Stewart D. McLaurin - Jimmy Carter's life and presidency show the true meaning of dedicated public servant

 https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/12/30/president-jimmy-carter-life-service/73804685007/

 

 

Jimmy Carter's life and presidency show the true meaning of dedicated public servant | Opinion

8–10 minutes

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Stewart D. McLaurin

As we mourn the death of President Jimmy Carter, one of only 45 people to serve as our chief executive, we can celebrate an extraordinary life. More than 100 years spanning 17 presidencies from Calvin Coolidge to Joe Biden, President Carter’s sense of justice and faith called him to a life of service – before, during and after his four years in the White House. 

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924, a short, shy child (nicknamed Peewee) who was formed by his childhood in the tiny rural communities of Plains and Archery. 

Although Georgia was deeply segregated, his mother, Lillian, was a nurse who provided free care for local Black sharecroppers and brought her son along to visit Black churches. A Black farmhand named Rachel Clark taught him much of his faith.

“Much more than my parents,” Carter later wrote, “she talked to me about the religious and moral values that shaped a person’s life.”

Jimmy Carter starts down his path of leadership

President Carter’s father was a businessman, farmer, blacksmith and cobbler – and later a state representative – but his support of racial segregation was a source of estrangement with his son. Jimmy Carter was the only student from his high school to go to college, and during World War II, he enrolled at the Naval Academy. (He is the only president who attended Annapolis.)

In the early 1950s, Carter interviewed for the Navy’s new nuclear submarine service, where its legendary founder, Adm. Hyman Rickover grilled him on everything from Shakespeare and opera to Carter’s time at the Naval Academy. “Did you always do your best?” he asked. 

When Carter – who had graduated in the top 10% of his class – admitted he hadn’t always, Rickover stared at him, then snapped, “Why not?” Carter got in, but the admiral’s question followed him the rest of his life, fueling a superhuman work ethic; he later called Rickover the greatest influence on his life after his parents.

Carter entered into politics and the presidency as the 'outsider'

When his father died of pancreatic cancer, Carter quit the Navy to save the family’s peanut farm from bankruptcy. He entered politics at the school board level and then as a state senator in the early 1960s, and by 1970 was elected governor of Georgia.  

Carter ran for president in 1976 as an outsider – "My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president," he would begin his speeches – and bested 16 other candidates to win the Democratic nomination. (He titled his campaign autobiography, "Why Not the Best?")

After defeating President Gerald Ford, Carter became America’s 39th president, sworn in as “Jimmy” instead of “James.”  He was the first president to walk 40 minutes from the Capitol to the White House during the inaugural parade, holding hands with first lady Rosalynn Carter as their 9-year-old daughter Amy traced the median strip with her feet.

Carter's presidency focused on human rights and foreign policy

As president, Carter focused on human rights and civil rights, appointed a record number of women to his Cabinet, and named more women and people of color to federal judgeships than all previous presidents combined.

He gave Vice President Walter Mondale historic new responsibilities, created the Departments of Energy and Education, deregulated the trucking and airline industries, and doubled the land area protected by the National Park Service.  

In foreign policy, President Carter achieved an unprecedented peace treaty that ended a cycle of wars between Israel and Egypt, signed after the president shuttled between the delegations for two weeks at Camp David. 

“It was the Jimmy Carter conference,” insisted Israeli leader Menachem Begin. “I think he worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.”  

Carter also recognized and established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, signed a major nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union and set in motion the return of the Panama Canal to Panama.

Bringing technology and religion to the White House

Carter brought new trends to the White House itself. When oil production dropped after the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, the president had 32 thermal solar collectors installed on the roof of the West Wing to heat water for the staff cafeteria. He introduced computer automation to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (including an 8-foot-long, water-cooled IBM laser printer). 

President Carter loved music, and befriended contemporary musicians like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffett, Wayland Jennings and the Allman Brothers.

The Carters also brought their deep religious faith to the nation’s capital. They joined the First Baptist Church a mile from the White House, where Amy was baptized and the president occasionally taught Sunday School and a class for couples (always preparing the night before). As president, he prayed many times a day.  

Carter later said of the Camp David Accords, “We finally got an agreement because we all shared faith in the same God – we all considered ourselves the sons of Abraham.”

During the 444 days when Iranians held American hostages, he later reflected to the White House Historical Association, “I prayed more that year more than I ever have before or since in my life – that I would make the right decisions.”

Rosalynn and Jimmy find a life after the White House

Rosalynn, who had known Jimmy since their earliest days in Plains and who died in November 2023 after 77 years of marriage, was first among equals as an adviser to the president and one of the most influential first ladies in American history. She championed mental health issues (as she had in Georgia), attended Cabinet meetings to listen, and met with leaders in South and Central America. 

At the White House she established the modern Office of the First Lady, set up her offices in the East Wing, and planned and hosted numerous state dinners, teas, receptions, coffees and luncheons.

After Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the Carters returned to Plains – and got to work. They founded the Carter Center, which has labored to eradicate diseases like Guinea worm and river blindness, encourage free and fair elections, and mediate conflicts. 

President Carter published more than 30 books about his life, vision and the struggle for world peace. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

The Carters also continued their tradition of service in everyday ways. They elevated the profile of the nonprofit housing organization Habitat for Humanity, driving nails and painting beams in their blue jeans and recruiting and inspiring volunteers around the world. (Carter was also a master woodworker, a skill he learned on the farm during his childhood.)

Until 2020 President Carter continued teaching Sunday School in Plains, open to the public – and still preparing carefully before each class. His decision to enter hospice care last year was driven in part by a desire to provide the hospice movement with more visibility and support.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter served their country during tumultuous times. For a century, they offered the full measure of their gifts to the country they loved, to the causes of justice and peace, and to the everyday people around them. As Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told me recently, “Just being president doesn't make you an inspiration to people around the world. It's what you do with the power that you've been given to change other people's lives.”

We mourn the loss of a dedicated public servant, but we celebrate his service, his faith and integrity, and his legacy.

Stewart D. McLaurin is president of the White House Historical Association and director of The People’s House: A White House Experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under Biden, a generational shift in U.S. views of Israel [nyt]

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/23/biden-politics-israel-jews-arabs-gaza/

Under Biden, a generational shift in U.S. views of Israel

Support for Israel was once widespread across the American political spectrum. Biden’s presidency has widened a deepening rift among Democrats.

December 23, 2024

 

 




Protesters in New York march against the war in Gaza on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. (Victor J. Blue for The Washington Post)



By Yasmeen Abutaleb

In late November, the White House and its allies scrambled to kill a Senate measure blocking three weapons shipments to Israel — a delicate move, since the measure was led or sponsored by senators close to President Joe Biden, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland).

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to plead that the measure would embolden Hamas at precisely the wrong moment. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) called senators into his office, one by one, to urge a no vote. The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee launched a blitz of online ads targeting the measure’s supporters.

Yet 19 senators — more than a third of all senators who caucus with Democrats — voted for at least part of Sanders’s proposal, sending an unprecedented message of dissatisfaction with Biden’s Middle East policy from his own party. It was the first time Congress had ever voted on blocking arms sales to Israel, and the White House was unable to head it off.

The episode highlights a fundamental transformation in America’s relations with Israel, a shift that began years ago but has exploded under Biden since the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. His response has contributed to a splintering in his party that is likely to be part of his legacy, though one he may not wish for, as the politics of Israel in America are unlikely ever to be the same.

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For decades after the Jewish state was founded in 1948, support for the country, born three years after the end of the Holocaust, was widespread among Americans. Now it’s a divisive, volatile issue, as Republicans led by President-elect Donald Trump firmly embrace the country, Democrats are increasingly critical and progressives stage impassioned protests against Israel and its policies.

“The younger generation of American voters sees Israel not as the aggrieved party, but as the party that has created the situation through its endless occupation and the lack of any negotiations with the Palestinian Authority,” said Bruce Riedel, an analyst who has worked on the Middle East under presidents of both parties. “The bottom line is, the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict have now changed significantly. And it happened on Biden’s watch.”

The reasons predate Biden. Israel has surged to the right, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Younger Americans have no personal memory of the Holocaust or Israel’s founding as a largely socialist state; many express more empathy toward the Palestinians, whom they view as suffering under a colonialist state after hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes as part of Israel’s founding. The American Jewish community, with its liberal Democratic tendencies, is more splintered than ever over a country that was once a source of near-universal pride for them.

Even so, the dynamic has accelerated and solidified during the Biden presidency.

After Hamas militants surged into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, Netanyahu launched a lengthy war that has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, fueled a humanitarian catastrophe and destroyed Gaza. While Biden criticized Israel throughout the war for endangering civilians and for blocking humanitarian aid, he has maintained a massive flow of military assistance, arguing that Israel’s war is self-defense against a terrorist enemy.

To many Democrats, that was more in tune with an earlier version of the Democratic Party — and Israel — than today’s reality. Biden seemed to them to reinforce his dated views with his fond reminiscences of meeting Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973.

“Part of Biden’s problem is he has such a depth of experience,” said Tommy Vietor, a former national security spokesman in President Barack Obama’s White House. “He still talks about meeting with Golda Meir, and that’s an Israel that’s all but disappeared.”

The Democrats who voted for blocking arms sales say the question is not whether to support Israel or whether the country has a right to defend itself. Rather, they say, the crux of the debate in their party is whether the time has come to rethink a relationship that involves the United States shipping enormous amounts of military aid to Israel with virtually no restrictions.

“All Senate Democrats support a close partnership with Israel. But a partnership should be a two-way street, not a one-way blank check, and that’s the core of the issue,” Van Hollen, a vocal critic of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in an interview. “There’s a significant and growing group [of Democrats] that believes in the U.S.-Israel partnership, but believes the United States needs to more effectively use its influence to ensure compliance with American law.”



President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Oct. 18, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Netanyahu has exacerbated Democrats’ frustration by seemingly abandoning previous Israeli leaders’ policy of careful bipartisanship and often aligning with Republicans. He committed a startling breach of protocol in 2015 by addressing Congress, at the invitation of Republican leaders, to attack then-president Obama’s policy on Iran. In July, Netanyahu made a similar decision when he addressed Congress at the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) as he and Biden were publicly at odds.

“This movement in the Democratic Party predates this war in Gaza,” said Vietor, who now co-hosts the “Pod Save America” podcast. “Bibi Netanyahu began to poison the relationship with Barack Obama as early as 2009, but the 2015 visit and his address to Congress made clear who he was and what his plans were. It’s been a steady erosion of support among lawmakers.”

Biden’s embrace of Israel after the Oct. 7 assault could hardly have been more enthusiastic, and it was applauded by both parties. He delivered a prime-time speech less than two weeks after the attacks, vowing the United States would stand with its ally as it sought to eliminate Hamas. He traveled to Israel, boasting that he was the first U.S. president to visit the country during wartime. He hugged Netanyahu when they met, a moment that many Democrats and even administration officials say came to symbolize the often-criticized “bear hug” approach Biden took to the Israeli prime minister.

But the political mood among liberals turned as quickly as the military tide. Israeli airstrikes yielded daily images of suffering and desperation in Gaza, including Palestinian buildings leveled by Israeli airstrikes and children pulled dead from the rubble. Israel’s sharp restrictions on humanitarian aid despite repeated U.S. pleas have led to widespread hunger, disease and devastation in Gaza, with outrage building over images and stories of children starving. Within months, Biden faced demonstrators at virtually all of his public appearances chanting against “Genocide Joe.”

Almost overnight, Gaza had become a defining cause for progressives, who viewed the Palestinians as a marginalized group and Israel as a colonial power, a stark reversal from its onetime image among many Americans as the rebirth of a persecuted people. And even as many Jewish leaders stood by Israel, others increasingly spoke out against Netanyahu’s government, from liberal rabbis to politicians such as Sanders and Schumer.

Still, Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for AIPAC, said in a statement that most Democrats have been strongly behind Israel in the current conflict. “A strong majority of Democrats have stood with the Biden Administration in ensuring that Israel has the resources to defend itself in this just and moral war and rejected anti-Israel efforts by Bernie Sanders to erode American support for the Jewish state,” Wittmann said.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, while relatively small, argue that Israel’s militarism is not only out of step with American values but with Jewish ones as well. “Like generations of Jewish leftists before us,” the group’s website declares, JVP seeks to “advance a Judaism aligning with our spiritual and moral commitments” through solidarity with “the Palestinian freedom struggle.”

Ilan Goldenberg, a former White House policy adviser, said people on both sides of the divided Jewish community have dug in over the past year.

“The first camp is already skeptical of Netanyahu, then became more so because of the war, and moved further away from this right-wing Israeli government. That’s a large part of the Jewish community,” said Goldenberg, who served as Jewish outreach director for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. “The other part is Republicans and conservative Democrats who after October 7th and the war in Gaza have doubled down on their support for the Israeli government’s actions.”



A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator tears down posters of Vice President Kamala Harris during the Democratic National Convention in August. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Arab Americans and Muslims underwent their own cultural shift. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many felt they were vilified after every attack by Islamist militants, and they hesitated to speak out or bring unnecessary attention to their religion or ethnicity, according to numerous interviews with community members.

But the Gaza war upended that, particularly among younger members of the community. Many Arabs and Muslims became outspoken about the Palestinian cause and donned kaffiyehs, the headscarf that has come to symbolize solidarity with it.

Other activists, including from the Black Lives Matter movement, saw Palestinians as fellow people of color targeted by a brutal police state and joined the cause. (Israel’s supporters say that about half its residents are people of color themselves, and they warn against viewing the Middle East through the prism of America’s racial dynamics.)

By October, a poll from the Pew Research Center found that 50 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents thought Israel’s campaign against Hamas had gone too far, while 13 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners felt that way.

As the presidential campaign entered the home stretch, both Harris and Trump sought to court the Arab and Muslim community, especially in Michigan, which has one of the largest concentrations of Arabs and Muslims in the country.

“We may look back on 2024 and say this is the first presidential vote in history where the Arab vote helped determine the outcome,” Riedel said. “The Arab and Muslim vote has never really mattered in American elections before because it’s always been tiny.”

As Biden stuck with his traditional, permissive approach to Israel, the agitation outside Washington began infiltrating the halls of Congress. In many ways, this resembled the trajectory of the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, which began on college campuses but ultimately found champions on the House and Senate floors.

Sanders said he believes there would have been even more support for his measure to block the weapons shipments if Biden’s team and Schumer had not mobilized so forcefully against it. The White House circulated talking points among lawmakers with assertions like, “Now is the time to focus pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and stop the war. Cutting off arms from Israel would put this goal even further out of reach and prolong the war, not shorten it.”

The pressure put his colleagues in a tough spot, Sanders said.

“You had the president of the United States and his administration, literally on the day of the vote, doing everything they could to move against us,” Sanders added. “You had the majority leader doing everything that he could. And you had AIPAC, a very powerful super PAC … playing a very active role.”

Several senators and White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters, said they became frustrated when the Biden administration on several occasions made an announcement seemingly designed to placate critics of Israel, only to avoid following through.

In October, for example, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote a letter warning Israel that absent “concrete measures” to surge food, medicine and other basic supplies into the ravaged Palestinian territory within 30 days, it could risk losing some U.S. military assistance.

Israel did not take significant steps in that direction, but the United States imposed no consequences, they said.

Earlier this year, the White House published a memo saying that countries receiving U.S. weapons must provide written assurances that they will abide by international law and let American aid into stricken areas. That came after Van Hollen led a push to amend the foreign aid bill to require that any country receiving American assistance follow international law, an amendment that attracted 18 co-sponsors.

The Biden administration concluded in May that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had violated international law in Gaza, but it also found that Israel’s insistence to the contrary was credible. That seemingly contradictory finding allowed Biden to continue sending military aid to Israel.

For all this support, Netanyahu repeatedly defied Biden in public — in the view of some Israelis, as a way of bolstering his domestic image of toughness. In February, Netanyahu denounced a hostage deal at the same time Biden officials were in the region trying to negotiate one. Around the same time, he announced that Israeli forces would invade the Gazan city of Rafah after Biden’s team publicly urged him not to.



Sen. Bernie Sanders makes his way to the Senate chamber in December 2023. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Such repeated snubs, Sanders said, have strengthened Democrats’ distaste for Netanyahu and their willingness to publicly oppose him. “It was a growing recognition that Netanyahu was actively involved in American politics, trying to make Biden look weak and stupid, and supporting Trump,” Sanders said.

Now, with Biden exiting the political stage, Democratic lawmakers who want to challenge Israel’s actions will no longer be defying their own party’s president. Rather, the powerful alliance between Trump and Netanyahu could make it easier for Democrats to criticize Israel.

In his first term, Trump endorsed Israeli control of the Golan Heights and moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, generating two enormous political wins for Netanyahu — and significant setbacks for the two-state solution. In turn, Netanyahu named an Israeli settlement after Trump and erected a large campaign billboard of the two leaders together.

Trump has signaled an intent to continue this embrace of Netanyahu in his second term, naming several staunchly pro-Israel figures to his Cabinet, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) as secretary of state and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel.

Amid the transformed political landscape, few figures embody the shifts in America, the Jewish community and the Democratic coalition more than Sanders, who at 83 is a year older than Biden. A socialist and a Jew, Sanders volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s.

He recalled in the interview how different Israel was at that time, pointing to prime ministers who still engaged in negotiations over a Palestinian state.

“Thirty or 40 years ago, you had leadership there who understood that at the end of the day, you had to work with the Palestinians — people who supported a two-state solution, people who understand it’s imperative you treat the Palestinian people with dignity and respect,” Sanders said. “What you have now is not just Netanyahu, it’s people worse than Netanyahu … who would just as soon drive every Palestinian out of the area if they could.”

US nerve center to combat China and Russia global propaganda shut down by Republicans [usatoday]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/12/26/gop-opposition-shutters-global-engagement-center/77239404007/

 US nerve center to combat China and Russia global propaganda shut down by Republicans

The State Department's Global Engagement Center called out Moscow and Beijing for disinformation efforts. But the pro-Trump GOP said it became politicized.

Josh Meyer

USA TODAY

 

Dec 26, 2024

 

WASHINGTON − The State Department's Global Engagement Center, the highly touted nerve center for coordinating U.S. efforts to counter foreign disinformation – especially by Russia and China – shut down this week after becoming a lightning rod for conservative criticism.

The mission of the GEC, as it is commonly known, was to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate” the U.S. campaign against propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security and stability of the U.S. and its allies.

But the GEC, with a relatively tiny $60 million budget and staff of 120, was first criticized in 2023 by Elon Musk, the multibillionaire advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, as the "worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation."

More:'President-elect Musk': Elon's influence on display in government spending fight

The GEC was initially included in a stopgap bill to fund the government past a Dec. 20 deadline, but GOP lawmakers deleted it from a last-minute bill ultimately passed by Congress.

A State Department spokesperson said the GEC "will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024. The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps," the AFP news agency reported.

GEC's origins in countering terrorist propaganda

The GEC evolved from the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, established by the Obama administration in 2011 to counter online extremist recruitment and propaganda. An Obama 2016 executive order created the GEC to broaden its mission to include fighting disinformation by state and non-state actors.

The GEC soon began to focus primarily on using high-tech tools such as social media analytics to identify and counter disinformation campaigns by Moscow and Beijing that were increasingly targeting Washington and its allies. It sought to broaden its impact by working with other U.S. agencies, foreign allies and the private sector.

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‘Calling out China’ – and Russia too

A Sept. 28, 2023 report by the GEC called out China for spending billions of dollars annually on foreign manipulation efforts. It detailed how Beijing employed “a variety of deceptive and coercive methods as it attempts to influence the international information environment.”

The report said China extensively pushed propaganda, including through fake media and research papers "falsely blaming the United States for creating COVID-19."

Those efforts falsely promoted China and the Chinese Communist Party's "desired narratives on issues such as Taiwan, its human rights practices, the South China Sea, its domestic economy, and international economic engagement.”

More broadly, the GEC report said, China sought to leverage propaganda, censorship and “digital authoritarianism” to encourage foreign governments, journalists and civil society at large to accept its preferred narratives and avoid criticizing its conduct as it sought more influence on the global stage.

The GEC also has published numerous hard-hitting criticisms of Russia.

In 2020, the GEC has detailed how Russia spread conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has called out the Kremlin for trying to sow chaos in U.S. And it has exposed Russian attempts to destabilize U.S. influence in Africa by spreading false claims about U.S. health programs.

In September, it called out Moscow and its state-run media organization RT for using propaganda, disinformation – and sophisticated “cyber capabilities” – to sway the global community on issues like its war against Ukraine.

More:Lara Trump, Kari Lake, other notable Republicans appeared on podcasts accused of Russia tie

That effort by RT involved not only information operations but also covert influence and even military procurement efforts in targeting countries around the world, including in Europe, Africa, and North and South America, the GEC said in a Sept. 13 report.

“When state or non-state actors spread disinformation, material deliberately meant to deceive or divide our public, they attack the very foundations of our free and open society,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in releasing the report. He laid out specific steps the Biden administration was taking “to hold accountable those who weaponize disinformation to undermine our democracy,” including coordinated crackdowns by the State, Justice and Treasury departments.

In January, the GEC spearheaded an agreement to counter state-run disinformation campaigns that’s now backed by at least 21 countries including Spain, Poland, Finland and the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire – and that could enable them to also create their own versions at home.

Funding for the GEC ran into congressional opposition in 2024 by Republican lawmakers who claimed it was overstepping its authority by trying to silence conservative voices in the U.S. including pro-Trump influencers.

Three ranking House Republicans wrote Blinken in July to accuse the GEC of straying from its statutory duty to counter propaganda and disinformation abroad. 

“Your Department refuses to acknowledge that … any value the GEC provides is tempered by genuine concerns that the GEC is at best indifferent to, and at worst complicit in, an orchestrated and systematic effort to stretch the term ‘disinformation’ to encompass viewpoints that, among American progressives, are deemed to be politically disfavored or inconvenient…” the lawmakers wrote. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who co-authored the 2016 legislation that established the center, said such criticisms were unwarranted and politically motivated. He led the effort to save it from GOP shutdown, along with Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn. Former Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman is also a staunch supporter.

“[The GEC] has played an indispensable role in combating Russian and Chinese disinformation,” Murphy said in October. “It would unnecessarily undermine U.S. national security if we eliminated this tool.” 

When Trump won a second term on Nov. 5, Republicans also retained control of the House and retook the Senate.

The GEC tweeted its last on Dec. 18, praising the European Union for its “first-time use of designations under its Russia hybrid sanctions framework.”

On Tuesday, the day before Christmas, the site went offline with this message: “This account is no longer in use as of 12/23/2024. For updates on the U.S. Department of State, please follow @StateDept.”

 

Yoni Appelbaum - Everything You Know About Latkes Is Wrong [theatlantic]

 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/the-great-latke-lie/420018/

Everything You Know About Latkes Is Wrong

The shocking true story of a Hanukkah staple

By Yoni Appelbaum

 

December 11, 2015

In 1927, when the word “latke” made its English debut, The American Mercury defined the Hanukkah delicacy as “luscious … pancakes made of grated, raw potatoes, mixed with flour and shortening.” Almost 90 years later, Jews are still frying the potato pancakes, and serving them up as a holiday treat. “The point of latkes at Hanukkah is not the potato but the oil,” Joan Nathan explained to her readers in The New York Times this year. “What matters is the recounting of the miracle of one night’s oil lasting eight nights in the temple over 2,000 years ago.”

Each year, Jews throughout the United States mark the holiday by frying grated potatoes in olive oil, savoring a treat that is, as Nathan put it, “traditional, nostalgic, and crispy.”

Or, at least, crispy. Because there’s nothing traditional about the contemporary American latke. Virtually every element of it is a lie. Delicious? Yes. Traditional? Not in the slightest.

Let’s start with the oil. There weren’t a whole lot of olive trees in the Eastern European lands from which many Jews emigrated to the United States. In the Old World, the common cooking fat was schmaltz—rendered from chickens, geese, or beef. And, in fact, the Mercury specified that latkes were to be “fried in schmaltz.”

But on this side of the Atlantic, Jews soon began to use Crisco—memorably marketed as the miracle for which “the Hebrew Race had been waiting 4,000 years.” When shortening fell from favor, it was replaced by olive oil, allowing Hebrew-school teachers and pulpit rabbis across the country to connect the pancakes to the story of Hannukah. Because if not for the oil, why are Jews celebrating the holiday by frying potatoes in the first place?

Which is a good question. Potatoes, after all, are Andean tubers. They arrived in Europe in the 16th century, but weren’t widely cultivated in Eastern Europe for another 200 years. By the early 19th century, though, they were a staple crop in the lands with large Jewish populations, most often consumed boiled or mashed. Shredding them and frying them in schmaltz elevated a dull staple into a luxurious holiday treat.

But when the landmark Art of Jewish Cooking explained in 1958 that these were the pancakes “which the wives of the soldiers of the ancient hero Judah Maccabee hurriedly cooked for their men behind the lines,” it was off by a couple millennia. One thing we know for certain about the Hasmoneans, heroes of the Hannukah tale? They weren’t eating potatoes.

So what was a latke before the arrival of the potato? Still a pancake, but made from grain—most commonly buckwheat or rye—and fried in schmaltz. That’s what there was in the early winter in those frozen lands, as Gil Marks details in his magisterial Encyclopedia of Jewish Food.

But buckwheat and rye are northerly crops. How did Jews celebrate the festival before they migrated away from the Mediterranean shores? The latke, it turns out, has its roots in an old Italian Jewish custom, documented as early as the 14th century. That, it seems, is where Jews first fried pancakes to celebrate Hannukah. Only back then, they were made of cheese.

Cheese? Well, yes. The original latkes were, effectively, deep-fried ricotta. They honored the custom of celebrating the holiday by consuming dairy goods.

Hold on. Dairy goods? The custom was based on the story of Judith. She seduced a general named Holofernes, who came at the head of an invading army, by feeding him and plying him with wine. As he slipped into an alcoholic stupor, she seized his hair and hacked off his head with a sword. Then she tucked it in with her picnic provisions, left his camp, and presented it to the people of her town to mount on the wall. The terrified invaders fled, and the land was saved.

Did you miss the part about the cheese? Well, it’s not in the standard text, or in the ancient variants—except for an obscure Syriac version. The Book of Judith—like the books of I and II Maccabees, which relate the story of Hannukah—is not even in the Jewish Bible; it’s an apocryphal text. All three, however, were included in the Bibles of Catholic Europe. Whether through an unbroken chain of transmission, or more probably, as a story adapted from the version preserved in the Vulgate, the tale of Judith began to circulate again in Medieval Jewish communities.

And in one of those Hebrew versions, Judith feeds Holofernes two pancakes, salted and mixed with cheese. That version may have reflected an existing rabbinic tradition, but more likely inserted these details as allusions to other Biblical episodes. But either way, medieval Jewish legal codes soon recorded the custom of eating cheese to honor Judith, variously the sister or aunt of Judah Maccabee.

Clear enough? Only, it turns out, there’s another twist. The story of Judith is actually set hundreds of years before the time of the Maccabees, even though many scholars now believe it was composed in the Hasmonean period. There’s nothing in it to connect Judith to Judah Maccabee, save the similarity of their names; no explicit reason to tie Judith to the celebration of Hanukkah. But without ready access to the book itself, it appears that Medieval Jews conflated Judith’s story with the Hanukkah tale.

So what’s a latke?

It’s a shredded Andean tuber, fried like a buckwheat pancake, which was substituted for Italian cheeses, once eaten to honor a mistaken reading of obscure variants of an apocryphal text.

But it’s crispy, and delicious.

 

Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians [nyt]

 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-bombing.html

 

Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians

Surprised by Oct. 7 and fearful of another attack, Israel weakened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants, allowing officers to endanger up to 20 people in each airstrike. One of the deadliest bombardments of the 21st century followed.

By Patrick KingsleyNatan OdenheimerBilal ShbairRonen BergmanJohn IsmaySheera Frenkel and Adam Sella

The reporters interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials in Israel, dozens of victims of the strikes in Gaza, and experts on the rules of armed conflict.

• Dec. 26, 2024

At exactly 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military leadership issued an order that unleashed one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.

Effective immediately, the order granted mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza. Officers could now pursue not only the senior Hamas commanders, arms depots and rocket launchers that were the focus of earlier campaigns, but also the lowest-ranking fighters.

In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians.

The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history. Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.

It meant, for example, that the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside.

In previous conflicts with Hamas, many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt. Sometimes, officers could risk killing up to five civilians and only rarely did the limit rise to 10 or above, though the actual death toll was sometimes much higher.

On Oct. 7, the military leadership changed its rules of engagement because it believed that Israel faced an existential threat, according to a senior military officer who answered questions about the order on the condition of anonymity.

Hours earlier, Hamas-led terrorists had stormed into southern Israel, seizing towns and army bases, committing atrocities, firing thousands of rockets at civilian areas, killing up to 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. As Israelis battled Hamas fighters inside their borders, the officer said, Israel’s leaders also feared an invasion from the group’s allies in Lebanon and believed that they had to take drastic military action.

“All of the places where Hamas was deployed, in this city of evil, all of the places where Hamas has been hiding and operating from — we will turn them into rubble,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a speech on Oct. 7.

An investigation by The New York Times found that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.

The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets. Collectively, their accounts provide an unparalleled understanding of how Israel mounted one of the deadliest air wars of this century. Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on a subject of such sensitivity. The Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.

In its investigation, The Times found that:

• Israel vastly expanded the set of military targets it sought to hit in pre-emptive airstrikes, while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. That led Israel to fire nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks, more than in the next eight months combined. In addition, the military leadership removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians that its strikes could endanger each day.

• On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.

• The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale.

• The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cellphone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.

• From the first day of the war, Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks, or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an imminent attack. And when it could have feasibly used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military goal, it sometimes caused greater damage by dropping “dumb bombs,” as well as 2,000-pound bombs.

The air campaign was at its most intense during the first two months of the war, when more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed — or roughly a third of the overall toll, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

From November 2023 onward, amid a global outcry, Israel began to conserve ammunition and tighten some of its rules of engagement, including by halving the number of civilians who could be endangered when striking low-ranked militants who posed no imminent threat. But the rules remain far more permissive than before the war. Since those early weeks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and while Israel disputes the ministry’s figures, the total continues to climb.

Provided a summary of The Times’s findings, the Israeli military acknowledged that its rules of engagement had changed after Oct. 7 but said in a 700-word statement that its forces have “consistently been employing means and methods that adhere to the rules of law.”

The changes were made in the context of a conflict that is “unprecedented and hardly comparable to other theaters of hostilities worldwide,” the statement added, citing the scale of Hamas’s attack; efforts by militants to hide among civilians in Gaza; and Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.

“Such key factors,” the statement said, “bear implications on the application of the rules, such as the choice of military objectives and the operational constraints that dictate the conduct of hostilities, including the ability to take feasible precautions in strikes.”

The relatives of Shaldan al-Najjar, a senior commander in a militia allied with Hamas that joined the Oct. 7 attacks, were among the first casualties of Israel’s loosened standards.

When the military struck his home in a war nine years earlier, it took several precautions to avoid civilian harm — and no one was killed, including Mr. al-Najjar.

When it targeted him in this war, it killed not just him but also 20 members of his extended family, including a 2-month-old baby, according to his brother Suleiman, who lived in the home that was hit and witnessed the immediate aftermath. Some relatives were blown from the building. His niece’s severed hand was found in the rubble.

“Blood was splattered all over the neighbor’s wall — as though some sheep had just been slaughtered,” the brother recalled.

Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it complies with international law by taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties, often by ordering evacuations of whole cities before strikes, and by dropping leaflets over neighborhoods and posting online maps about imminent operations.

Israel says that Hamas’s military strategy makes bloodshed more likely. The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.

Unlike Hamas, which fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas, Israel and all Western armies operate under a multilayered oversight system that assesses the legality of planned strikes. Each attack plan is usually meant to be analyzed by a group of officers, which often includes a military lawyer who can advise on whether strikes might be unnecessary or unlawful.

To comply with international law, officers overseeing airstrikes must conclude that the risk of civilian casualties is proportional to the target’s military value, and take all feasible precautions to protect civilian life. But officers exercise significant discretion because the laws of armed conflict are vague about what counts as a feasible precaution or an excessive civilian toll.

After the shock of the Oct. 7 attack, a dozen officers recalled, some Israeli officers involved in the counteroffensive became less stringent about adhering to military protocol. While some commanders tried hard to maintain standards, five senior officers used the same phrase to describe the prevalent mood inside the military: “harbu darbu.”

It is an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint.

Why Civilians Were at Higher Risk

The Israeli military first targeted Shaldan al-Najjar during the war in August 2014. He was a senior commander in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had conducted suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel for decades.

Before that strike in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, the air force gave his neighbors three chances to escape, according to his brother Suleiman.

Israeli officers called one neighbor, and then another, with warnings of an upcoming strike on a nearby target that the military did not identify. Then the military dropped a small projectile on the house, what it calls a “roof knock,” standard practice then before strikes on targets believed to hold ammunition or tunnel entrances. That was enough for everyone, including Shaldan al-Najjar, to escape unharmed.

But seven hours after Hamas attacked Israel last year, the order from Israel’s high command made roof knocks optional. In practice this meant the procedure was rarely used, officers said.

There were no warnings before an Israeli fighter jet fired at Shaldan al-Najjar on the evening of Oct. 10, 2023, as he visited his siblings’ home. The explosion killed Mr. al-Najjar, along with his stepmother, four children, a younger brother, a sister-in-law, 13 nephews and nieces, including the 2-month-old baby boy, named Zein, and at least one neighbor, according to records compiled by Gaza’s health authorities.

The Israeli military confirmed that it had been targeting a member of Islamic Jihad, but declined to release more information.

Under Israeli military protocols, there are four categories of risk for civilian casualties: Level Zero, which forbids soldiers to put any civilians at risk; Level One, which allows up to five civilian deaths; Level Two, which allows up to 10; and Level Three, which allows up to 20 — and became the standard on Oct. 7.

Suddenly, officers could decide to drop one-ton bombs on a vast array of military infrastructure — including small ammunition stockpiles and rocket factories — as well as on all Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. The definition of a military target included lookouts and money changers suspected of handling Hamas’s funds, as well as the entrances to the group’s underground tunnel network, which were often hidden in homes.

Authorization from senior commanders was required only if the target was too close to a sensitive site, like a school or health facility, though such strikes were regularly approved too.

The effect was swift. Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, documented 136 strikes that each killed at least 15 people in October 2023 alone. That was almost five times the number the group has documented during any comparable period anywhere in the world since it was founded a decade ago.

Strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were occasionally permitted to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved, according to four Israeli officers involved in target selection. Three of them said those targeted included Ibrahim Biari, a senior Hamas commander killed in northern Gaza in late October, in an attack that Airwars estimated killed at least 125 others.

Another order, issued by the military high command at 10:50 p.m. on Oct. 8, provides a sense of the scale of civilian casualties deemed tolerable. Strikes on military targets in Gaza, it said, were permitted to cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.

Military officials characterized the order as a precautionary measure intended to cap the number of strikes that could take place each day. A scholar at West Point consulted by The Times, Prof. Michael N. Schmitt, said it risked being construed by mid-ranking officers as a quota that they had to reach.

In any case, the limit was removed two days later — allowing officers to sign off on as many strikes as they believed were legal. The Gazan authorities later reported occasional daily tolls of more than 500, but it was unclear how many were civilians or if their deaths had occurred over several days.

The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war. By November, two officers said, the air force had dropped so many one-ton bombs that it was running low on the guidance kits that transform unguided weapons, or “dumb bombs,” into precision-guided munitions.

This forced pilots to rely on unguided and less accurate bombs, the officers said. They were also increasingly dependent on outdated Vietnam-era bombs that can fail to detonate, according to two U.S. military officials briefed on Israel’s arsenal.

The air force used the one-ton bomb to destroy whole office towers, two senior Israeli military officials said, even when a target could have been killed by a smaller munition.

While declining to comment on specific incidents, the Israeli military said that its “choice of munitions” was always governed by the rules of war. The senior military official said that heavy munitions were required to hit Hamas’s tunnels.

The Najjar family was struck by a precision-guided one-ton bomb — an American-made JDAM, according to a Times assessment of a guidance fin that the family said it had found in the rubble. The bomb completely destroyed their three-story building, flattening five apartments as well as a car workshop on the ground floor, according to the brother and two other surviving members of the family.

“After the dust and smoke cleared, I looked at my building,” said Suleiman al-Najjar, who said he survived because he was on his way back from the hospital. “There was no building.”

A Depleted Target Bank

Throughout the war, hundreds of Israeli intelligence officers spread across several military bases scrambled to find and strike new targets, relying on an automated surveillance system that enabled them to work exponentially quicker.

In earlier wars in Gaza, officers had typically worked their way through a “target bank” — a database of hundreds of militants and locations that already had been methodically researched and vetted. In this war, the air force raced through much of the list within days, 11 officers and officials said, putting intelligence officers under intense pressure to find new targets.

Many were encouraged to propose a certain number of targets each day, according to five officers.

Several elite intelligence units, officials said, were given more time to find small numbers of high-value targets, like senior Hamas political leaders and top military commanders. Other units focused on rocket launch sites and ammunition stores. One unit looked specifically for civilians who provided financial services to militant groups.

But most intelligence units, particularly those in infantry divisions preparing to invade Gaza, were given very little time to build a much longer list of targets, officials said. That mainly involved trying to locate tens of thousands of low-ranking militants.

Israel has long maintained databases, one of which was code-named “Lavender,” that list phone numbers and home addresses of suspected militants, according to 16 soldiers and officials. Israel also controls Gaza’s telecom networks, allowing it to tap and track Palestinian phones. By listening to calls made by phones associated with the militants, intelligence officers tried to work out where they were, officials said.

But the databases sometimes included outdated data, according to six officers, increasing the likelihood that officers would misidentify a civilian as a combatant. There were also too many calls for the officers to manually track.

To speed up the process, officers used artificial intelligence.

In recent years, the Israeli military had developed computing systems, one of which was known as “The Gospel,” that could automatically cross-reference information from several different sources, including phone conversations, satellite imagery and mobile phone signals.

 

In the chaotic opening weeks of the war, different intelligence units harnessed these automated computing systems in varied ways to triangulate data and locate militants.

One common method involved automatically cross-referencing the location of a phone with its owner’s home address. When a phone appeared to be in roughly the same place as an address linked to its owner, the system flagged and recorded the owner’s phone calls.

Arabic-speaking soldiers then listened to these calls to determine whether a wanted militant had been found. Some units used speech-to-text software to translate the conversations automatically.

The military said officers always verified the information provided by the automated systems and it denied that artificial intelligence was ever more than the starting point of a human-led verification process. But the amount of verification varied from unit to unit, according to at least eight officers.

Some officers said they would only confirm someone as a militant if they overheard the person speaking about their involvement in Hamas’s military wing.

In other units, three officers said, an individual was considered a confirmed militant if he was simply listed in Lavender. Details of that process were previously reported by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian news website; the Israeli military has denied that was military policy and said that any analyst who relied solely on Lavender would have been overruled by superiors.

Once officers were satisfied that they had confirmed a legal target, they would begin planning an attack, such as a missile strike if the target seemed to be staying the night at home, the soldiers said.

The first step was to gauge the civilian risk.

In the most rigorous version of that assessment, officers sometimes hacked a target’s phone handset to listen to the conversations taking place nearby, in order to build a better picture of whom he was with, according to three officers familiar with the process. In some cases, the hacking allowed officers to pinpoint the target’s location as well as which way he was facing, how many floors he had climbed and how many steps he had recently taken.

As an additional precaution, officers sometimes attempted to trace the phones of the buildings’ other known prewar residents — a laborious process that could take more than an hour.

But the military was pursuing so many targets that officers often lacked the time or resources for such sophisticated surveillance, particularly when tracking low-ranking militants early in the war, according to seven officials and soldiers.

Officers could still intercept calls and determine a phone’s rough location by checking which cellphone towers received its signals. That information was less precise — and it was more difficult to ascertain who was nearby.

Overlooked Civilians

In the absence of more accurate data, Israeli intelligence officers routinely used a simplistic model to estimate the number of civilians who might be killed in an airstrike, according to 17 soldiers and officials.

The military divided Gaza into 620 sectors, most the size of a few city blocks, and estimated the number of working phones in each using the signals received by cellphone towers. After comparing phone and Wi-Fi usage with prewar levels, the military then estimated the proportion of residents who remained in each sector.

To gauge the number of civilians inside a particular building, officers typically assumed that the building’s prewar residents had fled at the same rate as the surrounding neighborhood.

Even at its best, the model provided information that might be out of date by the time of an airstrike. The volume of attacks meant that there was often an hourslong gap between the assessment of civilian risk and the actual strike on the target, according to eight officers.

When the air force tried to kill a money changer connected to Islamic Jihad in mid-November 2023, for example, seven hours had passed since intelligence officers last checked where he was and who he was with, according to an official familiar with the attack. The strike killed two women — but the target survived because he was no longer there, according to the official and a second person familiar with the incident.

The model also suffered from fundamental flaws.

It relied, for example, on people having enough electricity to power their phones — and a working phone network. But power and network outages in Gaza often made that impossible.

The location of handsets also cannot be determined with complete accuracy based on phone signals; phones that seem to be in one neighborhood may be in an adjacent one. And the model also ignored how, during times of war, people often cluster together in large groups, three officers said.

Starting in November, senior officers in the American Joint Special Operations Command repeatedly raised concerns about the model’s accuracy with their Israeli counterparts, warning that it was leading to catastrophically imprecise assessments, according to the two senior U.S. military officials familiar with the conversations.

Some within the Israeli military also sounded the alarm. Throughout November and December, Israeli Air Force analysts urged colleagues to use more extensive drone surveillance to check for the presence of civilians, according to internal military assessments. Little to no action was taken, at least for several weeks, according to those assessments. The air force was supposed to recheck estimates of civilian presence but did not always do so.

Even when conducting after-action reviews, the military rarely tried to count how many civilians had been killed, making it almost impossible for officers to assess the model’s accuracy, according to 11 officers involved in target selection.

The Israeli military’s statement to The Times did not address questions about the model, but it said that in general the military’s methods “adhere to the rules of law, whether it be the choice of munitions or the use of digital technologies to support this effort.”

Israel’s strike on a residential street on the edge of Gaza City on Nov. 16, 2023, exemplified how inaccurate the model could be. The military told The Times in a statement that it was trying to destroy one of the many tunnels used by Hamas’s military wing. In the process, it hit a large house.

Before the war, 16 members of the extended Malaka family lived in the three-story building, according to two surviving brothers, Hazem and Nidal Malaka. After the war began, dozens of other relatives moved in, they said.

At the moment of the strike, 52 people — including Hazem and Nidal Malaka — were crammed into the bottom two floors. The brothers drew a family tree for The Times that detailed their names and backgrounds, and provided photographs of many of them. The oldest was the 64-year-old family patriarch, Jamal, and the youngest was his 2-year-old granddaughter, Sham.

By this point in the war, the surrounding neighborhood, Zeitoun, was largely depopulated. Israel’s formula for assessing the building’s occupancy, based on phone usage in the wider neighborhood, would have suggested there was only a handful of civilians left.

And several hours before the strike, phone reception was lost across Gaza, service providers announced at the time. That meant that a manual attempt to track the handsets of the building’s prewar residents may have suggested there was no one there at all.

The first reports of the strike emerged only after the network outage ended, three days later on Nov. 19.

By the brothers’ count, at least 42 people were killed and just 10 survived. Hazem Malaka said that most of them were not officially recorded as dead because the victims’ bodies were left trapped in the rubble instead of being taken to the nearest hospital where deaths are registered.

Hazem Malaka, 40, lost his pregnant wife, son and daughter. To the best of his knowledge, he said, their bodies still lie crushed “under three floors of concrete.”

Tightening the Reins

About two months ago, Israel struck a hospital compound in central Gaza where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. Several burned to death, including Shaaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old university student, who was filmed flailing helplessly in his tent as the flames engulfed him.

Israeli officials blamed Hamas for the blaze, saying it likely occurred after an Israeli missile, targeting a Hamas command center, hit munitions that the group had stored in the hospital compound.

“All I wanted was for him to look at me one last time,” said Mr. al-Dalou’s father, Ahmed, as he recalled watching his son burn to death.

The attack occurred about 500 yards south of where the militant commander Shaldan al-Najjar was killed a year and four days earlier.

Still, the military has steadily used fewer munitions over the past 12 months, according to officers and records reviewed by The Times. The average number of munitions used by Israel each month in Gaza fell from a high of nearly 15,000 in October and November 2023 to less than 2,500 from February through May. (The Times was unable to verify the number of munitions fired since June.)

In relative terms, Israel has also tightened its rules of engagement.

On Nov. 5, 2023, the military leadership decreed that officers needed special permission to endanger more than 10 civilians in strikes on low-ranking militants who posed no imminent threat to Israeli infantry. By late January, officers needed special permission for nearly all such deadly strikes, except for those targeting the most senior Hamas commanders.

But the rules were still far looser than they were before Oct. 7.

Mid-ranking officers could still sign off on most strikes that endangered 10 civilians or less — a threshold far higher than the prewar norm.

And many strikes proved far deadlier.

In July, Israel fired several missiles at Hamas militants, including a top commander, Muhammad Deif, killing at least 57 people, according to Airwars.

Israeli officers have also acted with near impunity. Only two officers are known to have been fired for their role in the air campaign, after they oversaw a drone strike that killed several foreign aid workers whom the officers had confused for militants.

The military said that a panel appointed by the military chief of staff was investigating the circumstances of hundreds of strikes.

No one has been charged.

Abu Bakr Bashir, Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. More about Patrick Kingsley

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. More about Ronen Bergman

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay

Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 27, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Loosened Limits On Strikes, Multiplying Risks to Gaza Civilians. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe