aid would “exponentially” increase preventable deaths, it said.
Throughout the war, Israeli officials have consistently downplayed or denied the severity of hunger in Gaza. On Friday, the Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries to the enclave rejected the group’s findings, saying that the experts had disregarded Israeli data on aid deliveries and overlooked Israel’s efforts over the last few weeks to bring more food into the territory, which it said had improved the situation.
Aid officials, however, say those measures fall short of what is needed after months of scarcity. The experts’ report, which used data from Gaza collected through Aug. 15, said it had taken into account recent Israeli moves to loosen restrictions, which began July 27, but said they were “insufficient.”
The top U.N. humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, told journalists in Geneva that the famine was one “we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.”
Calling for a cease-fire to allow for a flood of aid into Gaza, he added: “It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war.”
The Israeli agency, known as COGAT, criticized the expert group, which is known as the I.P.C., for relying on what it called speculation and methodology it called questionable.
“The I.P.C. report is based on partial and unreliable sources,” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the agency’s head, said in a statement, adding that it “blatantly ignores the facts and the extensive humanitarian efforts” led by Israel.
Deaths from hunger-related causes had already accelerated rapidly in Gaza this summer, the report said, well before the announcement on Friday.
But for the monitoring group to reach the conclusion that a famine is happening, it had to determine that Gaza meets three conditions: at least one in five households facing an extreme food shortage; a certain proportion of children acutely malnourished; and at least two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people dying each day, either from outright starvation or a combination of disease and malnutrition.
Food being airdropped over Gaza City this month. Credit: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The group said that the proportion of Gaza households reporting very severe hunger had doubled from May to July. It had more than tripled in Gaza City, where famine was confirmed, but Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah had also passed the famine threshold on that count, the group said.
Across Gaza, the number of acutely malnourished children has risen exponentially over the last three months, the group said. There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, according to the United Nations.
A determination of famine from the hunger monitoring group is rare. Since its founding in 2004, the group has confirmed only three other famines: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and war-torn Sudan last year. More than 100,000 people died in Somalia before the official declaration of famine arrived.
In those cases, announcing a famine helped focus global attention on the crisis and galvanized donors.
There is already deep international outrage over starvation in Gaza. Images of hungry children, reports of aid workers, medical workers and journalists being too weak to do their jobs and increasingly urgent warnings from aid groups have shocked consciences worldwide.
Gaza also does not lack for donations. Aid agencies say they have enough supplies stockpiled just beyond the territory’s borders to feed its entire population for at least three months. What Gaza does not have, they say, are the permissions or the conditions required for aid groups to distribute those supplies inside the territory.
“We are not facing a logistics, capacity or resource problem,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, an aid group operating in Gaza, said in a statement after the announcement on Friday. “What’s missing is not the ability to respond, but the political will to allow it. Failure to do so will cost countless additional lives.”
Israel says that the level of hunger in the enclave has been exaggerated, and that it is doing its best to lessen it. Israel’s military spokesman previously said there was no starvation in Gaza.
Israel’s foreign ministry lashed out at the report on Friday, denying that there was a famine in Gaza and saying the I.P.C. experts had changed their standards to fabricate a famine assessment. It said the experts did so “solely to serve Hamas’s fake campaign.”
The ministry accused the experts of lowering the threshold for one of the three criteria required for a famine determination — the proportion of acutely malnourished children — to 15 percent from 30 percent.
The report offered a technical explanation. To determine famine conditions “with reasonable evidence,” it said, experts could by longstanding protocol apply two methods for measuring child malnutrition. One uses a child’s height and weight; the other, the circumference of a child’s upper arm. For an area to be experiencing famine, at least 30 percent of children under 5 must be considered acutely malnourished by height and weight measures. Under the arm circumference method used in Gaza, it said, the accepted threshold dropped to 15 percent.
The group said that it had used arm circumference data in Gaza because height and weight data was not available. It said it had often employed this method in famine determinations, including in South Sudan in 2020 and in Sudan last year, and that it had consistently applied it in Gaza throughout the war.
Israel’s foreign ministry also said, without explaining how, that the group was “ignoring” a second standard criterion, the death rate. The experts said that while they had been unable to obtain a full count of hunger-related deaths in Gaza because the health care system and other monitoring mechanisms had been severely damaged, the evidence made them confident that the number had crossed the famine threshold.
If anything, the report said, they believed the true hunger-related death toll was “significantly higher” than Gaza officials had reported. The report said they had based the assessment on several sources, including figures from Gaza’s health ministry, World Health Organization nutrition centers, a Doctors Without Borders survey and phone surveys.
“The absence of data should not be interpreted as an absence of mortality,” the report said.
Israel first cut off aid to Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. Limited aid deliveries then resumed under a United Nations-run system.
A market with sparse food offerings last month in Gaza City.Credit: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Under global pressure, Israel has made concessions on its aid blockade, allowing in more food, water, medicine and other supplies. It has blamed the United Nations for not bringing in more food. But the organization and other aid groups say that Israel frequently denies or delays U.N. requests to pick up the supplies waiting at the border and move them into Gaza safely, among other challenges.
Another major obstacle, they say, is that people in Gaza are so desperate to eat that they routinely wait along the aid convoys’ routes to grab whatever they can from the trucks. Most of the aid is taken this way, depriving people who cannot physically seek food from the trucks — including women, children, older people and the sick.
In March, Israel imposed another total siege in an effort to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages still in Gaza.
In May, Israel largely replaced the U.N. aid system by backing a new and much-criticized operation run mainly by American contractors. Israeli officials said it was the only way to ensure food did not fall into Hamas’s hands.
Since the new group began distributing food in late May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed near its sites, according to Gazan officials and the U.N. human rights office. The Israeli military has said its troops have fired “warning shots” toward surging crowds and that it is investigating the episodes.
The New York Times reported in July that the Israeli military had never found proof that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations — a claim that Israel had frequently made to justify sidelining the U.N. aid system. Israeli officials said there was evidence that Hamas did take aid from other aid groups.
The hunger monitoring group has been warning for much of the war that Gaza was at high risk of famine. Aid officials have said that without a cease-fire allowing relief agencies to deliver large amounts of aid throughout Gaza safely and speedily, hunger and its complications will kill many more people there.
While Hamas has agreed to a new cease-fire proposal from mediators, Israeli forces are gearing up for a new offensive to take over Gaza City, the territory’s largest city and the heart of the area where famine was confirmed on Friday.
Troops were already massing on the city’s outskirts on Thursday, while Israeli officials were preparing to forcibly displace people to southern Gaza for what they said was their safety.
The displacement plans have drawn accusations from Palestinians and rights groups that Israel is pushing people from Gaza into something akin to a concentration camp.
Adam Rasgon and Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
See more on: United Nations, The Israel-Hamas War, Hamas
Trump’s tactics mean many international students won’t make it to campus.
by Anemona Hartocollis
August 20, 2025
New York Times
Arizona State University has one of the highest proportions of international students, but their numbers are set to drop this fall. Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Many Iranians are not going to American universities this fall. Students from Afghanistan are having trouble getting to campus.
Even students from China and India, the top two senders of international students to the United States, have been flummoxed by a maze of new obstacles the Trump administration has set up to slow or deter people entering the country from abroad.
Between the federal government’s heightened vetting of student visas and President Trump’s travel ban, the number of international students newly enrolled in American universities seems certain to drop — by a lot.
There were about a million international students studying in the United States a year ago, according to figures published by the State Department. Data on international student enrollment is not expected to be released until the fall. But higher education is already feeling the pain and deeply worried about the fallout.
Many schools have seen the number of international students grow in recent years. But a survey of over 500 colleges and universities by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit which works with governments and others to promote international education, found that 35 percent of the schools experienced a dip in applications from abroad last spring, the most since the pandemic.
In China and India, there have been few visa appointments available for students in recent months, and sometimes none at all, according to the Association of International Educators, also known as NAFSA, a professional organization. If visa problems persist, new international student enrollment in American colleges could drop by 30 to 40 percent overall this fall, a loss of 150,000 students, according to the group’s analysis.
Some students have given up on enrolling in U.S. schools entirely out of anxiety over the political environment in the United States. Others are staying away because they worry that even if they were to gain entry, they would effectively be trapped, unable to do things that other students can, like apply for internships or travel home over the holidays to see their families.
International students make up a significant portion of enrollment at elite universities like Columbia, but also at public institutions like Purdue. At Arizona State University, one of the ten universities that enroll the most international students, the number beginning their studies this fall — 14,600 in all — is down by about 500 from last fall, a spokesman said, mostly because of visa delays.
Many international students pay full tuition and are a revenue source that schools have come to rely on, including to help underwrite financial aid for other students. It’s part of the business model.
Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs at Cornell University, said the biggest loss from the drop in international enrollment is talent.
“They’re literally some of the best in the world,” she said.
Dr. Wolford said she was also worried about the lost opportunity for domestic students to be exposed to students from different cultures, and for international students to spread good will toward the United States when they return home.
The Trump administration began focusing on international students last spring, taking a number of steps to target students who were already in the country and to increase vetting of those who wanted to enroll.
While President Trump said that he welcomed international students, he argued that some of them pose security risks and may be involved in academic espionage. He also said foreign students were taking up coveted slots at universities that could instead go to American citizens.
“We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there,” Mr. Trump said. “But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country.”
Cornell University is allowing international students to enroll at its campuses abroad, but few have taken up the opportunity. Credit: Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
In one of its first moves, the Trump administration threatened to deport more than 1,800 international students studying in the United States. In many cases, the reasons were opaque.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that international students who were a part of campus protests over the war in Gaza, in particular, were not welcome. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” he said last spring, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
Several groups have gone to court to challenge what they called an ideological deportation policy. Veena Dubal, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, says the administration is violating the constitutional rights of noncitizens and citizens alike in choosing to deport people based on views that are protected by the First Amendment.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, has argued that the crackdown is undemocratic. “This practice is one we’d ordinarily associate with the most repressive political regimes,” he has said.
After an outcry, many of the students targeted for deportation were reinstated. But overall this year, State Department officials said they have revoked more than 6,000 student visas, on grounds of supporting terrorism, overstaying visas and breaking the law, a number first reported by Fox News.
And the State Department suspended new student visa appointments between May 27 and June 18, a time of year that is ordinarily the peak season.
When the government began issuing student visas again in late June, it was with a proviso that consulates would scrutinize applicants’ social media more rigorously. That has made the process much slower, and students who have yet to clear the interview process may be in danger of missing the start of fall classes or may even have to postpone enrollment by a semester or more.
“There does appear to be a heightened review of student visa applications,” said Ms. Dubal, adding: “Their social media are being reviewed for expression of pro-Palestinian sentiment or critiques of Trump’s foreign policy positions.”
Mr. Trump signed a proclamation in late May barring foreign students from entering the United States to attend Harvard, citing security concerns, but a judge has blocked the order from taking effect.
In June, Mr. Trump signed another proclamation to fully or partially restrict the entry of people from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Yemen, Cuba, Laos and Venezuela, and to increase scrutiny of people from other countries, to make sure that the people “do not intend to harm Americans or our national interests.”
Though the proclamation did not target students in particular, many students have been caught up in the travel restrictions.
“Because of the travel ban, it’s just not possible to get student visas from certain countries,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Northampton, Mass. “A lot of Afghan women had been offered full scholarships in the U.S. and can’t get visas.”
Asked about delays, a State Department spokesperson said that the department had made its vetting of visa applicants more effective and more efficient. “But in every case, we will take the time necessary to ensure an applicant is eligible for the visa sought and does not pose a risk to the safety and security of the United States,” the spokesperson said.
Noushin, an Iranian student who was admitted to the University of South Carolina to study for a doctorate in chemical engineering, was caught up in the travel ban. She had a visa interview in September 2024 and was to start her studies in the spring of 2025, but she has yet to hear whether her visa will be approved. She is now helping to organize a lobbying campaign to end the visa delays, and says that a chat group on Telegram suggests that there are hundreds of other Iranian students in similar situations.
Noushin, who asked for her last name not to be disclosed for fear that it would affect her visa prospects, said she chose the United States as the place to study because she believed that it offered the best higher education in the world. Now she believes she is being punished because of assumptions about her political beliefs, though as a scholar, she argues, she is separate from politics.
Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, said he met with an American diplomatic official in India a few months ago to discuss the visa problem, and was told the State Department was doing the best it could.
The uncertainty about getting a U.S. visa is prompting some students to look elsewhere. Dr. Wolford, of Cornell, said universities were already seeing European students diverting to European universities and Asian students to Asian universities.
“Our international students had always been very secure in the knowledge that they understood the rules of the game, and last year the rules of the game changed dramatically,” she said.
Many American universities now have campuses abroad and have tried to accommodate international students at those campuses until they can get U.S. visas. Cornell, for instance, gave students the option to start the fall 2025 semester at partner campuses in Edinburgh, Hong Kong or Seoul.
“We didn’t have many students take us up,” Dr. Wolford said. “Students were hoping they would either get their applications through and come to us, or they decided to go someplace else.”
Iranian students, including some admitted to Cornell, have banded together to try to attract attention to their plight. The group is highly educated, said Pouria, a civil engineering student, who asked that his surname not be used to protect his visa chances. He was admitted to a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin.
He said his research project — to investigate how polymeric geocells can be used to reinforce roadway foundations — is financed by the Texas Department of Transportation. His request for a visa has been stuck in “administrative processing” for 14 months, he said.
In the meantime he has been collaborating with colleagues remotely to keep the project from slowing down. Students like him, he argued, are not a threat to U.S. society.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/20/us/trump-news
by Zolan Kanno-Youngs
August 19, 2025
New York Times
Reporting from Washington
President Trump at a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July. Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
President Trump praised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a “war hero” for ordering his country’s forces to bombard Iran’s nuclear sites — and then said that the same label should apply to himself.
In an interview aired Tuesday with Mark Levin, the conservative talk show host and author who is a prominent supporter of the president, Mr. Trump described Mr. Netanyahu as a “good man.” His words echoed the mood of self-congratulation over the strikes on Iran when the two leaders met at the White House in July.
“He’s a war hero, because we work together. He’s a war hero,” Mr. Trump said of the Israeli leader. “I guess I am too,” he added.
Israel in mid-June launched waves of airstrikes against Iran, hitting important nuclear facilities in Natanz and Isfahan. It killed much of the country’s military chain of command along with several nuclear scientists. Then, on June 22, the United States used large bombs to strike the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo, which is buried under a mountain.
A recent U.S. assessment described Fordo as badly damaged, although it is difficult to precisely gauge the extent without access to the site.
During the interview, Mr. Trump also took credit for the return of hostages held in Gaza who have been freed since his election victory in November.
Hamas freed around 30 hostages during a cease-fire that began just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, and another captive was released in May on the eve of the president’s visit to the Middle East.
They were among 240 hostages taken during the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza. About 105 hostages were freed during an earlier cease-fire, while Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president.
“I’m the one that got all the hostages back,” Mr. Trump said.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister, in November 2024, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel has rejected the accusations, and the State Department in June imposed sanctions on four of the court’s judges in response to the warrants.
Since taking office in January, Mr. Trump has frequently taken credit for resolving conflicts including those between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, between India and Pakistan and between Thailand and Cambodia. He also announced the cease-fire between Iran and Israel that ended the nearly two weeks of back-and-forth strikes in June.
In the interview with Mr. Levin, Mr. Trump said: “I’ve settled six wars, and we did Iran, and I wiped out their total nuclear capability, which they would have used against Israel in two seconds if they had the chance.” He compared that record favorably with those of his Democratic predecessors.
Iran has long said that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes. Though its ability to enrich uranium, which is needed for a nuclear weapon, was set back significantly by the U.S. and Israeli attacks, some experts believe that Tehran could eventually resume enrichment at other sites.
In response to the interview, Iran’s Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the country’s Revolutionary Guard, on Wednesday described Mr. Trump’s remarks on Iran as “incoherent.”
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/world/middleeast/famine-gaza-city-israel.html
Gaza City and Surrounding Areas Are Officially Under Famine, Monitors Say
At least half a million people in the enclave were facing the most severe conditions measured by U.N.-backed international experts: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
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Palestinians jostling for food outside a charity kitchen in western Gaza City on Friday. Credit: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
by Vivian Yee
August 22, 2025
New York Times
Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced on Friday, nearly two years into an unrelenting war in which Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip.
The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that at least half a million people in Gaza Governorate were facing the most severe conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
With rare exceptions, the rest of Gaza’s total population of two million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is made up of food insecurity experts who monitor world hunger.
For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to worsen, sending two additional governorates farther south — Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis — into an official famine by the end of September.
Bar chart shows the proportion of Gaza’s northern governorates and southern governorates that are facing different levels of food insecurity, ranging from crisis (level 3) to famine (level 5).
Note: Data is as of August 15
Source: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)
by Samuel Granados
The group said in a report published on Friday that a combination of several factors had tipped Gaza from a hunger crisis into famine: the intensifying conflict, stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, the collapse of health care, water and sanitation systems, the destruction of local agriculture and the growing number of times people had been forced to flee for new shelters.
It said that conditions in the northernmost part of Gaza were likely to be as severe, or worse, than in Gaza City, but that it had not had enough data to judge whether famine was occurring there. And it said it did not analyze Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, because most people there had been forced to leave.
The report said that famine in Gaza could be “halted and reversed” because it was “entirely man-made.”
“The time for debate and hesitation has passed,” it added. “Starvation is present and is rapidly spreading.”
Even a short delay in flooding Gaza with aid would “exponentially” increase preventable deaths, it said.
Throughout the war, Israeli officials have consistently downplayed or denied the severity of hunger in Gaza. On Friday, the Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries to the enclave rejected the group’s findings, saying that the experts had disregarded Israeli data on aid deliveries and overlooked Israel’s efforts over the last few weeks to bring more food into the territory, which it said had improved the situation.
Aid officials, however, say those measures fall short of what is needed after months of scarcity. The experts’ report, which used data from Gaza collected through Aug. 15, said it had taken into account recent Israeli moves to loosen restrictions, which began July 27, but said they were “insufficient.”
The top U.N. humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, told journalists in Geneva that the famine was one “we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.”
Calling for a cease-fire to allow for a flood of aid into Gaza, he added: “It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war.”
The Israeli agency, known as COGAT, criticized the expert group, which is known as the I.P.C., for relying on what it called speculation and methodology it called questionable.
“The I.P.C. report is based on partial and unreliable sources,” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the agency’s head, said in a statement, adding that it “blatantly ignores the facts and the extensive humanitarian efforts” led by Israel.
Deaths from hunger-related causes had already accelerated rapidly in Gaza this summer, the report said, well before the announcement on Friday.
But for the monitoring group to reach the conclusion that a famine is happening, it had to determine that Gaza meets three conditions: at least one in five households facing an extreme food shortage; a certain proportion of children acutely malnourished; and at least two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people dying each day, either from outright starvation or a combination of disease and malnutrition.
Food being airdropped over Gaza City this month. Credit: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The group said that the proportion of Gaza households reporting very severe hunger had doubled from May to July. It had more than tripled in Gaza City, where famine was confirmed, but Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah had also passed the famine threshold on that count, the group said.
Across Gaza, the number of acutely malnourished children has risen exponentially over the last three months, the group said. There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, according to the United Nations.
A determination of famine from the hunger monitoring group is rare. Since its founding in 2004, the group has confirmed only three other famines: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and war-torn Sudan last year. More than 100,000 people died in Somalia before the official declaration of famine arrived.
In those cases, announcing a famine helped focus global attention on the crisis and galvanized donors.
There is already deep international outrage over starvation in Gaza. Images of hungry children, reports of aid workers, medical workers and journalists being too weak to do their jobs and increasingly urgent warnings from aid groups have shocked consciences worldwide.
Gaza also does not lack for donations. Aid agencies say they have enough supplies stockpiled just beyond the territory’s borders to feed its entire population for at least three months. What Gaza does not have, they say, are the permissions or the conditions required for aid groups to distribute those supplies inside the territory.
“We are not facing a logistics, capacity or resource problem,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, an aid group operating in Gaza, said in a statement after the announcement on Friday. “What’s missing is not the ability to respond, but the political will to allow it. Failure to do so will cost countless additional lives.”
Israel says that the level of hunger in the enclave has been exaggerated, and that it is doing its best to lessen it. Israel’s military spokesman previously said there was no starvation in Gaza.
Israel’s foreign ministry lashed out at the report on Friday, denying that there was a famine in Gaza and saying the I.P.C. experts had changed their standards to fabricate a famine assessment. It said the experts did so “solely to serve Hamas’s fake campaign.”
The ministry accused the experts of lowering the threshold for one of the three criteria required for a famine determination — the proportion of acutely malnourished children — to 15 percent from 30 percent.
The report offered a technical explanation. To determine famine conditions “with reasonable evidence,” it said, experts could by longstanding protocol apply two methods for measuring child malnutrition. One uses a child’s height and weight; the other, the circumference of a child’s upper arm. For an area to be experiencing famine, at least 30 percent of children under 5 must be considered acutely malnourished by height and weight measures. Under the arm circumference method used in Gaza, it said, the accepted threshold dropped to 15 percent.
The group said that it had used arm circumference data in Gaza because height and weight data was not available. It said it had often employed this method in famine determinations, including in South Sudan in 2020 and in Sudan last year, and that it had consistently applied it in Gaza throughout the war.
Israel’s foreign ministry also said, without explaining how, that the group was “ignoring” a second standard criterion, the death rate. The experts said that while they had been unable to obtain a full count of hunger-related deaths in Gaza because the health care system and other monitoring mechanisms had been severely damaged, the evidence made them confident that the number had crossed the famine threshold.
If anything, the report said, they believed the true hunger-related death toll was “significantly higher” than Gaza officials had reported. The report said they had based the assessment on several sources, including figures from Gaza’s health ministry, World Health Organization nutrition centers, a Doctors Without Borders survey and phone surveys.
“The absence of data should not be interpreted as an absence of mortality,” the report said.
Israel first cut off aid to Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. Limited aid deliveries then resumed under a United Nations-run system.
A market with sparse food offerings last month in Gaza City.Credit: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Under global pressure, Israel has made concessions on its aid blockade, allowing in more food, water, medicine and other supplies. It has blamed the United Nations for not bringing in more food. But the organization and other aid groups say that Israel frequently denies or delays U.N. requests to pick up the supplies waiting at the border and move them into Gaza safely, among other challenges.
Another major obstacle, they say, is that people in Gaza are so desperate to eat that they routinely wait along the aid convoys’ routes to grab whatever they can from the trucks. Most of the aid is taken this way, depriving people who cannot physically seek food from the trucks — including women, children, older people and the sick.
In March, Israel imposed another total siege in an effort to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages still in Gaza.
In May, Israel largely replaced the U.N. aid system by backing a new and much-criticized operation run mainly by American contractors. Israeli officials said it was the only way to ensure food did not fall into Hamas’s hands.
Since the new group began distributing food in late May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed near its sites, according to Gazan officials and the U.N. human rights office. The Israeli military has said its troops have fired “warning shots” toward surging crowds and that it is investigating the episodes.
The New York Times reported in July that the Israeli military had never found proof that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations — a claim that Israel had frequently made to justify sidelining the U.N. aid system. Israeli officials said there was evidence that Hamas did take aid from other aid groups.
The hunger monitoring group has been warning for much of the war that Gaza was at high risk of famine. Aid officials have said that without a cease-fire allowing relief agencies to deliver large amounts of aid throughout Gaza safely and speedily, hunger and its complications will kill many more people there.
While Hamas has agreed to a new cease-fire proposal from mediators, Israeli forces are gearing up for a new offensive to take over Gaza City, the territory’s largest city and the heart of the area where famine was confirmed on Friday.
Troops were already massing on the city’s outskirts on Thursday, while Israeli officials were preparing to forcibly displace people to southern Gaza for what they said was their safety.
The displacement plans have drawn accusations from Palestinians and rights groups that Israel is pushing people from Gaza into something akin to a concentration camp.
Adam Rasgon and Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
See more on: United Nations, The Israel-Hamas War, Hamas
Trump’s tactics mean many international students won’t make it to campus.
by Anemona Hartocollis
August 20, 2025
New York Times
Arizona State University has one of the highest proportions of international students, but their numbers are set to drop this fall. Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Many Iranians are not going to American universities this fall. Students from Afghanistan are having trouble getting to campus.
Even students from China and India, the top two senders of international students to the United States, have been flummoxed by a maze of new obstacles the Trump administration has set up to slow or deter people entering the country from abroad.
Between the federal government’s heightened vetting of student visas and President Trump’s travel ban, the number of international students newly enrolled in American universities seems certain to drop — by a lot.
There were about a million international students studying in the United States a year ago, according to figures published by the State Department. Data on international student enrollment is not expected to be released until the fall. But higher education is already feeling the pain and deeply worried about the fallout.
Many schools have seen the number of international students grow in recent years. But a survey of over 500 colleges and universities by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit which works with governments and others to promote international education, found that 35 percent of the schools experienced a dip in applications from abroad last spring, the most since the pandemic.
In China and India, there have been few visa appointments available for students in recent months, and sometimes none at all, according to the Association of International Educators, also known as NAFSA, a professional organization. If visa problems persist, new international student enrollment in American colleges could drop by 30 to 40 percent overall this fall, a loss of 150,000 students, according to the group’s analysis.
Some students have given up on enrolling in U.S. schools entirely out of anxiety over the political environment in the United States. Others are staying away because they worry that even if they were to gain entry, they would effectively be trapped, unable to do things that other students can, like apply for internships or travel home over the holidays to see their families.
International students make up a significant portion of enrollment at elite universities like Columbia, but also at public institutions like Purdue. At Arizona State University, one of the ten universities that enroll the most international students, the number beginning their studies this fall — 14,600 in all — is down by about 500 from last fall, a spokesman said, mostly because of visa delays.
Many international students pay full tuition and are a revenue source that schools have come to rely on, including to help underwrite financial aid for other students. It’s part of the business model.
Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs at Cornell University, said the biggest loss from the drop in international enrollment is talent.
“They’re literally some of the best in the world,” she said.
Dr. Wolford said she was also worried about the lost opportunity for domestic students to be exposed to students from different cultures, and for international students to spread good will toward the United States when they return home.
The Trump administration began focusing on international students last spring, taking a number of steps to target students who were already in the country and to increase vetting of those who wanted to enroll.
While President Trump said that he welcomed international students, he argued that some of them pose security risks and may be involved in academic espionage. He also said foreign students were taking up coveted slots at universities that could instead go to American citizens.
“We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there,” Mr. Trump said. “But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country.”
Cornell University is allowing international students to enroll at its campuses abroad, but few have taken up the opportunity. Credit: Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
In one of its first moves, the Trump administration threatened to deport more than 1,800 international students studying in the United States. In many cases, the reasons were opaque.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that international students who were a part of campus protests over the war in Gaza, in particular, were not welcome. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” he said last spring, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
Several groups have gone to court to challenge what they called an ideological deportation policy. Veena Dubal, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, says the administration is violating the constitutional rights of noncitizens and citizens alike in choosing to deport people based on views that are protected by the First Amendment.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, has argued that the crackdown is undemocratic. “This practice is one we’d ordinarily associate with the most repressive political regimes,” he has said.
After an outcry, many of the students targeted for deportation were reinstated. But overall this year, State Department officials said they have revoked more than 6,000 student visas, on grounds of supporting terrorism, overstaying visas and breaking the law, a number first reported by Fox News.
And the State Department suspended new student visa appointments between May 27 and June 18, a time of year that is ordinarily the peak season.
When the government began issuing student visas again in late June, it was with a proviso that consulates would scrutinize applicants’ social media more rigorously. That has made the process much slower, and students who have yet to clear the interview process may be in danger of missing the start of fall classes or may even have to postpone enrollment by a semester or more.
“There does appear to be a heightened review of student visa applications,” said Ms. Dubal, adding: “Their social media are being reviewed for expression of pro-Palestinian sentiment or critiques of Trump’s foreign policy positions.”
Mr. Trump signed a proclamation in late May barring foreign students from entering the United States to attend Harvard, citing security concerns, but a judge has blocked the order from taking effect.
In June, Mr. Trump signed another proclamation to fully or partially restrict the entry of people from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Yemen, Cuba, Laos and Venezuela, and to increase scrutiny of people from other countries, to make sure that the people “do not intend to harm Americans or our national interests.”
Though the proclamation did not target students in particular, many students have been caught up in the travel restrictions.
“Because of the travel ban, it’s just not possible to get student visas from certain countries,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Northampton, Mass. “A lot of Afghan women had been offered full scholarships in the U.S. and can’t get visas.”
Asked about delays, a State Department spokesperson said that the department had made its vetting of visa applicants more effective and more efficient. “But in every case, we will take the time necessary to ensure an applicant is eligible for the visa sought and does not pose a risk to the safety and security of the United States,” the spokesperson said.
Noushin, an Iranian student who was admitted to the University of South Carolina to study for a doctorate in chemical engineering, was caught up in the travel ban. She had a visa interview in September 2024 and was to start her studies in the spring of 2025, but she has yet to hear whether her visa will be approved. She is now helping to organize a lobbying campaign to end the visa delays, and says that a chat group on Telegram suggests that there are hundreds of other Iranian students in similar situations.
Noushin, who asked for her last name not to be disclosed for fear that it would affect her visa prospects, said she chose the United States as the place to study because she believed that it offered the best higher education in the world. Now she believes she is being punished because of assumptions about her political beliefs, though as a scholar, she argues, she is separate from politics.
Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, said he met with an American diplomatic official in India a few months ago to discuss the visa problem, and was told the State Department was doing the best it could.
The uncertainty about getting a U.S. visa is prompting some students to look elsewhere. Dr. Wolford, of Cornell, said universities were already seeing European students diverting to European universities and Asian students to Asian universities.
“Our international students had always been very secure in the knowledge that they understood the rules of the game, and last year the rules of the game changed dramatically,” she said.
Many American universities now have campuses abroad and have tried to accommodate international students at those campuses until they can get U.S. visas. Cornell, for instance, gave students the option to start the fall 2025 semester at partner campuses in Edinburgh, Hong Kong or Seoul.
“We didn’t have many students take us up,” Dr. Wolford said. “Students were hoping they would either get their applications through and come to us, or they decided to go someplace else.”
Iranian students, including some admitted to Cornell, have banded together to try to attract attention to their plight. The group is highly educated, said Pouria, a civil engineering student, who asked that his surname not be used to protect his visa chances. He was admitted to a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin.
He said his research project — to investigate how polymeric geocells can be used to reinforce roadway foundations — is financed by the Texas Department of Transportation. His request for a visa has been stuck in “administrative processing” for 14 months, he said.
In the meantime he has been collaborating with colleagues remotely to keep the project from slowing down. Students like him, he argued, are not a threat to U.S. society.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/20/us/trump-news
by Zolan Kanno-Youngs
August 19, 2025
New York Times
Reporting from Washington
Trump says Smithsonian focuses too much on ‘how bad slavery was.’
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Credit: Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America as his administration conducts a wide-ranging review of the content in its museum exhibits.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
Mr. Trump made the comments a week after the White House told the Smithsonian that its museums would be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” within 120 days. Taken together, the administration’s examination and Mr. Trump’s post on Tuesday were the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to impose his will on a cultural institution and minimize the experiences and history of Black people in the United States.
“It’s the epitome of dumbness to criticize the Smithsonian for dealing with the reality of slavery in America,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “It’s what led to our Civil War and is a defining aspect of our national history. And the Smithsonian deals in a robust way with what slavery was, but it also deals with human rights and civil rights in equal abundance.”
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has led an effort to purge diversity, equity and inclusion policies from the federal government and threatened to investigate companies and schools that adopt such policies. He has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history, preferring to instead spotlight a sanitized, rosy depiction of America.
The administration has worked to scrub or minimize government references to the contributions of Black heroes, from the Tuskegee Airmen, who fought in World War II, to Harriet Tubman, who guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. Mr. Trump commemorated Juneteenth, the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States that became a federal holiday in 2021, by complaining that there were too many non-working holidays in America. He has called for the return of Confederate insignia and statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery.
And he has previously attacked the exhibits on race at the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself as outside the purview of the executive branch, as “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Mr. Trump’s comments also ignore the breadth of the displays in Smithsonian museums. While the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for example, does include exhibits on the Middle Passage and slavery, it also showcases civil rights and cultural icons in Black history. The director of that museum, Kevin Young, stepped down this spring as Mr. Trump increasingly targeted the Smithsonian and its museum intended to tell the African American story for all Americans.
Mr. Trump has often stoked divisions in the United States by tapping into white grievance and framing himself as a protector of white people both in the United States and overseas. Quentin James, a co-founder of the Collective, which aims to elect Black officials in America, said Mr. Trump’s comments about the museums were an attempt to protect “white fragility.”
“For all of us, it’s an assault on our history and an assault on what we know to be true,” Mr. James said, while for Mr. Trump it is about “white grievance and him exerting his authority.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Trump added in the social media post that he had instructed his lawyers “to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities.” His administration has pursued an effort to investigate universities that have adopted diversity, equity and inclusion programs, leading to court fights, funding battles and, in many cases, the removal of diversity initiatives.
https://www.change.org/p/defend-the-smithsonian-s-national-museum-of-african-american-history-and-culture
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Credit: Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America as his administration conducts a wide-ranging review of the content in its museum exhibits.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
Mr. Trump made the comments a week after the White House told the Smithsonian that its museums would be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” within 120 days. Taken together, the administration’s examination and Mr. Trump’s post on Tuesday were the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to impose his will on a cultural institution and minimize the experiences and history of Black people in the United States.
“It’s the epitome of dumbness to criticize the Smithsonian for dealing with the reality of slavery in America,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “It’s what led to our Civil War and is a defining aspect of our national history. And the Smithsonian deals in a robust way with what slavery was, but it also deals with human rights and civil rights in equal abundance.”
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has led an effort to purge diversity, equity and inclusion policies from the federal government and threatened to investigate companies and schools that adopt such policies. He has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history, preferring to instead spotlight a sanitized, rosy depiction of America.
The administration has worked to scrub or minimize government references to the contributions of Black heroes, from the Tuskegee Airmen, who fought in World War II, to Harriet Tubman, who guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. Mr. Trump commemorated Juneteenth, the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States that became a federal holiday in 2021, by complaining that there were too many non-working holidays in America. He has called for the return of Confederate insignia and statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery.
And he has previously attacked the exhibits on race at the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself as outside the purview of the executive branch, as “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Mr. Trump’s comments also ignore the breadth of the displays in Smithsonian museums. While the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for example, does include exhibits on the Middle Passage and slavery, it also showcases civil rights and cultural icons in Black history. The director of that museum, Kevin Young, stepped down this spring as Mr. Trump increasingly targeted the Smithsonian and its museum intended to tell the African American story for all Americans.
Mr. Trump has often stoked divisions in the United States by tapping into white grievance and framing himself as a protector of white people both in the United States and overseas. Quentin James, a co-founder of the Collective, which aims to elect Black officials in America, said Mr. Trump’s comments about the museums were an attempt to protect “white fragility.”
“For all of us, it’s an assault on our history and an assault on what we know to be true,” Mr. James said, while for Mr. Trump it is about “white grievance and him exerting his authority.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Trump added in the social media post that he had instructed his lawyers “to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities.” His administration has pursued an effort to investigate universities that have adopted diversity, equity and inclusion programs, leading to court fights, funding battles and, in many cases, the removal of diversity initiatives.
https://www.change.org/p/defend-the-smithsonian-s-national-museum-of-african-american-history-and-culture
Defend the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture
The Issue
Click Here to Donate to America's History SOS
Executive Order 14253 Threatens the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture
We Demand Rescission of Executive Order 14253
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC or Museum) and other historical monuments and properties. Executive Order 14253, misleadingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to ensure that Smithsonian Institution exhibits and programs align with what the administration calls “American greatness” and singles out for particular scrutiny the NMAAHC.
The order instructs the review and removal of exhibits, narratives, and programs which the administration, in its sole discretion, deems would “divide Americans based on race,” “degrade shared American values,” or are “anti-American.” It then directs reductions of federal funds if exhibits or programming are inconsistent with the administration’s preferred version of history. There is no legal authority or precedent for this order.
America’s Conscience Is at Stake
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established to tell the truth of African American history—the struggles, the triumphs, and the countless contributions African Americans have made to the United States of America. For generations, Americans of all backgrounds fought to establish the Museum—not only to honor the history and contributions of African Americans, but out of a deep conviction that the nation must reckon with its past and finally honor and acknowledge the truth.
Executive Order 14253 attempts to rewrite our past by obscuring the realities of brutal slavery, Jim Crow, and the history of persistent and ongoing discrimination. Whitewashing this shared history isn’t just an attack on the Museum’s integrity—it’s an assault on America’s collective memory. The definition of "American greatness" that the order promotes is one that would erase crucial stories of resilience, innovation, and perseverance that Black Americans have contributed to this country. Erasing these truths does lasting harm, not only to the Museum’s reputation, but to everyone—because all people deserve an honest and complete account of our nation's history and legacy.
We Demand:
- That the NMAAHC and the Smithsonian remain free from political interference.
- That Congress and the Smithsonian Board of Regents act to protect the Museum’s independence.
- That President Trump immediately rescind Executive Order 14253.
- That all efforts to censor or sanitize African American history be met with unified, unflinching resistance.
Stand With Us to Save the NMAAHC
By signing this petition, you join a national effort to defend and support the nation’s sacred legacy embodied by the Museum.
America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian)
If you’d like to know more about America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian), we invite you to read, adopt, and share our Resolution to Preserve the Integrity of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Read Our Resolution by Clicking Here
Click Here to Donate to America's History SOS
For more information about this petition check out our website at americashistorysos.org
https://www.americashistorysos.org/
Click Here to Donate to America's History SOS
Executive Order 14253 Threatens the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture
We Demand Rescission of Executive Order 14253
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC or Museum) and other historical monuments and properties. Executive Order 14253, misleadingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to ensure that Smithsonian Institution exhibits and programs align with what the administration calls “American greatness” and singles out for particular scrutiny the NMAAHC.
The order instructs the review and removal of exhibits, narratives, and programs which the administration, in its sole discretion, deems would “divide Americans based on race,” “degrade shared American values,” or are “anti-American.” It then directs reductions of federal funds if exhibits or programming are inconsistent with the administration’s preferred version of history. There is no legal authority or precedent for this order.
America’s Conscience Is at Stake
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established to tell the truth of African American history—the struggles, the triumphs, and the countless contributions African Americans have made to the United States of America. For generations, Americans of all backgrounds fought to establish the Museum—not only to honor the history and contributions of African Americans, but out of a deep conviction that the nation must reckon with its past and finally honor and acknowledge the truth.
Executive Order 14253 attempts to rewrite our past by obscuring the realities of brutal slavery, Jim Crow, and the history of persistent and ongoing discrimination. Whitewashing this shared history isn’t just an attack on the Museum’s integrity—it’s an assault on America’s collective memory. The definition of "American greatness" that the order promotes is one that would erase crucial stories of resilience, innovation, and perseverance that Black Americans have contributed to this country. Erasing these truths does lasting harm, not only to the Museum’s reputation, but to everyone—because all people deserve an honest and complete account of our nation's history and legacy.
We Demand:
- That the NMAAHC and the Smithsonian remain free from political interference.
- That Congress and the Smithsonian Board of Regents act to protect the Museum’s independence.
- That President Trump immediately rescind Executive Order 14253.
- That all efforts to censor or sanitize African American history be met with unified, unflinching resistance.
Stand With Us to Save the NMAAHC
By signing this petition, you join a national effort to defend and support the nation’s sacred legacy embodied by the Museum.
America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian)
If you’d like to know more about America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian), we invite you to read, adopt, and share our Resolution to Preserve the Integrity of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Read Our Resolution by Clicking Here
Click Here to Donate to America's History SOS
For more information about this petition check out our website at americashistorysos.org
https://www.americashistorysos.org/
Join and Support the SOS (Save our Smithsonian) Movement
Please click the red buttons to support our petition!
SIGN OUR PETITION!
CLICK HERE TO DONATE!
(Photography by Alan Karchmer)
Defend the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture
The Threat: Executive Order 14253
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC or Museum) and other historical monuments and properties. Executive Order 14253, misleadingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to ensure that Smithsonian Institution exhibits and programs align with what the administration calls “American greatness” and singles out for particular scrutiny the NMAAHC.
The order instructs the review and removal of exhibits, narratives, and programs which the administration, in its sole discretion, deems would “divide Americans based on race,” “degrade shared American values,” or are “anti-American.” It then directs reductions of federal funds if exhibits or programming are inconsistent with the administration’s preferred version of history. There is no legal authority or precedent for this order.
America’s Conscience Is at Stake
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established to tell the truth of African American history—the struggles, the triumphs, and the countless contributions African Americans have made to the United States of America. For generations, Americans of all backgrounds fought to establish the Museum—not only to honor the history and contributions of African Americans, but out of a deep conviction that the nation must reckon with its past and finally honor and acknowledge the truth.
Executive Order 14253 attempts to rewrite our past by obscuring the realities of brutal slavery, Jim Crow, and the history of persistent and ongoing discrimination. Whitewashing this shared history isn’t just an attack on the Museum’s integrity—it’s an assault on America’s collective memory. The definition of "American greatness" that the order promotes is one that would erase crucial stories of resilience, innovation, and perseverance that Black Americans have contributed to this country. Erasing these truths does lasting harm, not only to the Museum’s reputation, but to everyone—because all people deserve an honest and complete account of our nation's history and legacy.
We Demand:
- That the NMAAHC and the Smithsonian remain free from political interference.
- That Congress and the Smithsonian Board of Regents act to protect the Museum’s independence.
- That President Trump immediately rescind Executive Order 14253.
- That all efforts to censor or sanitize African American history be met with unified, unflinching resistance.
Stand With Us to Save the NMAAHC
By signing this petition, you join a national effort to defend and support the nation’s sacred legacy embodied by the Museum.
America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian)
If you’d like to know more about America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian), we invite you to read, adopt, and share our Resolution to Preserve the Integrity of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
If you would like to help this effort please complete this form.
PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/israel-al-sharif-killing-gaza.html
Opinion
The Threat: Executive Order 14253
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC or Museum) and other historical monuments and properties. Executive Order 14253, misleadingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to ensure that Smithsonian Institution exhibits and programs align with what the administration calls “American greatness” and singles out for particular scrutiny the NMAAHC.
The order instructs the review and removal of exhibits, narratives, and programs which the administration, in its sole discretion, deems would “divide Americans based on race,” “degrade shared American values,” or are “anti-American.” It then directs reductions of federal funds if exhibits or programming are inconsistent with the administration’s preferred version of history. There is no legal authority or precedent for this order.
America’s Conscience Is at Stake
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established to tell the truth of African American history—the struggles, the triumphs, and the countless contributions African Americans have made to the United States of America. For generations, Americans of all backgrounds fought to establish the Museum—not only to honor the history and contributions of African Americans, but out of a deep conviction that the nation must reckon with its past and finally honor and acknowledge the truth.
Executive Order 14253 attempts to rewrite our past by obscuring the realities of brutal slavery, Jim Crow, and the history of persistent and ongoing discrimination. Whitewashing this shared history isn’t just an attack on the Museum’s integrity—it’s an assault on America’s collective memory. The definition of "American greatness" that the order promotes is one that would erase crucial stories of resilience, innovation, and perseverance that Black Americans have contributed to this country. Erasing these truths does lasting harm, not only to the Museum’s reputation, but to everyone—because all people deserve an honest and complete account of our nation's history and legacy.
We Demand:
- That the NMAAHC and the Smithsonian remain free from political interference.
- That Congress and the Smithsonian Board of Regents act to protect the Museum’s independence.
- That President Trump immediately rescind Executive Order 14253.
- That all efforts to censor or sanitize African American history be met with unified, unflinching resistance.
Stand With Us to Save the NMAAHC
By signing this petition, you join a national effort to defend and support the nation’s sacred legacy embodied by the Museum.
America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian)
If you’d like to know more about America’s History: SOS (Save Our Smithsonian), we invite you to read, adopt, and share our Resolution to Preserve the Integrity of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
If you would like to help this effort please complete this form.
PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/israel-al-sharif-killing-gaza.html
Opinion
Israel Says It Killed a Hamas Commander. It Killed a Pulitzer-Winning Journalist.
PHOTO: Anas al-Sharif reporting in Gaza City last year. Credit: Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
Listen to this article · 13:53 minutes
Learn more
by Lydia Polgreen
August 21, 2025
New York Times
Eleven days ago, Israel assassinated a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a young man who had suddenly become the face and voice of the desperate people of his homeland, Gaza.
In gripping dispatches on Al Jazeera and his social media feeds, that journalist, Anas al-Sharif, documented the relentless Israeli assault on civilians, breaking down on camera as he reported on the gathering famine. He was 28 years old, a husband and the father of two young children. He, four of his colleagues from Al Jazeera and at least one freelance journalist were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a press tent outside a hospital in Gaza City.
The Israeli military made no attempt to obscure this brazen strike on civilians, which is a war crime. Instead, it argued that al-Sharif was not a civilian at all. It claimed with no credible evidence that he was the commander of a Hamas cell and that his journalism was merely a cover for that clandestine role. Those killed alongside him — Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi — were presumably acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of this target.
Since the gruesome Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 Israelis, Israel has waged a pitiless war in Gaza. More than 62,000 people have been killed, including some 18,500 children, according to local health authorities, in what is considered by many experts to be an undercount. Most of the tiny enclave is now rubble; almost all of Gaza’s two million people have been forced to flee their homes, many repeatedly. Since Israel ended the latest cease-fire in March, it has sharply curtailed the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. Most of its population, according to the United Nations, is experiencing or staring down starvation.
Amid so much suffering, the targeting of a single journalist may seem like an individual tragedy. But coming as Israel begins an all-out assault to capture Gaza City and as Benjamin Netanyahu has said he intends to occupy all of Gaza in the face of growing global condemnation, the killing of al-Sharif, like the killing in March of his fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat, marks an ominous new phase in the war.
To justify its pitiless pulverizing of Gaza, Israel has endlessly invoked the threat of Hamas, supposedly lurking in schools, hospitals, homes and mosques. Now it has begun not only accusing individual journalists of being Hamas fighters but also openly admitting to killing them in targeted attacks, based on purported evidence that is all but impossible to verify.
With Gaza closed to international journalists, this new campaign has created a pretext to eliminate the remaining journalists with the platform to bear witness and terrify anyone brave enough to attempt to take the place of the fallen. It has also exposed the cruel logic at the heart of Israel’s prosecution of the war: If Hamas is everywhere, then every Gazan is Hamas. This is truly a war with no limits, and soon there may be no journalists left to document its horror.
I have long been awed by the work of journalists who find their homelands under attack. I spent years in war zones as a foreign correspondent, working alongside some of the bravest and finest journalists I’ve ever encountered. We were engaged in the same work, fundamentally: trying to help the world understand seemingly incomprehensible suffering. As an American employed by an American news organization, I stood on the same front lines in Congo, in Darfur, in Kashmir and elsewhere. But I would fly home to safety, while they would remain, struggling along with everyone else to survive.
We differed in another important way as well. I chose and pursued a career in journalism. For many reporters from war zones, the profession chose them. This was the story of Mohammed Mhawish, a young man from Gaza City. When Hamas attacked Israel, he was dreaming of a career in the arts. He had graduated from the Islamic University in Gaza, where he studied English and creative writing, and hoped to write literature and poetry. Instead, he found himself working as a journalist for Al Jazeera’s English-language service.
“It was a feeling of obligation to my people and a responsibility to my hometown that was being destroyed in real time,” he told me. “I never imagined myself being given the responsibility or assigned the responsibility to be writing through destruction and death and loss and tragedy.” Gaza City is a small place, so he got to know al-Sharif as they struggled to cover the catastrophe unfolding around them.
“He was this really brave young person,” Mhawish told me. Before the war, al-Sharif’s work focused on culture and ordinary life. “He reported on families having hope, families getting married, people celebrating life accomplishments, people just enjoying life on a daily basis. He never wanted or aspired to be a correspondent carrying a responsibility for his entire people.”
The work took a toll on al-Sharif. “I remember many times where he was in public and sometimes personally with other colleagues of his in Gaza, just saying how hungry he was,” Mhawish said. “How tired, how exhausted, how terrified and how scared — he was really scared all the time. He was feeling that he was being watched and he’s being hunted and he’s being targeted.”
People inspecting the destroyed press tent a day after Israel’s attack. Credit: Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Under international law, journalists are considered civilians. But since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at least 192 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. (I’m on the organization’s board.) “At some point, I had to abandon my press vest because it no longer provided me with the protection that I was seeking,” Mhawish told me. “In fact, it functioned as a target on my back.”
Mhawish left Gaza last year. Al-Sharif’s death, coming after so many threats from Israeli military officials, was an especially devastating blow. “At the end of the day, he chose to give the sacrifice of his life,” Mhawish said. “I am really, really tired of grieving my friends and colleagues.”
When the Saudi government murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident columnist who wrote for The Washington Post, inside its consulate in Turkey, it created a global outcry. Russia’s detention and killing of journalists have likewise provoked outpourings of support. If the governments bother to concoct accusations — of espionage and other crimes — to justify these heinous acts against working journalists, they are usually dismissed out of hand as the ravings of autocratic regimes bent on destroying free speech.
The response to al-Sharif’s killing, like that of scores of other Palestinian journalists, has been different — more muted, more likely to give equal weight to Israeli accusations despite the lack of verifiable evidence. Mhawish said he was dismayed to see so many news organizations around the world parrot Israeli claims that his friend was killed because he was a Hamas militant. “What’s heartbreaking about this is that it tells me that there are journalists in the world who are justifying the killing of other journalists,” he said.
This is another respect in which I, as a foreign journalist, was always perceived differently from the local journalists who worked alongside me in war zones. They knew far more than I did about events unfolding in their homelands. They understood how to move safely through dangerous territory and possessed essential contacts and expertise that helped enrich my coverage.
Ideally, this leads to mutually beneficial relationships between local journalists and their international counterparts, who often hire locals to improve their coverage. But in some places, what might be seen as expertise comes to be viewed as something darker. As a foreigner, I tend to be seen as a neutral outside observer. A local reporter, embedded in her community and enduring the same hardships as her fellow citizens, comes under more scrutiny. She cannot help being blinkered, the thinking goes, by her own suffering and rooting for one side in the conflict she is covering. She is, surely, a partisan.
In the remarkable new documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” a pair of Ukrainian journalists accompany a group of Ukrainian soldiers through a narrow band of forest as they seek to recapture a village from Russian forces. It is a claustrophobic, harrowing film, unfolding in bunkers and foxholes. At one point the film’s director, the Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, notes the parallel between himself, the journalist, and the young officer he is interviewing.
The soldier, Chernov says, picked up a rifle, while he picked up a camera. Through different means, each man sought to stand up for the dignity and sovereignty of Ukraine’s people. Were Chernov, who works for The Associated Press, to be targeted or smeared by the Russian state, journalists the world over would not hesitate to rally to his side and dismiss any allegations against him as propaganda. I would be among the first to join any crusade on his behalf.
It is in this context that we must consider Israel’s contention that al-Sharif was a Hamas militant. The evidence offered to the public is weak, consisting of screenshots of spreadsheets, purported service numbers and old payments that have not been independently verified.
“The Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists,” said Irene Khan, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, when a different Israeli airstrike killed another Al Jazeera journalist and his cameraman last year. Al-Sharif reported on their deaths.
In interviews before al-Sharif died, he pleaded for help and safety. “All of this is happening because my coverage of the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip harms them and damages their image in the world,” he told the Committee to Protect Journalists. “They accuse me of being a terrorist because the occupation wants to assassinate me morally.”
Even if one takes Israel’s allegations at face value — which I absolutely do not, given Israel’s track record — and entertains the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas has been the governing authority of Gaza since 2006. It ran the entire state apparatus of a tiny enclave. “It is a movement with a vast social infrastructure,” Tareq Baconi, the author of a book about Hamas, has written, “connected to many Palestinians who are unaffiliated with either the movement’s political or military platforms.”
Take it further and contemplate, based on Israel’s supposed evidence, that al-Sharif played some military role before becoming a journalist. The history of war correspondence is replete with examples of fighters turned reporters — perhaps the most famous among them, George Orwell, recorded soldiers’ lives while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and became a war correspondent.
These days, having served in the military is widely seen as an asset among American war reporters. Far from seeing those who served as hopelessly biased, editors rightly value the expertise and perspective these reporters bring from their experiences and trust them to prioritize their new role as journalistic observers. In Israel most young people are required to serve in the military, so military experience is common among journalists.
Many will protest that Hamas is different from the military of a state. This is true. Long before its gruesome attack on Israel on Oct. 7, it engaged in horrifying terrorist tactics like suicide bombings that targeted civilians. Many countries, including the United States, consider it a terrorist organization. But it was the accepted authority in Gaza.
Indeed, the uncomfortable truth is that Hamas owes much of its strength to Netanyahu’s cynical policies, which, as The Times reported in 2023, included tacit support designed to prop up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. As late as September of that year, the month before Hamas attacked Israel, his government welcomed the flow of millions of dollars to Hamas via Qatar.
“Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued,” my newsroom colleagues wrote. “For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.”
A vigil for Anas al-Sharif and his fellow slain journalists in Mexico City last week. Credit.: Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press
Freud theorized that hysterics were an extreme version of ordinary people experiencing outsize distress in exceptional circumstances. In this way, journalists are an extreme version of the curious person who lingers and tries to figure out what’s going on when most others, sensing danger, have packed up their curiosity and gone home.
What are journalists but unusual people who decide on society’s behalf to witness the unbearable? They set aside their personal safety and perhaps find strange thrills in the horrors of the work they do and the things that they witness. There can be a kind of moral deformity in this, to be sure, but it’s an important and socially recognized role. Someone’s got to send word back into history.
In this regard, journalists are actually not that different from soldiers. Soldiers, after all, are ordinary people given minimal training, mostly how to use their equipment and the tactical ways that one does the job. And then they set off to do a monstrous task on behalf of the rest of us, something most of us cannot possibly imagine doing.
This strange and seldom acknowledged kinship is what permits a pall of suspicion to fall over the work of journalists in war zones, especially local ones, who cannot help being caught up in the events unfolding around them. Using their chosen instruments and medium, they are engaged in a struggle to protect their home and their people. It is easy to see how the other side will seek to cast them as combatants, even if they carry no weapons. But that does not mean we should believe it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
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Freud theorized that hysterics were an extreme version of ordinary people experiencing outsize distress in exceptional circumstances. In this way, journalists are an extreme version of the curious person who lingers and tries to figure out what’s going on when most others, sensing danger, have packed up their curiosity and gone home.
What are journalists but unusual people who decide on society’s behalf to witness the unbearable? They set aside their personal safety and perhaps find strange thrills in the horrors of the work they do and the things that they witness. There can be a kind of moral deformity in this, to be sure, but it’s an important and socially recognized role. Someone’s got to send word back into history.
In this regard, journalists are actually not that different from soldiers. Soldiers, after all, are ordinary people given minimal training, mostly how to use their equipment and the tactical ways that one does the job. And then they set off to do a monstrous task on behalf of the rest of us, something most of us cannot possibly imagine doing.
This strange and seldom acknowledged kinship is what permits a pall of suspicion to fall over the work of journalists in war zones, especially local ones, who cannot help being caught up in the events unfolding around them. Using their chosen instruments and medium, they are engaged in a struggle to protect their home and their people. It is easy to see how the other side will seek to cast them as combatants, even if they carry no weapons. But that does not mean we should believe it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
More on the war in Gaza:
Opinion | Etgar Keret
We Need a New Language After This War
Aug. 20, 2025
Opinion | Alex de Waal
Netanyahu Is Choosing to Starve Gaza
Aug. 1, 2025
Opinion | Aseel Aburass, Tirza Leibowitz and Itamar Mann
The Death of Gaza in Slow Motion
July 30, 2025
Beyond Dog Whistles: How Anti-Blackness Is Destroying Our Democracy...
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VIDEO:
AAPF
and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History
(ASALH) are partnering for ASALH’s timely third national convening from
the historic Union Chapel, Beyond Dog Whistles: How Anti-Blackness Is
Destroying Our Democracy And What We Must Do To Resist. In the current
environment of racial backlash and the slide into autocracy, disparities
impacting Black Americans are being ignored, while Black excellence is
being erased from our workplaces, museums, and history books. No longer
cloaked with dog whistles, this assault is happening in plain sight,
endangering our health, eliminating our jobs, banning our books,
defaming our knowledge, and gutting our civil rights infrastructure.
Despite the scale of this attack, the response remains muted—even within
our own communities. What must we do to sound the alarm and ensure that
others hear it? Join Kimberlé Crenshaw with ASALH President Kaye Wise
Whitehead, President & CEO National Coalition on Black Civic
Participation (NCBCP) and Convener of Black Women's Roundtable Melanie
Campbell (and special guests) for a sober assessment of how far we’ve
devolved since the racial reckoning of 2020 and, more critically, where
we must go from here.
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Six Republican-led states have now pledged National Guard troops to the Trump administration's takeover of Washington, D.C., where it has assumed control of policing under the claim of tackling crime. Along with the D.C. National Guard that Trump already controlled, this brings the total number of troops in the streets of the capital to more than 2,000. The federal takeover comes even as violent crime in the capital is at a 30-year low — numbers the Trump administration now disputes, with the Justice Department launching an investigation into whether those crime statistics were manipulated by city officials. "What we're seeing is lawlessness, but it's all coming from the White House," says community activist Keya Chatterjee, the executive director of the group Free DC.
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
Fascism in the United States is an expression of fascist political ideology that dates back over a century in the United States, with roots in white supremacy, nativism, and violent political extremism. Although it has had less scholarly attention than fascism in Europe, particularly Nazi Germany, scholars say that far-right authoritarian movements have long been a part of the political landscape of the U.S.[1]
Scholars point to early 20th-century groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and domestic proto-fascist organizations that existed during the Great Depression as the origins of fascism in the U.S. These groups flourished amid social and political unrest.[1] Alongside homegrown movements, German-backed political formations during World War II worked to influence U.S. public opinion towards the Nazi cause. After the U.S.'s formal declaration of war against Germany, the U.S. Treasury Department raided the German American Bund's headquarters and arrested its leaders. Both during and after World War II, Italian anti-fascist activists and other anti-fascist groups played a role in confronting these ideologies.
Events such as the 2017 Charlottesville rally have exposed the persistence of racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy within U.S. society. The resurgence of fascist rhetoric in contemporary U.S. politics, particularly under the administration of Donald Trump, has highlighted the persistence of far-right ideologies and it has also rekindled questions and debates surrounding fascism in the United States.[1]
Early origins
The origins of fascism in the United States date back to the late 19th century with the passage of Jim Crow laws in the American South, the rise of the eugenicist discourse in the U.S., and the intensification of nativist and xenophobic hostility towards immigrants. During the early 20th century, several groups were formed in the United States that contemporary historians have classified as fascist organizations – with a prominent example being the Ku Klux Klan.[1]
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or "the Klan," is an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group founded in 1865 during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in the devastated South.
Scholars have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group[2][3][4][5] and compared its emergence to fascist trends in Europe.[6] Historian Peter Amann states that: "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental. ... [The KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."[7]
The first Klan, founded by Confederate veterans, assaulted and murdered politically active Black people and their white political allies in the South.[8] The second Klan was formed in 1915 as a small group in Georgia and flourished nationwide by the mid-1920s.[9]
Inter-war period
The rise of fascism in Europe during the interwar period raised concerns in the U.S.; however, European fascist regimes were largely viewed positively by the American ruling class. This was because fascist interpretations of ultranationalism allowed a nation to gain a significant amount of economic influence in the Western world and permitted a nation's government to destroy leftists and labor movements.[10]
