Thousands Protest in Israel After Recovery of 6 Hostages Killed in Gaza
Protesters across Israel demand a deal for the release of hostages.
Protesters flooded the streets of Israeli cities on Sunday in mass demonstrations demanding that the government immediately accept a deal for the release of hostages held in Gaza. The furious protests, some of the largest the country has seen over months of failed negotiations, came after the Israeli military announced that six of the hostages had recently been killed in Gaza.
In Tel Aviv, protest organizers put the number of people in the hundreds of thousands. Hostage families and a crowd of supporters carried six prop coffins in a march through the city. They swarmed in front of the Israeli military headquarters and clashed with the police on a major highway.
In Jerusalem, the Israeli police fired skunk water, a noxious crowd control weapon, and forcefully removed a crowd of hundreds who rallied at the city’s main entrance. In smaller cities too, including Rehovot, in central Israel, people blocked traffic and chanted, “We want them back living, not in coffins!”
The national uproar built on months of protests and increasingly aggressive actions by the families of many hostages, who have been attempting to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to accept a deal to little avail.
The frustration of the families, who have accused Mr. Netanyahu of sacrificing their loved ones for his own political gain, appeared to reach a boiling point on Sunday after the Israeli military said it had recovered the bodies of six hostages killed in Gaza. The Israeli health ministry said they had been shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning.
Their blood was on the hands of the Israeli government, said the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group that represents some of the relatives, and it called on the public to “bring the nation to a halt.”
The message was echoed by Israel’s largest labor union, which declared a strike beginning Monday morning, and by Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader.
The Families Forum said hundreds of thousands of people were protesting around the country on Sunday evening, but it was not possible to verify the figure. The Israeli police declined to provide any estimates of crowd sizes.
More protests were planned for Monday, the Families Forum said on social media.
Several family members of the hostages directed their anger squarely at Mr. Netanyahu as they agitated for public action.
“Whoever accepts the murder of civilians for the Prime Minister should stay home,” Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was one of the hostages found dead over the weekend, said on the social media platform X. “Those who don’t: in memory of Carmel, take to the streets — stop the abandonment, bring the state to a halt, get a deal.”
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is still held in Gaza, said in an interview that Mr. Netanyahu was “not only endangering our national security by refusing to complete this negotiated settlement, he’s also tearing apart this country by its seams. The country is aware that this government doesn’t exist for the service of the country but the service of itself.”
In Tel Aviv, where some of the largest crowds gathered, tensions escalated as night fell. Protesters blocked the main highway, pushed through security barricades and lit bonfires in the streets while the Israeli police carried out violent detentions and fired water cannons into the crowd. Naama Lazimi, a member of the Israeli Parliament, said on social media that the police had also thrown stun grenades at a close range, knocking her to the ground.
After hours of demonstrations, the Israeli police said it had arrested 29 people in Tel Aviv and cleared the highway. Five protesters were also arrested in Jerusalem, and two in Haifa, according to police officials.
Protesters expressed a mix of grief and rage, many carrying photos of the hostages and waving yellow ribbons in solidarity.
Shiraz Angert, a 23-year-old design student who was protesting in Jerusalem, wore a shirt bearing the photo of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the hostages whose bodies were recovered on Saturday. “It was possible to save them in a deal,” she said. “These are people who were sacrificed because we didn’t do enough.”
In Tel Aviv, Dan Levinson, a 59-year-old high school teacher, said he hoped the night’s protest would be a watershed moment.
“I feel that tonight is the last chance for a turning point — people out in the streets tonight understand that what we have not been able to achieve so far into the war, we will not be able to ever reach unless a decision is made,” he said.
“If it does not happen now,” he added, “it never will.”
Many Israelis direct their anger at Netanyahu over the hostage deaths.
The discovery of the bodies of six dead hostages found in Gaza has prompted a furious reaction among Israelis on Sunday, many of whom blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to secure a cease-fire deal that would have paved the way for their release.
By Sunday evening, protests were being organized and held across the country. Israel’s largest labor union declared that a “complete strike” would begin on Monday morning, a dramatic reflection of the anger that has been growing among advocates for the hostages and Mr. Netanyahu’s political opposition.
“For 11 months, the government of Israel led by Netanyahu failed to do what is expected of a government — to bring its sons and daughters home,” a group representing the families of hostages said in a statement. “Netanyahu: Enough of the excuses. Enough of the spin. Enough of the abandonment.”
Israel’s health ministry said on Sunday that a forensic examination showed the hostages had been shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning. The Israeli military blamed Hamas for the killings, and the raw responses to their deaths put into focus the stark divisions within Israel over the war.
Many hostage families and their supporters have called for a deal with Hamas without delay, even if it leaves the group intact. Mr. Netanyahu and his allies have said a bad deal with Hamas could put Israel’s long-term security at risk.
On Sunday, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, appeared to protest Mr. Netanyahu’s approach to the cease-fire negotiations. On the social media platform X, he responded to news of the dead hostages by calling for the reversal of a cabinet decision last week to keep Israel’s forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land along the border of Gaza and Egypt that Israeli officials say Hamas has used to smuggle in weapons.
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and a right-wing ally of Mr. Netanyahu, was critical of Mr. Gallant’s comment, saying that the cabinet would not allow for a “surrender deal” with Hamas that forsakes Israel’s security.
“Hamas murdered our hostages in cold blood in order to make us surrender, accept its demands and permit it to survive and rebuild its capabilities,” he said on X in response to Mr. Gallant’s post. “During difficult, heart-rending moments, common sense and national responsibility need to prevail and lead in our decision-making.”
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that in the cabinet meeting last week, Mr. Gallant had strongly opposed the decision to keep Israeli forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, insinuating that it was tantamount to abandoning the hostages. Hamas has demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, including from the corridor.
Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, publicly accused Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday of turning his back on the hostages and called for a strike on Monday.
“They were alive,” he said in a video statement. “Netanyahu and the cabinet of death decided not to save them. There still are living hostages there, and it’s still possible to do a deal. Netanyahu isn’t doing it for political reasons.”
Arnon Bar-David, the head of the Histadrut, Israel’s largest labor union, later called for members to take to the streets on Sunday night and on Monday morning.
“I came to the conclusion that only our intervention here might shock who needs to be shocked,” he said.
The Histadrut announced that workers at Israel’s biggest commercial airport, Ben Gurion, would join in the general strike starting at 8 a.m. on Monday. Eyal Yadin, chairman of the Transport and Port Workers’ Union in the Histadrut, said the shutdown would halt departing flights, with some exceptions. Arriving flights, the Histadrut said, would be not be affected.
Opponents of Mr. Netanyahu have argued that the Israeli leader has undermined efforts to reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas because doing so would anger his right-wing coalition allies and potentially collapse his government.
Mediators from Qatar, Egypt and the United States have made several attempts in recent weeks to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas, without success.
Both Israel and Hamas have been blamed at times for obstructing progress toward a cease-fire, but Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to set new conditions in July raised questions about whether the Israeli prime minister was truly interested in a deal.
Hamas, for its part, has requested its own extensive revisions throughout the process and has refused any truce that would see it give up overall power in Gaza. It has also defied international calls to release the hostages unconditionally.
Mr. Netanyahu spoke with the parents of one of the six hostages found dead, Alexander Lobanov, on Sunday, according to his office. It said in a statement that Mr. Netanyahu had apologized to the family and asked for “forgiveness for not succeeding in bringing” their son back alive.
The most recent proposals under negotiation for a cease-fire deal have involved a multiphase agreement, with the first phase involving the release of hostages categorized as women, children, the elderly, female soldiers and the ill and wounded.
Four of the six hostages whose bodies were recovered over the weekend were included on a list of those who Israel was demanding be released in the first phase of a three-phase agreement, according to an official Israeli document shared with mediators in late July and reviewed by The New York Times.
Israel’s list placed Eden Yerushalmi and Carmel Gat in the category of civilian women and children, while Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Almog Sarusi were included in the ill and wounded grouping, the document shows.
The Times reviewed the documents and confirmed their authenticity with officials from Israel and other parties involved in the negotiations. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to a full withdrawal, Hamas has demanded that Israel agree to end the war. Mr. Netanyahu has said he wants a “partial deal” that would allow for Israel to resume the war after freeing some of the hostages.
Mr. Netanyahu has consistently blamed Hamas for blocking progress toward a deal. On Sunday, he accused Hamas of not negotiating seriously since December, and said the group’s acts “required Israel to do everything so it can’t perpetrate these atrocities again.”
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Israel’s military says the hostages were killed by Hamas shortly before being found.
The Israeli military said on Sunday that six bodies found in Gaza were hostages who had been “brutally murdered” by Hamas, setting off a wave of nationwide grief mixed with anger.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, said the bodies had been recovered a day earlier from a tunnel underneath the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, close to where a seventh hostage, Farhan al-Qadi, was found alive last week.
“They were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short time before we reached them,” Admiral Hagari said.
Israel’s health ministry said later on Sunday that a forensic examination showed the hostages had been shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “shocked to the depths” of his soul by what he called the “coldblooded murder” of the hostages.
“The heart of the entire nation is torn,” he said in a statement.
In an initial statement, Hamas did not directly address the accusations, but said responsibility for the deaths lay with Israel, which it blamed for the lack of an agreement to stop the fighting in Gaza. Hamas later claimed in a separate statement, without providing evidence, that the hostages were killed by the Israeli military’s bullets.
Some people in Israel also angrily blamed the government for the deaths, calling for protests over the government’s inability to secure a deal to bring the hostages home.
Israeli military officials had said on Saturday that six bodies were found during a military operation, without specifying whether they were hostages’ bodies.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said Sunday on CNN that the grim discovery was not the result of a “specific mission to release hostages,” but that Israeli forces had “some idea of hostages being held in the area.”
The dead were identified as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino. They ranged in age from 23 to 40, according to a group representing families of hostages.
Five of those captured had been at a dance music festival in southern Israel. The sixth, Ms. Gat, was taken from the nearby village of Be’eri.
Before the Israeli military’s announcement, President Biden issued a statement saying that Israel had found the bodies of six hostages, identifying one as Mr. Goldberg-Polin, a dual Israeli American citizen whose parents had campaigned around the world for the release of the captives.
“I am devastated and outraged. Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel,” Mr. Biden said. “He lost his arm helping friends and strangers during Hamas’s savage massacre. He had just turned 23.”
Mr. Biden vowed to keep working toward an agreement to secure the release of the hostages. But he also issued a warning: “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
Mr. Goldberg-Polin was among the roughly 250 people who were abducted by Hamas and its allies during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. He was last seen in a video released by Hamas in April.
On Sunday, the Goldberg-Polin family confirmed his death “with broken hearts.”
The Israeli military said that the bodies of the six hostages were returned to Israeli territory.
More than 60 living hostages, and the bodies of about 35 other hostages believed to be dead, are still in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
The hostages ranged in age from 23 to 40 years old.
Tributes poured in on Sunday for the six hostages who were found dead in southern Gaza over the weekend.
The hostages, who the Israeli military said had been “brutally murdered” by Hamas, ranged in age from 23 to 40. Five had been at a dance music festival in southern Israel when they were taken captive during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and its allies; a sixth was taken from the village of Be’eri.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group of their relatives, identified the dead as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino. It also provided ages.
More than 60 living hostages, and the bodies of about 35 other hostages believed to be dead, are still in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
Here is what we know about the six whose deaths were confirmed on Sunday.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23
Mr. Goldberg-Polin was a dual Israeli American citizen who was taken hostage from the festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7. His mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, had traveled the world since, advocating the release of the hostages.
“Hersh is a happy-go-lucky, laid-back, good-humored, respectful and curious person,” she said last month, when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention with her husband, Jon.
“He is a civilian,” she added. “He loves soccer, is wild about music and music festivals, and he has been obsessed with geography and travel since he was a little boy.”
Mr. Goldberg-Polin was born in Berkeley, Calif. His family moved to Israel when he was in elementary school. Grievously injured during the attack, Mr. Goldberg-Polin lost part of his left arm and was last seen in a video released by Hamas in April.
President Biden was among those who expressed condolences to Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s family. “I am devastated and outraged,” Mr. Biden said in a statement, adding, “He planned to travel the world.”
Carmel Gat, 40
Ms. Gat lived in Tel Aviv but was staying at her parents’ house in Be’eri, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, when she was taken hostage on Oct. 7. Her mother, Kinneret Gat, was killed in the attacks.
“Carmel was an occupational therapist, full of compassion and love, always finding ways to support and help others,” the forum wrote in a post on X. “She loved solo travel, meeting new people, live rock music concerts, and was particularly fond of Radiohead.”
Haaretz published a profile of Ms. Gat in January that said her closest friends had been holding regular yoga classes in her honor in Tel Aviv in what has become known as “Hostage Square.”
They also created a Spotify playlist of her favorite songs, Haaretz reported, calling it “a humorous, eclectic mix.”
“I remember us coming back to the kibbutz on weekends, putting music on and dancing,” Adi Zohar, a classmate, told the news outlet. “That’s her. Making a party out of things. Taking it easy.”
On Sunday, a cousin, Gil Dickmann, posted a photograph on X of a young Ms. Gat, wearing a pink shirt and holding a young baby, grinning at the camera. “Sorry Carmeli,” he wrote, adding, “If only you saw how your friends fought to get you back alive.”
Alexander Lobanov, 32
Mr. Lobanov, who went by Alex, lived in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to the forum.
It said he was working as a bar manager at the festival when the attack began and that witnesses said Mr. Lobanov helped evacuate people.
He and his wife, Michal, had two children: Tom, who is 2, and Kai, who is five months old and was born when Mr. Lobanov was in captivity in Gaza, Haaretz reported.
Mr. Lobanov also held Russian citizenship, according to Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov.
“We mourn together with the entire family,” he said in a statement.
Ori Danino, 25
Ori Danino was from Jerusalem and was planning to study electrical engineering, Haaretz reported.
The oldest of five children, Mr. Danino had escaped the music festival but had gone back to help other people when he was captured, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum wrote on X.
“He was a fighter,” his partner, Liel Avraham, said on Israeli radio after learning of his death, The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday. She called him a “hero” who “excelled in everything he did.”
Ms. Avraham had posted about Mr. Danino on social media during his captivity. On April 7, she shared a picture of him kissing her on Instagram and in the caption teased him for losing to her at Backgammon and for letting his morning alarm ring.
Four weeks ago, she posted a photo of the two of them with the caption: “I’m waiting for you.”
Almog Sarusi, 27
Mr. Sarusi was from Ra’anana, a city north of Tel Aviv, according to Haaretz. It said he was at the music festival with his longtime girlfriend and had stayed by her side after she was wounded in the attack.
She died, and he was captured.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum described him on X as “a vibrant, positive person who loved traveling around Israel in his white jeep with his guitar.”
Eden Yerushalmi, 24
Ms. Yerushalmi was “a vibrant young woman with many friends and hobbies,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum wrote on X. “Eden loved spending summer days at the beach playing paddleball, attending parties, and was studying to become a Pilates instructor.”
In November, Ms. Yerushalmi’s sisters lit candles for her in New York City at the gravesite of a major spiritual leader in Judaism. They giggled at the time, trying to explain her nickname — “Opossum” — an old inside joke the sisters could no longer recall. Relatives of Ms. Yerushalmi had also traveled to Paris and Washington to press for the release of the hostages.
In a video posted in April, Ms. Yerushalmi’s sisters said she was a waitress in Tel Aviv who loved to make TikTok videos, rode a motorcycle and was “always the life of the party.”
“She’s very friendly,” they said in another video, posted in July. “She lives life to the fullest.”
Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
In the race against polio, Gaza begins a vaccination drive.
Health workers on Sunday began a polio vaccination drive in Gaza aimed at preventing an outbreak of the quick-spreading disease — a daunting challenge in a besieged enclave shattered by 10 months of war and dependent on commitments by Israel and Hamas to abide by pledged “humanitarian pauses.”
Israel, facing international pressure to prevent a wider outbreak of the crippling disease, moved with relative speed to allow agencies of the United Nations, supported by local health officials, to tackle the crisis in Gaza, where it launched a war in response to a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.
Although the vaccination drive officially began early Sunday, Gazan health authorities gave some doses to children on Saturday at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, according to reports in Palestinian news media. Videos showed doctors and health workers squeezing droplets of the poliovirus vaccine into the mouths of children who were being treated at the hospital.
“I knew about this campaign by chance. I was frightened when I heard the word polio,” said Maysaa Abu Daqqa, a mother of a 9-year-old, Habib Nizam. Ms. Abu Daqqa was waiting in a patients’ room at Nasser Hospital. “When I saw other women accepting the vaccinations for their children, I was encouraged to follow them,” she said.
Both Hamas and Israel agreed to the pauses in the fighting to allow the vaccinations to take place, but the campaign will be tricky to execute. With much of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, and some 90 percent of the enclave’s roughly two million residents having repeatedly fled Israeli bombardment, it may be impossible to ensure the immunization of all of the enclave’s estimated 640,000 children under age 10.
“This is a race against time,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the main U.N. agency in charge of aiding Palestinians, said in a post on X.
For families seeking to get their children vaccinated, the challenges are layered and fraught: Not only must they trust that the cessations in fighting will hold, but many will have to find transportation, navigate blocked and broken roads and expose themselves to danger and widespread lawlessness to reach the vaccination sites.
The 2,100 people trained to conduct the vaccination drive will face risks, too, including anxieties over a history of deadly assaults on aid workers since the war began.
At a news briefing at Nasser Hospital on Saturday, Dr. Bassam Abu Hamad, a member of the polio campaign committee in Gaza, tried to encourage families to get their children vaccinated.
Acknowledging potential concerns some parents might have, he said that the vaccine “is safe and rarely has any side effects,” and urged mothers to “convince each other” to vaccinate their children.
“At first, we were warned by some people that this would harm our children,” said Yousif al-Saqqa, a 31-year-old displaced father who first heard about the campaign on social media. But after listening to encouraging remarks by the Palestinian health minister in Ramallah, Mr. al-Saqqa took his 4-year-old daughter, Alaa, to receive it on Sunday, even though she was vaccinated at 2 months old, he said.
Poliovirus, which is highly contagious, can cause paralysis and death in the unvaccinated. Largely eradicated around the world by decades of public health campaigns, it can thrive in unsanitary conditions and in places where vaccination rates are not high enough. Such rates in Gaza, which health officials have said were at about 99 percent as recently as 2022, have dropped significantly among babies because of the war.
The vaccine drive will be conducted through staggered pauses of fighting in different regions of the Gaza Strip, a process that is intended to allow aid workers to try to vaccinate children at roughly 700 medical facilities, mobile clinics and shelters.
Israel will “allow a humanitarian corridor” for vaccination personnel to travel and will establish “designated safe areas” for them to administer vaccines during certain hours, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement on Saturday.
“Israel views with importance the prevention of a polio outbreak in the Gaza Strip, including for the purpose of preventing the spread of diseases in the region,” it said.
The campaign is expected to last for three days, with each humanitarian pause in place from early morning until midafternoon. There will be an option to extend the vaccine drive if necessary, and then local health officials will shift their focus to southern Gaza. The northern region of the enclave will be treated last, according to the staggered schedule announced by global health officials on Thursday.
Gazans received a text message from the health ministry on Saturday, announcing the beginning of the vaccination drive for children under 10 years old across different parts of the strip starting on Sunday.
The vaccination campaign kicked off in central Gaza, where the health ministry said clinics, hospitals and U.N. schools would be offering the vaccine during the hours of the humanitarian pause, from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Early indications suggested that Sunday’s vaccinations were carried out unimpeded. UNRWA, the main U.N. agency in charge of aiding Palestinians, said on Sunday afternoon that the humanitarian pauses “were respected” in the areas where vaccinations were taking place.
“The turnout for the first day of the campaign was positive and thousands of children and families were seen lining up ready to receive their vaccine,” it said in a statement.
Yet Israeli strikes continued across the strip, including in central Gaza later in the day, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency services agency. It said that at least 34 people had been killed across Gaza as of Sunday evening, including 11 killed in an Israeli strike on a school building sheltering displaced people in Gaza City.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, have rushed more than 1.2 million doses of oral polio vaccines to the region, and say that another 400,000 doses are on their way.
Dr. Majdi Dheir, the head of the campaign against polio in Gaza, said more than 2,700 people had been trained by experts from the health ministry, the W.H.O. and UNICEF to carry out the vaccinations.
Once the first round of vaccinations is complete, a booster round of immunizations will need to be administered four weeks later. Israel has agreed to repeat the staggered humanitarian pauses for the boosters as well.
The scale, ambition and logistics of the vaccination campaign are unprecedented in the Gaza war. The fact that the plan for it came together in only six weeks of negotiations after the virus was first detected is a sign of just how serious public health officials believe an outbreak could be.
Because polio can strike and spread rapidly, it is not only a risk to Gazans but also could spread to neighboring Egypt or Israel, and potentially beyond. Whether the disease can now be contained is impossible to determine, health experts have said.
Israel has begun to offer booster vaccines for soldiers operating in Gaza..
Polio is transmitted by contact with the feces of an infected person, or consumption of water or food contaminated by fecal matter.
Aid and rights groups say Israeli strikes have badly damaged access to sanitation and clean water in Gaza, not only risking the spread of preventable diseases but also possibly constituting a war crime. In June, the aid organization Oxfam released a report accusing Israel of destroying more than two-thirds of the enclave’s sewage pumps and all of its wastewater treatment plants.
After the virus was detected in sewage samples from Gaza in July, the W.H.O. director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the conditions created “the perfect environment for diseases like polio to spread.”
Such warnings became more urgent when, two weeks ago, Gaza confirmed its first case of polio in 25 years, in a nearly 1-year-old boy.
Facing repeated displacement, tens of thousands of Gazans have crammed themselves into camps with little access to water and sanitation. As a result, some 340,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated in or around populated areas, according to a U.N. assessment.
“My daughter already got that vaccine, so I was hesitant to take this step,” said Mohammed Abu Hashish, a 31-year-old Arabic teacher sheltering in a tent in Deir al Balah in central Gaza. But he said he decided to go forward with it on Sunday out of fear for his 2-year-old daughter’s health and the risk of infection between her and her cousins.
Mamdouh Abu Nadi, who also took his 2-year-old daughter, Ikhlas, and his 10-year-old son, Kareem, to get vaccinated in Deir al Balah on Sunday, said that all of the children in the area where they are sheltering went to get the vaccine.
He added that he had also encouraged his extended family members to do the same “for the safety of all the children.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Three Israeli police officers are killed in the West Bank.
Gunmen killed three Israeli police officers on Sunday morning as they drove through the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the latest episode in the spiral of violence in the territory that includes attacks by Palestinian and Israeli extremists, as well as ongoing raids by the Israeli military in Palestinian cities.
The officers were shot and killed as they drove along a highway in the southern part of the West Bank, close to a major checkpoint where traffic is screened before entering Israel, according to statements from the Israeli police and Magen David Adom, the emergency medical service.
One of the officers was the father of a police officer who was killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 raid on southern Israel that started the war in Gaza, according to the police.
The episode followed two attacks on Friday night by Palestinian militants, one of whom attempted to detonate a car bomb at a busy intersection in the southern West Bank, according to the Israeli military. In the second attack, a Palestinian drove into a nearby Israeli settlement, prompting a car chase and a shootout that caused an explosion in the Palestinian’s car, the military said.
The Israeli military raided three major cities in the northern West Bank last week, killing at least 22 people, according to the Palestinian health authorities. The military said the operation was aimed at quelling armed Palestinian groups, but critics warned that the death and destruction caused by the raids risked encouraging the same violence that they aimed to reduce.
Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 after capturing it from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli war that year. Israel has since built hundreds of settlements in the territory, which are considered illegal by most of the world. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis now live under military protection in the West Bank, interspersed among roughly three million Palestinians who generally want the territory to form the backbone of a future Palestinian state.
Since Wednesday, hundreds of Israeli soldiers have surged through the Palestinian cities of Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas, clashing with militants and churning up the streets with bulldozers in search of improvised explosive devices. The chaos left many people trapped in their homes without running water or internet.
The Israeli military said it had killed more than 20 militants in those raids, and militant groups said many of the slain were members of their organizations. One family said that a relative with mental illness was shot dead during the raid, his body left untended for hours during the violence.
By Sunday morning, troops had withdrawn from Tulkarem and Tubas.
In Jenin, they were still surrounding one of the city’s major hospitals, closely inspecting everyone who arrived and left, for the fifth consecutive day, said Wissam Bakr, the hospital director. The Israeli military said it had deployed troops around the hospital to prevent militants from entering it in an attempt to seek cover.
With the power cut, the hospital was making do with backup generators, said Dr. Bakr. Scores of patients, particularly those on dialysis, were being transferred to other hospitals, as the generators were incapable of powering all of the wards, he added. Before the raid, there had been roughly 180 patients in the hospital; now there were about 50 left, according to Dr. Bakr.
In the early 2000s, Dr. Bakr was working at the same hospital when Israeli forces swept into Jenin, part of a major crackdown in response to a surge in Palestinian suicide bombings that were planned by groups based in the city, he said. At that time, Israeli soldiers also surrounded the hospital for nearly two weeks before withdrawing, Dr. Bakr recalled.
“History is repeating itself,” he said.
The tense atmosphere across the territory has been exacerbated in recent weeks by rising violence by Israeli extremists, some of whom have also attempted to seize land used and owned by Palestinians. In mid-August, a group of Israeli arsonists surged through a Palestinian village, setting fire to vehicles and property.
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
Death of Israeli-American hostage prompts outpouring of grief across the U.S.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin loved soccer and music. He was curious, respectful and passionate about geography and travel, according to his mother. He was born in the Bay Area and moved to Israel when he was 8.
Some 15 years later, he became one of the most internationally recognized hostages among the 240 who were taken by Hamas on Oct. 7. For months, his parents made pleas to bring their son and the other hostages home.
But he was among the six hostages whose bodies were found in a tunnel in Gaza over the weekend. In a statement, President Biden said they were killed by Hamas.
“With broken hearts, the Goldberg-Polin family is devastated to announce the death of their beloved son and brother, Hersh,” his family said in a statement. Family members declined to be interviewed for this article, asking for privacy.
On Sunday, tributes to Mr. Goldberg-Polin, who was 23 and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, poured in from many pockets of America. People who knew him expressed immense grief and recalled moments they shared. To many across the country, he had become a symbol of hope.
Andy Feig, a rabbi in Los Angeles, grew up with Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s father and later spent time with the family in California. He said Mr. Goldberg-Polin “exuded the best traits” of his parents: caring, fun-loving and kind.
“In Yiddish, you say ‘mensch,’” meaning a person with integrity,” Rabbi Feig said, adding, “Hersh was that kind of kid.”
Jeffrey Abrams, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Los Angeles, recalled a fond memory of Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s family in 2010. Mr. Abrams was visiting Israel with his wife and three young sons, and after meeting Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s parents through a mutual friend, the family invited them to their apartment for a Sabbath dinner.
“Out of nowhere, this nice, lovely young family, with similarly aged kids, expressed one of the core Jewish values, which is to welcome the stranger,” Mr. Abrams said. He remembered Mr. Goldberg-Polin, then 9, as a “boy with big curly hair riding his tricycle with glee.”
Orly Lewis, chief executive of the Weinstein Jewish Community Center in Richmond, Va., which has a preschool Mr. Goldberg-Polin attended, also remembered him as a fun, open-minded child. Ms. Lewis said that she and others in the city’s tight-knit Jewish community had admired his parents’ advocacy in the past several months.
“There’s a saying in Hebrew: Who saves one life, it’s as if they saved the entire world,” she said. “I think the whole world was watching how much they tried to bring Hersh home, and the rest of the hostages.”
Mr. Goldberg-Polin was abducted while attending a music festival, and he lost a part of his arm while defending an emergency shelter from Hamas gunmen. In the 11 months since he was taken captive, his parents, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, became two of the most outspoken advocates for the hostages’ release. They have delivered speeches, met with elected officials and the Pope, and even addressed the Democratic National Convention in their hometown last month. At the convention, Ms. Goldberg and Mr. Polin each wore a piece of tape on which the number 320 was written, representing the number of days their son had been in captivity.
“Hersh, if you can hear us, we love you,” Ms. Goldberg said at the convention. “Stay strong. Survive.”
For Yael Nidam Kirsht, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, the news felt personal. Her sister and brother-in-law were abducted from the kibbutz where they lived on Oct. 7. Her sister was released in November, but her brother-in-law was killed in captivity this year, she said.
Ms. Nidam Kirsht had continued to find meaning in something Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s mother often said: “Hope is mandatory.” Just last week, Ms. Nidam Kirsht joined dozens at a vigil honoring Mr. Goldberg-Polin in Berkeley, where he was born.
“I was really hoping that what happened to us wouldn’t happen to Hersh,” she said.
To many who didn’t know Mr. Goldberg-Polin or his family personally, the news still cut deep. Susan Gordon Newman, a 52-year-old marketing professional in Chicago, where Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s parents were born and raised, said that as a mother of two, she was “devastated” for the family.
“There was so much hope for almost a year and now there’s no hope,” she said.
Some Americans lamented the ongoing war and its overall impact. Christine Blevins, a 50-year-old property manager from Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood, said, “All of it is horrible and has gone on way too long. It has created further division in our country.”
There are still seven U.S. citizens in captivity by Hamas. Israeli authorities say more than 60 living hostages and the bodies of about 35 people believed to be dead remain in Gaza. The Israeli military on Sunday said that the six whose bodies were found this weekend were fatally shot at close range by Hamas.
Hamas initially did not directly address the accusations but said in a statement that responsibility for the deaths lay with Israel. Later, without providing evidence, the group said in another statement that the hostages were killed by the Israeli military’s bullets.
In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s family once lived, Alfred Aghapour, 70, who lived two doors down from the family and attended the same synagogue, said he had been praying for Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s release. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said.
Rabbi Leonard Matanky, head of Chicago’s Ida Crown Jewish Academy — where Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s parents both graduated from — has known the family for decades. Tragedy in the world often seems to be anonymous and far away, he said, but for the Ida Crown community, Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s capture was “very close.”
After Oct. 7, Rabbi Matanky said, the school displayed a photograph of Mr. Goldberg-Polin and a prayer for the safety of the hostages around the building. When students return this week, his photo will still be there.
At a vigil Sunday night in Manhattan near Columbus Circle, hundreds of people gathered to light candles, say prayers and sing. One of the songs, “Kol Ha’Olam Kulo,” contains a line that can be translated as “the whole world is a narrow bridge, but the most important thing is not to fear at all.”
There, the families of Edan Alexander and Omer Neutra, two other Israeli-American hostages, described the despair after learning of the deaths of Mr. Goldberg-Polin and the five others.
“It’s been a really, really tough day,” said Orna Neutra, Mr. Neutra’s mother. She said that Mr. Goldberg-Polin was close in age to her son, and that her family had become extremely close with Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s parents. But despite their grief, she added, they still inspired strength and faith that an agreement would be reached to bring the remaining hostages home.
“The news of Hersh’s death is devastating,” she said. “And yet, even today, Rachel chose to share words of hope with us, praying that this tragedy stops the madness and brings the deal now.”
Robert Chiarito and Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
Russians Bomb Kharkiv, Ukraine Says, After Russia Reports Wave of Attacks
Marc Santora and David Guttenfelder
David Guttenfelder
Marc Santora reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and David Guttenfelder from Kharkiv, Ukraine
Russia on Sunday bombarded residential areas of Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, with ballistic missiles and powerful guided bombs, wounding more than 40 civilians, Ukrainian officials said. The attack came hours after what Russian authorities said was a wave of drone attacks against energy facilities across Russia, including an oil refinery in Moscow.
At least 10 explosions rocked Kharkiv, a city of 1.3 million situated less than 25 miles from the Russian border, local officials said, warning that they expected the number of casualties to rise as emergency crews raced across the city to various blast sites.
The attack on Kharkiv came less than 48 hours after powerful Russian guided bombs hit the city on Friday, striking a 12-story residential building and devastating a children’s park. At least six people were killed in those strikes, including a 14-year-old girl. Another 59 people were reported injured, with 20 in serious condition and some requiring amputations, Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv military administration, said in a statement.
In the attack on Sunday, Mr. Syniehubov said that a post office, a sports complex, a shopping center, stores and cars were damaged. “The enemy targeted only civilian infrastructure,” Mr. Syniehubov said. In a later statement, he said that at least 41 people were wounded.
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not offer any immediate comment on the strikes in Kharkiv.
The city’s Palace of Sports, which features a 4,000-seat arena, was targeted by four strikes, Ukraine’s National Olympic Committee said in a statement. “The sports complex was destroyed,” the committee said.
Rescue workers searched for survivors in the rubble of the complex throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
Earlier, the Russian military claimed to have largely thwarted one of the largest Ukrainian drone assaults directed at Russia territory since the start of the full-scale war, and said it had shot down 158 drones across 15 regions.
Local officials in Russia reported fires and explosions caused by drone attacks at a number of facilities, including an oil refinery in Moscow and one of the largest energy production facilities in the central Russian region of Tver.
Military analysts confirmed geolocated footage showing a successful Ukrainian strike on the Moscow oil refinery in Kaputnya, which is only about 10 miles from the Kremlin.
“The inability of Russia’s air and missile defense systems to protect against relatively crude long-range, one-way drone attacks is surprising,” Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who specializes in missile technology, wrote on X.
Many of the drones were directed at targets in the regions of Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh and Belgorod, all of which border Ukraine, according to the Russian military. The reports by Russian officials could not be independently verified.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the continued attacks justified Ukraine’s efforts to bring the war directly to Russians on Russian territory.
“Every such strike on Kharkiv and our other cities and towns proves the correctness of our tactics, particularly in the Kursk region — we must push the war back to where it came from, into Russia,” he said Sunday in his nightly address. “And not just in the border areas. The terrorist state must feel what war truly is.”
The Ukrainian military has repeatedly targeted Russian oil and gas facilities in what it has said is an effort to undermine Russia’s ability to supply its forces with fuel and cut into the energy revenues that fund the Kremlin’s war effort.
It was difficult to assess the effect of the overnight attacks or the overall Ukrainian campaign. As the number of Ukrainian strikes has increased, Moscow has increasingly limited the information it releases on its oil industry.
Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service completely stopped publishing data on the production of oil products in the country this past week.
While Kyiv has been attacking oil facilities for months, the campaign has yet to have a demonstrable effect on the fighting inside Ukraine, where Russian forces have made steady gains throughout the summer in the eastern Donbas region.
The Russian advance in the direction of Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub, threatens to undermine Ukraine’s ability to supply its forces across a broad swath of the front line.
And even as Ukraine steps up its strikes inside Russia, they still pale in comparison to the destruction wrought by Russian attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities since the war began in February 2022. Moscow has directed around 10,000 missiles, 14,000 long-range attack drones and 33,000 guided bombs at targets across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military.
In the past week alone, Mr. Zelensky said, Russia used more than 160 missiles of various types, 780 guided aerial bombs and 400 attack drones to hit targets across Ukraine.
There did not appear to be any military facilities in the vicinity of several places hit in Kharkiv on Sunday. One strike site was a shopping area where the blast caused a fire from a gas pipe.
Another strike site visited by The New York Times was a residential area next to a sports complex. There was a massive crater in the middle of a children’s playground, a hole gouged in the earth near battered slides and seesaws.
A burst water main caused flooding across the whole neighborhood and residents scrambled to use the rubble from the blast site to hand build a dam in a futile attempt to stop waters from inundating apartment blocks.
Given the advantages Russia holds in terms of troop numbers and firepower in the war, Kyiv has been employing a variety of asymmetric strategies.
These include an offensive into the Kursk region of western Russia, grabbing hundreds of square miles of territory in a matter of weeks, in an effort to force Moscow to pull resources from the Ukrainian front to defend its own land. So far, the Kremlin appears determined not to redeploy elements of the military engaged in offensive operations.
Ukrainian leaders have said their efforts to undermine the Russian war effort have been hampered by restrictions on the use of long-range weapons provided by its allies to hit targets inside Russia. The Biden administration has resisted changing the policy out of concern that it could lead to an escalation in the war and draw NATO into a more direct conflict with Moscow.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, traveled to Washington over the weekend to press the Biden administration to lift the restrictions, presenting senior officials with a list of military sites that Ukraine would like to hit as soon as the ban is lifted.
Ukraine is also desperate to find a way to limit Russia’s ability to unleash powerful guided bombs from warplanes that can be deployed from the relative safety of the skies above Russia by attacking the airfields where the aircraft begin their bombing runs.
“I appeal to the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany: We need the abilities to really and fully protect Ukraine and Ukrainians,” Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday. “We require both: permissions for long-range use, and your long-range shells and missiles.”
At the same time as Kyiv presses its allies for support, Ukraine has been busy developing its own domestically produced long-range weapons. And Mr. Zelensky said last week that Ukraine had carried out a successful test of the first domestically produced ballistic missile.
He also recently announced the development of a “new class” of domestically produced, long-range strike weapons — a drone powered with a rocket engine.
But the weapons are still in the early stages of development, and Kyiv still has to largely rely on its expanding fleet of slow moving, fixed-wing drones to hit targets deep inside Russia.
Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting.
East Germans Lean Toward Extremes in State Elections
The far-right Alternative for Germany was on course on Sunday to become the strongest party in a state election for the first time, in Thuringia, and it was running a close second to mainstream conservatives in a second state, Saxony, according to projections based on early results.
A new party rooted in the extreme left, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, was running third in both states. But neither party was expected to be able to run either state’s government after coalition negotiations that could take weeks.
The elections in the two states in the former East Germany were being closely watched in Berlin as a measure of the rising strength of extremist parties, left and right, as well as of the weakening position of the centrist parties that make up the current federal coalition. It was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had won a state election.
The returns were seen as a worrying indicator of the health and future of German democracy, and they were likely to intensify a quandary over whether and how mainstream parties can isolate extremists and keep them from entering government.
All parties have said they would shun the Alternative for Germany, know as the AfD, which they consider as dangerous to democracy. That could leave the Christian Democratic Union, which may end up running both state governments, as the main beneficiary of the vote among traditional mainstream parties.
While the results may augur well for the Christian Democrats for the next federal elections, scheduled for September 2025, they are certain to add to the troubles of the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition, which performed badly.
“This is a historic success for us,” Alice Weidel, a national leader of the AfD, told the public broadcaster ARD. She described the result as a “requiem” for the Berlin government.
In Thuringia the AfD got 32.8 percent and in Saxony, it was a close second, at 30.6 percent, according preliminary official results released early Monday morning. The Christian Democratic Union, the main opposition party nationally, came in first in Saxony with 31.9 percent; the party came in second in Thuringia, at 23.6 percent. The BSW was running third, with 15.8 percent in Thuringia and 11.8 percent in Saxony.
Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats should make the 5 percent threshold to enter the Parliament in both states, getting 6.1 percent in Thuringia and 7.3 percent in Saxony. The Greens are expected to barely make the threshold in Saxony, but fall short in Thuringia. The Free Democrats were polling in both states under 1.5 percent.
And the party Die Linke, or The Left, the inheritor of the old Communist Party, was getting around 13.1 percent in Thuringia, where its current leader, Bodo Ramelow, is the prime minister, but only 4.5 percent in Saxony.
But what seemed clear already was that many East German voters rewarded the parties on the far left and far right and punished the ruling coalition in Berlin, underlining the continuing differences between the two parts of Germany so many years after unification.
Turnout in Thuringia was 73.6 percent of eligible voters and in Saxony 74.4 percent, a sharp increase from 2019, which was 64.9 in Thuringia and 66.5 in Saxony.
Though on the far left, BSW holds many of the same positions as the AfD, like tough controls on immigration and an end to German military support for Ukraine, but it does not have the same stigma.
Even as the AfD attracted a significant number of votes, its regional branches in Saxony and Thuringia have been classified by regional domestic intelligence agencies as “confirmed extremist” groups based on ethnically tinged anti-migrant positions, Islamophobia and defamation of state institutions and government officials.
On a national level, the authorities have classified the AfD’s youth wing as “confirmed extremist,” and the main AfD as a “suspected extremist” group.
Those designations allow intelligence surveillance of the party and have led to mounting calls for a ban. But they did not stop voters in Thuringia and Saxony from voting for the party in droves. Many fear that a ban, or even a coalition that keeps the AfD from power, will only add to the sense of disenfranchisement among the party’s backers and increase its support.
In Thuringia, where the AfD ran strongest, Die Linke may also be the kingmaker in a very divided Parliament, and may end up choosing to back either the Christian Democrats or the BSW.
In Saxony, the incumbent state prime minister, Michael Kretschmer of the Christian Democrats, may retain office in a coalition with the BSW.
But if the Christian Democrats must turn to the far-left BSW for a coalition partner, they may find these negotiations awkward because Ms. Wagenknecht, who is not running for office on the state level, has insisted that any coalition partner accept her position on Ukraine, calling for an end to German aid to Kyiv and rapid negotiations to try to end the war.
The Christian Democrats have been openly supportive of Ukraine in its defense against Russia, but they are likely to be flexible on the state level, which has no real influence over foreign policy.
In Dresden Sunday, Mr. Kretschmer, the Christian Democrat, told supporters that he knew “how disappointed people are in what is happening in Berlin,” but that “people trusted us here in Saxony. They didn’t cast a protest vote.”
Both Mr. Scholz and the Christian Democrats have recently taken a harsher stance toward illegal immigration and urged a toughening of asylum laws and the faster deportation of those who do not qualify for asylum — major issues for both the AfD and the BSW.
That shift was accelerated by a knife attack in the western city of Solingen on Aug. 23, when prosecutors say a Syrian refugee killed three bystanders at a “festival of diversity.” Both the AfD and the BSW immediately leaped on the killings to use as part of their campaigns.
Despite the immediate focus on vote totals, coalition negotiations are expected to take weeks.
Still, whatever governments emerge — and in a third state election in nearby Brandenburg on Sept. 22 — they will have significant powers over domestic matters, judicial appointments, culture, education, universities and the police.
The AfD could, especially in cooperation with other parties, reach the parliamentary threshold needed to block certain decisions, like the appointment of judges and amendments to the state Constitution.
Each state also has its own intelligence services, and there may be concern if Ms. Wagenknecht’s party, which has positions on foreign policy that are close to Russia’s, gets into power even as a junior coalition member.
If the AfD should somehow form a government, that would create an immediate constitutional crisis because the party has already been labeled “right-wing extremist” by the federal intelligence agencies and the courts.
While support for both the AfD and the BSW tends to be twice as high in East Germany as in the more populous West, both parties are making inroads. Since 2017, when the AfD entered the German Bundestag, it now has representatives in 14 of Germany’s 16 state legislatures, plus the European Parliament in Brussels.
In June 2024, in the European elections, it finished second nationally, with 15.9 percent of the vote. So the AfD is not going away, and the risk is that the more its voters feel shut out of real power by the refusal of other parties to bring it into coalition, the more support it could get.
Even Summer Nights Can’t Escape Egypt’s Economic Crisis
Ten p.m. arrives in Cairo’s Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood with the same dogged tenacity as it does anywhere else, but down the fluorescent shopping streets and in the sidewalk cafes, few people used to glance at the clock. It might have been near bedtime in other countries, but Cairo was practically still waking up.
That was summer in the past, season of sweat, and the city adapted its schedule. Days were for cooling inside, or at least avoiding the sun’s blitzkrieg. Nighttime offered mercy. Though the concrete sidewalks still belched up the day’s accumulated heat, the neighborhood came alive only after isha, the last of the five daily Muslim prayers. The day went on long into early morning.
Not this summer. With an energy shortage prompting the government to mandate earlier closing times, 10 p.m. now brings a dimming to Sayyida Zeinab: metal shutters are down or rolling toward the ground, turning the loudly colored, exuberantly lit storefronts to gray.
Years into an economic crunch that has left the government scrambling for dollars and made life a misery for all but the richest, Egypt is short on natural gas and funds to buy more, necessitating daily countrywide blackouts until a few weeks ago.
So, starting in July, orders came from on high: To save electricity, stores must close by 10 p.m. and cafes, restaurants and malls by midnight, slightly later on weekends. Only groceries and pharmacies are exempt.
Wealthy Cairenes in the sprawling suburbs can go from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned malls, or even send their doormen on errands. In the cramped, churning traditional areas of central Cairo, that option does not exist.
“If you go out to shop during the day, you’ll boil yourself,” said Hind Ahmed, 51, who had gone with a friend recently to pick up clothes from a tailor after evening prayers at Sayyida Zeinab’s landmark mosque. “But we end up having to roast, because the stores close early now.”
Her friend Wafaa Ibrahim, 46, barely goes out anymore anyway, late opening times or no. She cannot afford to.
“The minute I run out of money, I lock myself up at home,” she said. “Now I don’t go out shopping because I don’t want to depress myself.”
By that point, it was well past 10 p.m., and signs of halfhearted compliance were appearing. In recent weeks, one shopkeeper who was closing up explained, the police had been driving down the main streets every night, enforcing the order.
No power can mute Cairo entirely. But the volume was uncharacteristically low, the shoppers dwindling even as motorcycles and tuk-tuks blared down the street.
In some ways, the stillness matched the country’s gloom. The all-night hustle of working-class neighborhoods like Sayyida Zeinab, the mahraganat tunes that blare from tuk-tuks and the dazzling displays of nuts and candies can make for a misleading, if jaunty, facade.
Teenage girls peek at windows full of clothed mannequins. Mothers in loose abayas shop for children’s sneakers, their sons and daughters occupied with cups of cold mango-topped pudding. Cafe tables colonize part of the street, lorded over by men who suck at water pipes and nurse coffees until late.
Tourists marvel at the shimmying street, at Egyptians’ famed friendliness and broad humor. But locals say they joke to cope with what they cannot change.
“Egypt is a graveyard,” said Saied Mahmoud, 41, who works from noon until closing time in his father’s small, wedge-shaped clothing shop near the mosque. “Everybody is dead on the inside. They’ve surrendered; they’re down. What you see in front of you is dead people walking.”
He earns barely enough for food, rent and bus fare after years of soaring prices, even if inflation had cooled somewhat in recent months, he said. Like many overeducated, underemployed Egyptians, he cannot find better work despite his master’s degree in business. Marriage? He could only laugh at the thought of what a wedding, wife and children would cost.
It was only getting worse, he said: Despite his sly attempts to stay open past 10 (shutter partly closed, lights dimmed), customers were hardly coming anyway, either driven away by the rows of shut shops or unable to afford new clothes.
Having to close earlier “just made muddy water even muddier,” he said, using an Egyptian expression meaning things had gone from bad to worse.
Since coming to power in a 2013 military takeover, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has promised prosperity for a new, improved Egypt. For most Egyptians, however, most of the past decade has been a downward spiral.
Successive devaluations of the currency starting in 2016 damaged their ability to buy the imported goods Egypt depends on. The coronavirus pandemic and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East shocked an economy already weakened by Mr. el-Sisi’s policies. Inflation soared; wages did not, and Egypt skimped on the health care and education spending that once supported middle-class life.
Despite recent infusions of cash from international investors and lenders that have stabilized the economy, analysts say the country may face a new crisis unless it makes major changes.
Though Egypt says it has expanded welfare programs, the most recent official statistics say just under 30 percent of Egyptians live in poverty. But that was before the pandemic and the most recent economic crisis. And International Monetary Fund bailouts have forced the government to cut bread, gas and electricity subsidies vital to many poor Egyptians.
Just last month, Egypt increased electricity prices again.
That means even more of a squeeze for Ahmed Ashour’s barbershop, named for the Yugoslav statesman Josip Broz Tito. Usually, he stays open from 7 p.m. until 5 a.m. all summer: It is so hot out that men’s skin gets inflamed if they come for a shave during the day, he explained. Besides, he has a day job from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Finance Ministry — he cannot make ends meet without both.
Side streets, including the one where Tito stood, seemed to escape enforcement of the government order. But the main streets’ early darkening meant fewer people around, period. Between that and customers’ thinning wallets, Mr. Ashour estimated that he had lost 70 percent of his business during the economic crisis.
Customers from around the neighborhood used to drop by for a haircut and stay for hours, he said, hanging out on his worn black chairs with endless cups of coffee and tea. Now they said quick hellos on their way to their own second or third jobs.
People had the new school year to pay for, summer vacations and the ever-rising cost of practically everything. “A man will consider other stuff, he doesn’t pay attention to how he looks,” he said, though he noted that some customers had learned to cut their own hair at home.
“There’s a point where we can’t continue like this,” he said, his forehead dewed with sweat even at 11 p.m. “It’s as if we’re hanging ourselves.”
In a nearby alleyway, Hosni Mohammed, 67, was closing up the optical shop where he earned a small salary. From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., he said, almost nobody came in these days.
“Someone taught me that business falls asleep, but never dies completely,” he said, trying to take the long view. “Just like Egypt. It gets tired, but never dies.”
Emad Mekay contributed reporting.
With Russia on Its Doorstep, a Ukrainian Town Packs Its Bags
Andrew E. Kramer
Andrew E. Kramer and Nicole Tung reported from Pokrovsk, Ukraine.
Placards on the train bluntly listed its purpose: “Evacuation.”
With hugs and teary goodbyes, families bundled children and the elderly aboard coaches at the central train station in the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. They stood and waved through the windows as they departed.
With the Russian Army at its doorstep and closing in quickly, Pokrovsk is a town bowing to reality. The police drive around with loudspeakers blaring instructions to leave now. Municipal workers have shipped out library books, elementary school desks and statues from parks and squares.
By late afternoon, with a curfew in effect, the streets were eerily deserted last week, except for military vehicles zipping about.
The Ukrainian military’s surprise attack into Russia last month came as one of Kyiv’s boldest gambles of the war, bringing swift gains in land and prisoners captured. But hundreds of miles away, inside Ukraine, the wholesale evacuation of Pokrovsk is evidence of the operation’s risks.
Ukraine was calculating that its incursion over the border would force Russia to divert troops to defend there. Instead, Moscow has carried on with its relentless advance in eastern Ukraine, and Pokrovsk, a key logistics and transit hub, is in the path of destruction.
“It didn’t go as planned,” Mykyta Pohorelyi, a 19-year-old evacuating with his mother and sister, said of the Ukrainian Army’s move into Russia.
President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top military commander have conceded that the offensive into Russia, which began Aug. 6, fell short of the objective of forcing Moscow to redeploy forces from the Donbas region of Ukraine.
Now, it is too late to ensure that Pokrovsk will be protected from artillery bombardment, the town’s military administrator said.
In the fast-moving fighting in fields and villages nearby, the Ukrainian military has retreated in places by more than a mile a day, soldiers fighting in the area said. The Russians are now six miles outside the town.
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, is “still thinking of how to keep the occupied territories and does not think about how to protect his people,” Mr. Zelensky said of Moscow’s response to Ukraine’s incursion.
Ukraine’s military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said Russia had redeployed 30,000 troops to defend against the Kursk operation, but not from the offensive in the Donbas, the region of coal mines and sunflower fields that has been a principal Russian target in its two-and-a-half-year-old invasion.
Russian forces since April have ground through five defensive lines east of Pokrovsk, said Serhiy Dobryak, the town’s military administrator. With only two more lines remaining, the incursion into Russia, and the potential diversion it might cause, was essentially a last hope.
The town for now is not at risk of imminent capture, he said, but officials expect a sustained artillery bombardment that is likely to leave it in ruins. That has been the fate of other Ukrainian towns like Bakhmut and Avdiivka that Russia pummeled into rubble before forcing Ukraine to pull back.
“They will bring the artillery nearby and they will destroy the town,” Mr. Dobryak said. “That will happen.”
With that prospect looming, the town’s population has dropped from about 62,000 inhabitants at the beginning of August to 36,000 today. Signs of people fleeing are everywhere.
At the train station, coaches rattled and clanged. Brakes were released with a hissing noise, signaling an imminent departure.
A mother watched her daughter’s teary goodbye to the daughter’s husband, who would be staying to continue working in a coal mine. “Don’t cry,” she said, “let me cry for you.”
Grocery stores have closed. Moving vans parked along leafy back streets. Sidewalks are cluttered with bed frames, flat-screen televisions and plastic bags packed with clothes.
A curfew is now in effect, except for four hours in the late morning and afternoon.
“The enemy is close and getting closer,” said Ihor Kopytsya, the owner of a stationery store who was trying to unload the last of his notebooks, pens and backpacks before the bombing began.
Asked about the military’s gamble that an attack into Russia would slow the advance toward his town, he called it a worthy attempt. “They hoped it would work but it didn’t,” he said.
Volodymyr Porosyuk, 20, was evacuating with his grandmother, Zoya Porosyuk, 88. “When we push them out, we will come back,” he said. “If there’s anything to come back to.”
At a school repurposed for registering internally displaced people, volunteers with an aid group, Light of Donbas, handed stuffed geese to children as they boarded buses, to ease the trip. “People realize they will have to leave forever,” said Alyona Fyodorova, a volunteer. “It’s painful to see.”
Nina Mashtikhina, 71, who was moving to live with her daughter in western Ukraine, said the army did its best, even if the town will not be saved.
“I thank them. They are good guys,” she said. “I believe in them. I believe in our victory.”
But other residents questioned why valuable troops were sent into Russia when they might have served better protecting their town in the trenches just east of Pokrovsk.
“They should have defended here,” said Iryna Sekreteva, 39, who was evacuating with her 15-year-old son, Bohdan. “Now, they will retreat. That is what we fear. That is the opinion in the town.”
At the entrance to Jubilee Park, municipal workers were dismantling a statue of Mykola Leontovych, a local musician who a century ago composed in Pokrovsk one of Ukraine’s most recognizable Christmas songs, “Carol of the Bells.” Cobblestones had been torn up around the statue’s feet.
A short drive outside town, a Ukrainian artillery commander watched video streaming in from reconnaissance drones. It showed Russian soldiers filtering through backyards in the village of Mykhailivka, swathed in smoke from fires.
The fighting has come in a flurry of small movements. The Russian Army relies largely on infantry units. Soldiers dash forward and hide in trees or abandoned houses near Ukrainian positions, then attack. The Ukrainian military reported 58 such engagements near Pokrovsk on Thursday.
Nearby in a field, sweaty, dust-covered soldiers with the 15th Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard firing a howitzer said they were aiming for a Russian position near a coal mine’s slag that only five days earlier had been a Ukrainian stronghold. “We just don’t have the people,” said the commander, who asked to be identified by his nickname, Doker, in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol.
Russia’s slow response to the Kursk incursion could reflect disorganization in its military, said Johan Norberg, a military analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, or alternatively it could be a strategic trade-off — capturing more territory in Ukraine while leaving its own lightly guarded.
“They had momentum in Donbas, so why not carry that through?” he said of the possible Russian calculation, with an intention to turn to Kursk later. “Russia can easily trade territory for time,” he said. The incursion bore a cost for Mr. Putin domestically and abroad by signaling an inability to defend the border, he said.
It has not, though, slowed the advance in the Donbas, forcing a sad reckoning for those now leaving Pokrovsk.
Vitalia Trusova, 37, an economist for the national railway company, sat on a chair on the sidewalk hugging her daughter, watching the contents of her home loaded onto a moving truck.
“We are leaving forever,” she said. “We and the kids will build a new life somewhere quiet.”
Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from Pokrovsk, and Stas Kozliuk from Kyiv.
Helicopter Crash Near Volcano in Russia’s Far East Kills at Least 17
A helicopter flying tourists near a volcano in Russia’s Far East crashed on Saturday, killing at least 17 people, according to emergency officials who discovered the wreckage the next day and state news agencies.
The helicopter was carrying 19 passengers and three crew members, the governor of the Kamchatka region, Vladimir Solodov, said Saturday on Telegram after the search began. He said it had taken off near the region’s Vachkazhets volcano — a tourist attraction in the remote Kamchatka Peninsula — and was heading toward the village of Nikolaevka.
On Sunday, Mr. Solodov said that the wreckage of the helicopter, an Mi-8, had been found, and that “we are doing everything possible to get specialists to the scene as quickly as we can.”
A rescue team found the wreckage on Sunday at an altitude of 900 meters, or almost 3,000 feet, not far from where the helicopter’s crew had last made contact, Russia’s ministry of emergencies said on Telegram.
The rescue crew found 17 bodies, the ministry reported. The emergency service told the state news agency Tass that, based on the condition of the wreckage, no survivors were expected.
The agency posted a photo and video on Telegram that showed shards of a helicopter lying on the side of a steep hill in a mountainous region.
Fast-changing, harsh and sub-Arctic weather often buffets the peninsula, and there was fog, drizzle and poor visibility in the area on Saturday, according to the Kamchatka Department of Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring. In 2021, another Mi-8 helicopter carrying tourists crashed into a deep volcanic crater lake in Kamchatka, killing eight people.
The region’s investigative agency covering transportation has opened an inquiry into possible violations of traffic safety and air transport rules in Saturday’s crash, it said in a statement. Tass reported that the company operating the helicopter, Vityaz-Aero, was reprimanded by the authorities in 2021 over the crash into the Kamchatka crater lake.