An Outcry in Europe, a Shooting in Washington and a Blockade in Gaza

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Hey there. It’s Michael. A quick request before today’s show. In the past couple of years, nearly half the states in the US have passed bans on gender-affirming care for kids. The Trump administration is now targeting that care. And in the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in. Amidst all of that, some of our colleagues here on “The Times” audio team have been working on a project about where this care came from, who it was meant to help, and how it got pulled into a political fight that could end it altogether.

The team making that show is looking to hear from kids and parents about their direct experience with gender-affirming care. If that’s you, what has your experience been with pediatric gender medicine? How have recent government actions affected you? And how are you feeling about the future? If you’re willing to share your story, please send us a short voice memo to genderstoryatnytimes.com. That’s genderstoryatnytimes.com. Thank you. And here’s today’s show.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Rachel Abrams. And this is “The Daily.” [THEME MUSIC]

For the past few weeks, international outcry has been building over Israel’s plans to escalate its military campaign in Gaza and over its two-month long blockade of the region, which has put Gaza’s population on the brink of starvation. And then on Wednesday, a man chanting free Palestine gunned down two employees of Israel’s embassy in Washington, DC. Today, Aaron Boxerman, a “Times” correspondent in Jerusalem on the desperate situation in Gaza and Israel’s fears that the world has become an increasingly dangerous place for its people.

It’s Friday, May 23rd.

Aaron, we’re talking to you. I’m in New York. You’re in Jerusalem. What time is it over there?

It’s about 9:40 in the evening.

Well, thank you so much for making the time so late at night to talk to us about this.

Thanks for having me.

We want to start this conversation with what happened here in the United States on Wednesday night in DC. So can you tell us a little bit about the events of the last 24 hours?

So at around 9:00 PM on Wednesday night, there was a shooting in Washington, DC. It was right outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where a major American Jewish organization, the American Jewish Committee, was having an event for young diplomats, where they were focused on discussing aid to Gaza and the Middle East. Now, according to the police, a shooter approached a number of people who had left the event.

He pulled out a handgun, and he opened fire, killing two of them. Both of them were employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington. One of them was named Yaron Lischinsky, who was 30 years old. And the other was Sarah Milgrim, 26. The two of them were dating. And Mr. Lischinsky, according to his family, had planned to propose marriage during a trip to Israel next week.

A lot of the details about the attack remain unclear. There’s video of the alleged attacker shouting free Palestine at the scene as he’s being detained. But it wasn’t clear whether the shooter was targeting this event because it was at a Jewish Museum, or because it was hosting Israeli embassy employees, or for some other reason entirely. At this stage, we just don’t know 100 percent. That being said, law enforcement officials are looking into this as a potential hate crime and an act of terror.

These two young people who were killed, they were staff members at the Israeli embassy. And so I’m really curious what the reaction is inside Israel to their deaths.

So in Israel, people were really shocked. I mean, they viewed the idea that two people who work for the Israeli embassy might be targeted in the middle of Washington, DC, as absolutely shocking and horrifying. It was immediately condemned. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a horrific anti-Semitic murder. And many Israeli leaders turned their criticism outward.

In fact, at a news conference just after news of the shooting broke, Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, actually accused Israel’s critics abroad —

— particularly in Europe, where he said some international organizations and government officials had used words like genocide, crimes against humanity —

And Sa’ar tried to draw a straight line between this criticism of Israel and the horrible killing of the young couple. But this is really an enormously emotionally charged debate. In fact, some in Israel’s opposition actually blamed Israeli government policies, which they said were fueling anti-Semitism around the world.

But these criticisms of Israel are not new, right? Leading human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Criminal Court, they’ve all accused Israel of human rights abuses for months. And that’s been an ongoing part of the condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza. So is there something specific that this foreign minister thinks has changed in all of this?

Let’s be clear. This is standard rhetoric from the foreign minister. There’s been enormous international concern over the toll of the war in Gaza. According to Palestinian health officials in Gaza, more than 50,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the war. A lot of those concerns were voiced in private channels with Israeli officials. But over the past few weeks, and especially over the last week, some of Israel’s own traditional allies have dramatically ratcheted up their public condemnations of Israeli policies towards Gaza. And to understand that, you really have to understand the situation on the ground in Gaza right now.

For more than two months, Israel barred the entry of all humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. That meant no food, no fuel, no medicine.

A total blockade.

Right. Exactly. And this caused widespread hunger and deprivation among Gazans, who had already faced enormous struggles over the course of more than a year of devastating war.

As the blockade went on over the past two months, we started to hear reports that the situation was getting worse and worse. And that really led to a growing chorus of criticism that began to crescendo in early May.

A UN-backed panel of experts warned that there was a critical risk of famine due to the dwindling stockpiles of food inside the Gaza Strip.

UN officials began issuing more warnings about how dire the situation was becoming on the ground in Gaza. And in the middle of all of this —

Israeli leaders begin starting a drumbeat of threats and warnings —

— which suggests that they are going to launch a major ground offensive in Gaza that could potentially append everything in the Gaza Strip.

And just by ground offensive, you mean a full scale takeover of the Strip?

That’s what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about.

And I think all of this together has really begun to cause a dramatic shift in the way that even Israel’s traditional allies are talking about Israeli policy toward Gaza.

So this week, we saw Canada, Britain, and France come out with some of the strongest condemnations of the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip.

We also saw the new pope call for the immediate entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and for the war to come to an end.

We also recently saw President Trump discuss the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian critics have argued that the shift has been mostly rhetorical. But Britain on Tuesday actually did announce that it was suspending further negotiations on expanding its free trade agreement with Israel. And this was very clearly a protest against Israeli policies.

Given the global condemnation of this blockade, Israel must have known that it would be controversial, right? Even among its allies. So I want to understand, why did they put this blockade in place to begin with? What was the aim?

Back in January, Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire. The goal of the ceasefire was ultimately to reach an end to the war and free the remaining Israeli and foreign hostages who were still held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The first part of the ceasefire is slated to last six weeks, which took Israel and Hamas all the way up to early March. At that point, both sides were deadlocked over the next steps in the truce. And this is when Israel applies that blockade on Gaza on all humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip in what Israeli officials called an attempt to pressure Hamas.

Basically, their argument was negotiations over freeing the remaining hostages that Hamas is still holding in Gaza have reached a dead end. And we’re going to use every tool at our disposal to pressure Hamas to come to the table. Israel also argues that a lot of the humanitarian aid that goes into Gaza is exploited by Hamas, that Hamas either diverts it or takes control of it, stores it for its own purposes, or makes money off of it. So from Israel’s perspective, this was a key pressure point where they could make their opponents feel the pain. And then two weeks after that blockade begins, Israel resumes attacking Hamas in Gaza, ending the ceasefire.

And all of this, of course, becomes much worse. Can you just talk a little bit about the changes you’ve seen?

So Gazans who we speak to have talked about street markets that have relatively little food to offer, and whatever they do have is at unattainable prices, people scrounging whatever they can from canned food or surviving from basically communal soup kitchens. But even those have also increasingly struggled to keep up their operations as the stockpiles of food in Gaza have dwindled. So a lot of people have lost a lot of weight. Doctors in the enclave say that it’s starting to affect people’s health.

And my colleague, Erika Solomon actually spoke to Dr. Ahmed al-Farah, a pediatrician in Gaza.

He told her that some people are dying of diseases simply because they’re so malnourished.

When there’s widespread hunger, it’s not necessarily that people are going to die of starvation or wasting away, but that their body’s immune system might simply become too weak to fight off diseases that they might otherwise be able to fend off.

He even said that they’re seeing some cases in Gaza that are so extreme —

— that his colleagues abroad are asking him to send photos.

These are cases that they might have studied in theory, but they don’t really see them these days out in the world with modern medicine and advanced health care.

I mean, they’re basically saying, we’ve only ever seen these conditions in textbooks. I wonder, as these conditions have gotten worse and worse and the blockade has been ongoing, what does Israel say about it? Do they acknowledge the situation? Or how have they responded?

For the first several weeks, Israeli officials took a very clear stance. They said that more than enough supplies had entered Gaza during the ceasefire to provision Gaza for months, at least for a very, very long time and that the blockade was not causing widespread suffering to ordinary Palestinian civilians living in Gaza. But as the blockade wore on, weeks and weeks later, some Israeli military officers privately began to change that assessment. My colleagues, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman reported that these officers had found that unless Israel changed its policy and soon, that Palestinians in Gaza could face widespread starvation.

Finally, on Sunday evening, the Israeli government announced that in order to prevent starvation, they were going to allow some amount of food into the Gaza Strip. So we’ve started to see some aid trickle in over the past few days.

But now everybody is watching and waiting to see what happens next. That is to say, is prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually going to follow through on the massive military operation in Gaza that Israeli leaders have been threatening for weeks?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

Aaron, this massive military operation that Netanyahu has basically been threatening, this takeover of Gaza, what would that actually look like?

Well, it’s not hundreds percent clear. But what we know is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders in his government have been threatening a massive military offensive against Hamas in Gaza for weeks now.

When Netanyahu gets up and describes his plans for Gaza to the Israeli public, he talks about full security control of the Gaza Strip after a massive ground maneuver of Israeli forces throughout the enclave. Netanyahu has said that this would be a decisive blow to Hamas and that this could finally end more than a year and a half in which Hamas has really fought a dogged war of attrition in the face of a devastating Israeli military campaign.

This time, Netanyahu says, the Israeli military would seize control of large chunks of the Gaza Strip. They would basically capture them and stay there instead of going in and withdrawing, as they often did during the war. As part of this offensive, at least according to the declared plan, many Palestinian civilians would be displaced to Southern Gaza. And at the end of the operation, Netanyahu has promised the public Israel would effectively have complete security control of the Gaza Strip.

That last thing you said seems to be the key difference here, the complete control as opposed to the heavy bombardment, the fighting, et cetera.

Exactly. But even though the Israeli military has already formally announced the start of the operation, Israeli forces on the ground have not actually moved that much farther. We haven’t seen them sweep through major Palestinian cities like Khan Younis and Gaza City the way that they did during the first year of the war.

I mean, that’s kind of my question, why they haven’t already swept in, because if that is what their stated goal is, it doesn’t really seem like there’s much stopping them, right?

If Israel really wants to do this, and let’s assume for a moment that this is what they want to do, despite the potential cost for Israelis and Palestinians alike, there are still a number of factors that I think are giving them pause. One of them is definitely the hostages. So around 20 of the hostages in Gaza are still believed to be alive. There are the bodies of more than 30 others that are presumed dead.

But there’s absolutely a fear in Israel that a massive military campaign in Gaza could significantly endanger or kill the remaining hostages that are still alive. Another factor is Netanyahu himself. Netanyahu is described by his biographers and people who know him well as somebody who’s fundamentally very cautious and a political chameleon.

Throughout the war, he’s really refrained from making any big strategic decision about the future of Gaza, about what would be in the enclave in the so-called day after the war ends. This contrasts rather sharply with some of his coalition partners who are much more committed to permanent Israeli rule in Gaza and to building Jewish settlements in Gaza. Netanyahu is much harder to pin down. And so far, he appears to have successfully avoided having to make that big decision about what the future of Gaza should be.

Or seen another way, the stated goal of occupying Gaza may just be more important to the coalition keeping him in power than to Netanyahu, potentially.

Exactly. And I think a third factor that could be a potential check on Israel launching this massive offensive is the state of the military. Israel’s military has been fighting for more than a year and a half nonstop. And the country’s own security establishment is anxious about the feasibility of a protracted campaign in the Gaza Strip.

And why are they worried about that?

There’s a number of concerns that they have. Israel is already engaged in, I mean, really, the longest, most intense war of its history in Gaza, far outstripping the Yom Kippur War in 1973 or the Six-Day War in 1967. The war has really taxed Israel’s capacities in many ways, and particularly, its soldiers. In recent weeks, we’ve started to see a real shift in Israeli public opinion. If in the early days, right after the Hamas attack on October 7, the Israeli public was almost totally unified behind the campaign in Gaza, the question is now much more fraught.

We’ve seen opinion polls that show that a majority of Israelis support a deal that would free the hostages in exchange for ending the war. And I think there is also a growing sense among Israelis of how long can this really last. Does this war really still have a purpose, or has it lost its way? I interviewed one reservist who described how he couldn’t shake the feeling that Israel was sinking into the sands of Gaza, that it was having its own Vietnam moment in the sense that the United States continued to fight the war in Vietnam well after many had concluded that the war fundamentally could not be won.

At least some people have said that they no longer want to participate in the war because they feel that it no longer serves a purpose or because they’ve been worn down by hundreds of days of reserve duty. I think that says a lot about how it raises a yellow card to Israel’s ability to continue fighting indefinitely.

One thing I didn’t hear you talk about in terms of why Israel might be hesitating or why Netanyahu might be hesitating is humanitarian concerns, the concerns raised by all the people that we’ve been talking about this whole conversation. How much does Israel actually care about those concerns?

So I think Israel does care about these concerns. At the end of the day, Israel is not a superpower. It relies on its allies. It needs diplomatic backing from the rest of the world. It relies extensively on the United States, its biggest patron. And for all of the bravado and bluster that we hear from Israeli leaders, I think they do recognize that they have to sometimes make concessions in the face of diplomatic pressure from abroad.

So for example, Netanyahu, when he was justifying the decision to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza to his base, who had criticized him from the right, he said from a diplomatic perspective, not just practically in terms of the situation in Gaza, but also diplomatically, we can’t allow things in Gaza to become catastrophic. We can’t allow there to be starvation in Gaza. And on one level, we have rhetoric. And then on another level, there’s realpolitik, and there’s interests. And Netanyahu had to walk a fine line between these different competing interests, both inside Israel and inside his own coalition, inside his own security establishment, and then also among his allies abroad.

Aaron, since we’ve been talking, more details have emerged about the shooter. He’s been charged with murder and that he told police that he, quote, unquote, “did it for Garza.” And it makes me wonder how many people in Israel are looking at this shooting and thinking, the world hates us, and there could be more of this. Or are people thinking, this is exactly how we suspected people felt about us all along, and that’s why we need to keep fighting?

So some officials have made exactly the latter argument. And that’s what Netanyahu is saying. On Thursday night in Israel, he made a statement where he invoked the horrific shooting before pivoting to how Israel couldn’t accept an end to the war before Hamas’ total defeat. And on the other hand, you also have some people on the left who look at this incident, and they draw a totally different conclusion. From their perspective, it wasn’t criticism of the war, which was making the world less safe for Jews and for Israelis. It’s just the war, which has had a horrible toll and whose end, as far as all of us can tell, is still nowhere to be seen.

Aaron, thank you so much.

Thank you. Rachel.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Trump administration said it would halt Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. Because those students represent a quarter of the university’s student body, the move could strip Harvard of a crucial source of revenue. It’s the Trump administration’s latest attempt to strong arm Harvard into falling in line with its agenda. But the university is likely to challenge that decision in court. And —

After weeks of intense, and at times, heated negotiations, Republicans in the House of Representatives narrowly passed a wide ranging bill to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda.

The legislation, which now heads to the Senate, would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of the costs with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, and clean energy programs. Democrats, who uniformly opposed the bill, accused Republicans of voting to gut vital government programs to pay for tax breaks to the rich.

Today’s episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Clare Toeniskoetter, and Mooj Dadie. With extra help from Alexandra Leigh Young. It was edited by Maria Byrne and MJ Davis Lin. With help from Mike Benoist. Contains original music by Marion Lozano and Pat McCusker. And was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Erika Solomon and Patrick Kinsley. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Rachel Abrams. See you Monday.

[THEME MUSIC]