Middle East Crisis: Rescuers Struggle to Reach Victims After Israel Targets Militants in Tent Camp
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Israel strikes a humanitarian area, and Gazan officials say at least 19 people are killed.
Israeli airstrikes slammed into a humanitarian area in southern Gaza early Tuesday, leaving large craters where Palestinians had crowded for shelter and, according to Gazan officials, killing or wounding dozens of people.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the strikes had targeted three senior Hamas militants who had been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 19 people were confirmed dead and more than 60 others injured — figures that appeared likely to rise because it said that there were still victims in the area, including some buried in rubble and sand, and that ambulances had not been able to reach them. Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.
An official with Civil Defense emergency services in Gaza, Muhammad al-Mughaier, had said that 40 bodies were recovered from the site of the strike. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear, although official accounts of death tolls often fluctuate in the early hours after an attack.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the figures from Civil Defense “do not align with the information” it has, but did not offer its own casualty estimate or comment on the numbers from the Health Ministry. It said it had carried out a “precise strike” and had tried to mitigate the risk to civilians, though it declined to answer questions from The Times about the specific steps it had taken.
Videos of the aftermath of the attack verified by The New York Times show craters in the southwestern part of Al-Mawasi, where satellite imagery from a week earlier showed several tents. Images taken at the scene Tuesday morning show people searching in rubble using the lights on their phones, and emergency workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society digging with shovels.
Palestinians sheltering in Al-Mawasi said the strike came without warning around midnight or 1 a.m., with large explosions jolting their tents and filling them with smoke.
“It was like an earthquake,” said Marwan Shaath, a 57-year-old civil servant from the southern Gaza city of Rafah who has been sheltering with his family in Al-Mawasi for more than three months. “The entire area, and of course the tent, all kept shaking.”
Fatoom al-Garra, a 30-year-old widow from Rafah, said she and her children ran for safety from sounds of “horror” and a burning smell. “We couldn’t see anything as black smoke and dust were covering the area,” she said.
Al-Mawasi, a once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza, is now packed with tens of thousands of Palestinians who took shelter there. The Israeli military has designated the area as a humanitarian zone, but it has maintained that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be. Israeli airstrikes also hit the area in July, in operations the military said were aimed at Hamas commanders. At the time, Gaza health officials said that strike had killed scores of people.
In its statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military said that it had conducted aerial surveillance in the hours before the strike that it said confirmed the presence of militants in the area where it struck.
Israeli has long said that Hamas embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields. International law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians during its military operations. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza in 11 months of war, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, whose figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, condemned the strike. “The killing of civilians must stop, and this horrific war must end,” he said.
The United Nations and other rights organizations have said that there is no safe place in Gaza. Almost the entire population of Gaza — more than two million Palestinians — has been displaced multiple times. Israel has ordered frequent evacuations and has shrunk the size of the humanitarian zone, forcing an increasing number of Palestinians to squeeze into ever tighter areas.
Ms. al-Garra said that Israel’s urgings to seek shelter in Al-Mawasi were hollow.
“What safety are they talking about?” she said. “There is no safety.”
Farnaz Fassihi, Anushka Patil, Iyad Abuheweila and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
Israel says its forces likely shot an American protester, and Blinken says Israeli practices must change.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it was highly likely that a slain American activist was “unintentionally” struck by Israeli gunfire last week at a protest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the killing was “not acceptable.”
In the toughest criticism the United States has leveled at Israel over the death of the activist, Aysenur Eygi, Mr. Blinken said that “no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest.” He said she was the second American to be killed by Israeli security forces in recent years, after a Palestinian American journalist was fatally shot in the West Bank in 2022.
“Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes to the way they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement,” he said at a news conference in London.
The Israeli military, in a statement describing its initial inquiry into Ms. Eygi’s death last Friday, expressed regret over her killing and said that it had meant to target a person it described as a “key instigator” of the protest, which it called “a violent riot.” Eyewitnesses have disputed Israel’s justifications for opening fire, saying that the clashes had finished by the time Ms. Eygi was shot, and that they had occurred in a separate location.
Palestinians have long said that Israel uses excessive force against them at clashes and protests in the West Bank, but the death of Ms. Eygi has shined a spotlight on the issue. An autopsy report obtained and reviewed by the Times found a bullet hit Ms. Eygi’s head near her left ear.
The criminal investigation division of the military police has been investigating the episode and will share its findings with military prosecutors later, the Israeli military said. Ms. Eygi’s family has demanded that President Biden and other senior U.S. officials order an independent investigation to “ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” saying that an Israeli inquiry was not adequate.
Human rights advocates said Israel has a history of failing to take meaningful action against soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the West Bank.
“We absolutely do not expect meaningful accountability to emerge this case,” said Sarit Michaeli, a spokesman for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. “Similar incidents occur against Palestinians all the time and they don’t lead to any real consequences for perpetrators.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, two key eyewitnesses said the military hadn’t contacted them to collect their testimony.
The bullet, according to the autopsy conducted by forensic examiners at An-Najah National University in Nablus, penetrated Ms. Eygi’s head near her left ear, leading to a major bleed in the area. Fragments of the bullet were recovered, including one that was approximately 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters by 4 millimeters, and handed over to the office of the Palestinian Authority’s attorney general, the report said.
The autopsy said that the cause of death was “bleeding, edema, and laceration of brain matter,” adding that a CT scan of Ms. Eygi’s body didn’t show other injuries.
The office of the Palestinian Authority’s attorney general confirmed it received the fragments of the bullet and transferred them to a criminal investigations laboratory directed by the Palestinian police. The office declined to respond to further questions, saying it wouldn’t discuss other details about Ms. Eygi’s case while its investigation was ongoing.
Ms. Eygi, a Turkish American dual citizen who immigrated to the United States from Turkey as an infant and lived in Seattle, had recently arrived in the West Bank to join activists affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement, who demonstrate alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. On Friday, she joined the protest, in the northern West Bank village of Beita, where residents have been demonstrating for years — sometimes violently — against a settler outpost on lands claimed by the village. The Israeli government had recently said it would legalize the outpost.
The Israeli military said on Friday that soldiers had “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity” who had thrown stones at Israeli forces and posed a threat.
Witnesses at the scene confirmed that some protesters had hurled rocks at Israeli troops, who responded with tear gas and gunfire. But they said the clashes had finished by the time Ms. Eygi was shot, and that they had occurred in a separate location around 200 yards away.
“There was no stone-throwing and it was calm for a few minutes,” said Eran Maoz, an Israeli activist who was at the protest. Ms. Eygi was “visibly with a group of international activists,” he said, adding that when the fatal shot was fired, the soldiers “weren’t exposed to any threat, especially from this activist.”
Another witness, Abu al-Nimer Mouid, who lives in Jericho in the West Bank, agreed, saying, “The situation was calm, there was no shooting or gas, and they killed her then when no one was doing anything,” he said. “She was standing between the olive trees” he added, and was shot “when she peeked her head out.”
The demonstrations around Beita began before the current war between Israel and Hamas. Israeli settlers took over a nearby hilltop in 2021, erecting an outpost known as Evyatar on land claimed by the village. That prompted months of deadly protests in which several residents of Beita were killed and scores wounded.
The outpost was illegal under Israeli law when it was established, lacking Israeli government authorization. But in June, Israel’s cabinet agreed to retroactively legalize Evyatar and four other outposts, following a demand by Bezalel Smotrich, the hard right Israeli finance minister and a settler leader.
Most of the world considers all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be illegal under international law, which Israel disputes. Roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory alongside some three million Palestinians, who live under Israeli military occupation.
Jonathan Pollak, 42, a hard-left activist who said he was roughly 50 feet away from Ms. Egyi at the protest, said the soldiers were standing at an elevated location, undermining the assertion that their safety was threatened.
“She was not involved in the confrontations at any point,” said Mr. Pollak. “She was taking cover next to an olive tree when an Israeli soldier shot her dead without justification.”
No one in the area, Mr. Pollak said, was known to be carrying firearms other than the Israeli forces.
Over the past several days, friends and fellow activists have mourned her death, calling her a staunch supporter of marginalized communities.
“She was passionate about helping others and every action she did was through a lens of compassion and care,” Juliette Majid, a close friend who studied with Ms. Eygi at the University of Washington, said in an interview. “It’s heartbreaking that we lost such a human being.”
Edward Wong contributed reporting from London and Aaron Boxerman and Hiba Yazbek from Jerusalem.
Polio vaccinations begin in northern Gaza after Israel detained a U.N. convoy.
United Nations officials said that health workers began vaccinating children in northern Gaza against polio on Tuesday but noted that convoys carrying critical supplies of fuel and medicine were facing increasing obstruction and delays by Israeli forces.
The main U.N. aid agency operating in Gaza said that the Israeli military had detained a convoy of international and local staff members from various U.N. bodies at gunpoint just after they crossed the Wadi Gaza checkpoint on Monday and held them for more than eight hours.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. aid agency, UNRWA, said in a social media post just after midnight in Gaza that the team had been threatened with detention. He added that armored U.N. vehicles in the convoy had suffered “heavy damage” from bulldozers.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had intelligence suggesting there were “Palestinian suspects” with the convoy and that it had been detained so they could be questioned. It did not immediately respond to queries about the episode, which highlighted the challenges facing the vaccination campaign and what U.N. officials say is increasing Israeli obstruction of aid deliveries to Gaza.
The United Nations delivered the first of two doses of oral vaccine to 446,000 Gazan children in the center and south of Gaza in two operations earlier this month as part of a campaign negotiated with Israel to halt the quick-spreading polio virus. The global body aimed to vaccinate roughly 200,000 more children in the north of Gaza in the third phase, lasting through Thursday, and then to repeat the whole operation in a month’s time to deliver the second oral vaccine dose.
The World Health Organization said that the convoy halted on Monday consisted of two missions previously coordinated with the Israeli authorities, one of which was to deliver fuel for vehicles carrying vaccination teams and the other to carry fuel and other supplies for Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
“Unfortunately, it’s not isolated,” the W.H.O. spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said of the convoy’s detention, reporting that four attempts by the agency to deliver supplies to Al-Shifa in the last four days had failed. He added that the number of applications for aid deliveries that ended up being rejected by the Israeli authorities had more than doubled in August, compared with previous months.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the claims.
The anti-polio campaign kicked off a little more than a week ago, aiming to prevent an outbreak of the quick-spreading disease among Gaza’s children. Both Hamas and Israel agreed to pauses in the fighting to allow the vaccinations to take place, but much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, and both medical workers and residents seeking vaccines must navigate blocked and broken roads and expose themselves to widespread lawlessness to reach the vaccination sites.
While the polio virus has been eradicated in many parts of the world, it was identified in Gaza’s wastewater in July, and global health authorities warn that an outbreak could rapidly spread beyond the devastated territory. Israel’s nearly yearlong military offensive has disrupted routine immunizations, decimated Gaza’s health and sanitation systems and trapped hundreds of thousands of displaced people in overcrowded conditions — creating a ripe environment for the highly infectious disease to spread.
Adding to the challenges in northern Gaza, the Israeli military had on Monday ordered a new round of evacuations of several neighborhoods in Beit Lahia and Jabaliya, including in areas that the United Nations said had been designated to be part of the vaccination campaign.
The Israeli military issued the orders after saying on Sunday night that projectiles had been fired from the area. One of the projectiles was intercepted, the military said, and the other had crashed off the coast of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.
More than 55 evacuation orders covering up to 86 percent of the entire Gaza Strip were in effect as of Monday, the U.N. office for humanitarian affairs said, adding that they were “deepening the humanitarian crisis for hundreds of thousands of people, especially those who have been displaced multiple times.”
Patrick Kingsley and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
New details of hostages’ dire conditions emerge, as families warn of ‘grave danger.’
A group representing the families of hostages in Gaza — including six captives whose bodies the Israeli military recently retrieved from a tunnel there — say that harrowing details about the conditions of their captivity indicate that those still held by Hamas are in “grave danger.”
The Hostages Families Forum, which represents relatives of many of the captives, said in a statement on Monday that families of the six dead hostages had been briefed on an Israeli military investigation that described some of the conditions their loved ones endured. The information, the group said, exposed “an utterly horrific reality.”
The six hostages — whom Israeli officials have said Hamas fatally shot at close range shortly before soldiers found their bodies — had been confined in narrow underground tunnels about 30 inches wide, “where they could neither stand nor move freely,” the families said, citing the investigation. Autopsies showed that the hostages “suffered from significant malnutrition, severe weight loss and long-term physical neglect,” that some had untreated injuries and that one “was found with signs of being tied up,” they said.
“These revelations provide irrefutable proof that the hostages still held in Gaza are in grave danger,” and that “their lives hang by a thread,” the statement said. The group renewed its call for a hostage deal, saying, “Time is running out.”
But international mediators don’t appear optimistic that a deal to secure the hostages’ freedom is near.
“We know how urgent this is,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for President Biden, told reporters at a briefing on Monday, noting that American mediators had been working “night and day” on a deal. He blamed Hamas for the lack of progress, saying that the group changed some of the terms laid out previously, “and that has made it more difficult for us to get there.”
Hamas has pushed back on blame for the lack of progress toward a deal. On Monday, Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said in a statement that it was “a lie” that the group had made additional demands. He said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had introduced new conditions.
Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, has been insistent that Israel cannot withdraw from a strip of Gaza that borders Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, as part of any agreement because it would be a security vulnerability. Both Egypt and Hamas oppose a continued Israeli presence in the area.
Some Israelis, including many relatives of hostages, contend that Mr. Netanyahu is being unnecessarily adamant on the point, and not prioritizing the captives’ return. Even after the discovery of the six slain captives drove tens of thousands of Israelis into the streets in protest last week, Mr. Netanyahu repeatedly insisted that Israel couldn’t withdraw from the corridor, and said that putting military pressure on Hamas as negotiations proceed is the best way to ensure the hostages return home.
On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu issued a brief, somber video statement addressing the captives’ families. “I hear the anguish of the hostages’ families,” he said. “I hear the anguish of those who have lost what is dearest to them.”
The statement came after a recording of a conversation between Mr. Netanyahu and Rabbi Elhanan Danino — the father of Ori Danino, one of the six recently slain hostages — was released and widely covered in the Israeli news media on Monday. Mr. Danino put the onus for his son’s death on what he called Mr. Netanyahu’s “petty” policies and politicking, beginning long before the war.
Mr. Netanyahu, in his statement, described going to “heartbreaking” meetings with the captives’ relatives.
“I hear. I listen. And I also don’t judge,” he said. “I am doing everything to return the hostages and win the war.”
Fearing Israeli Strikes, Gaza School Shelters Try to Keep Gunmen Out
When the war forced Nasser al-Zaanin to flee his home in northern Gaza in October, he, along with his adult sons and grandchildren, moved to a school that had been turned into a shelter.
There, at the Abdul Kareem al-Aklouk school in the town of Deir al Balah, he helped set up a system of committees to improve life for families who had taken refuge. The committees oversaw food, water and medical needs, and they had one red line: No armed men were allowed in the compound.
Residents, already forced to evacuate their homes because of Israel’s intense bombardment, wanted to avoid becoming a target for Israeli forces hunting down Hamas militants. Every few days in recent weeks, Israel has hit a school building turned shelter where it has said militants are hiding, including on Saturday, when it struck two compounds in northern Gaza that it said Hamas was using as a military base.
Early in the conflict, Mr. Zaanin said, Hamas had wanted to station police officers at the shelter where he was staying. The group said it would ensure security, but he said the residents had gathered to stop that.
“All the families agreed,” said Mr. Zaanin, 56, who once worked as a civil servant for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza.
“We simply want to save all families, women and children and not let there be any potential threat against us because of the existence of police and members of the Hamas government,” he said. The police, Mr. al-Zaanin added, could stand outside the building but not inside.
Several other residents of school shelters in central Gaza recounted similar stories, though attitudes in other areas were unknown. It is hard to know how widespread the phenomenon is, and whether the armed militia are from Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other armed gangs, but these residents’ experiences suggest that at least some evacuees have blocked armed militias from moving into these shelters.
“We will quickly kick anyone who has a gun or a rifle out of this school,” said Saleh al-Kafarneh, 62, who lives at another government school in Deir al Balah and said he locked the gates at night. “We don’t allow anyone to ruin life here, or cause any strike against those civilians and families.” A third resident, Mohammed Shehda al-Obwaini, 57, said he would fight any armed men if he found them in a school shelter.
The residents’ testimonies also suggested that Hamas’s grip on the enclave may be weakened by the war and that ad hoc community groups are starting to operate outside the organization’s control, at least on a small scale.
The accounts, which cannot be independently confirmed, come as Israel has sharply increased the rate of its airstrikes on schools turned shelters to target what it calls Hamas command-and-control centers. It says militants have “cynically exploited” these sensitive sites to plan operations. Hamas, a militant group rather than a conventional army, has used both civilian structures and tunnels as defenses. It was not possible to confirm whether armed or unarmed militants stay in the school shelters.
“Strikes against this infrastructure are conducted in accordance with international law, with the purpose of preventing the restoration of terrorist organizations’ capabilities,” an Israeli military statement said last month. The military also says it acts using precise intelligence and takes steps to minimize civilian harm.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the attacks, according to local health officials. In one particularly deadly example on Aug. 10, the Gaza Civil Defense emergency service said that more than 90 people were killed in a strike on a school in northern Gaza. The toll could not be confirmed independently. Israel said that it had killed at least 31 Islamic Jihad and Hamas fighters and that the compound itself had not been severely damaged.
In Saturday,’s strikes, Gazan rescue services said the first had killed four people, and medics said the second had killed three and wounded 20 more.
The Israeli military has said that it has found weapons stored at schools or struck armed militants there. In some cases, the military has said that Hamas used schools as a “hiding place to direct and plan numerous attacks” against Israeli troops.
More recently, some of the military’s reports about the strikes have not mentioned weapons, and on Saturday, it did not say whether the militants targeted in the strike were armed.
Middle East Crisis: Live Updates
- Israel says its forces likely fired ‘unintentionally’ on the American protester killed in the West Bank.
- Polio vaccinations begin in northern Gaza after Israel detained a U.N. convoy.
- New details of hostages’ dire conditions emerge, as families warn of ‘grave danger.’
The military, in recent weeks, has not explained in its statements how it arrived at its intelligence conclusions or given more details about whom it has targeted.
The United Nations, the European Union and several governments have sharply criticized Israel’s government over the strikes. Senior U.N. officials argue that to target schools — many of which are run by the United Nations — violates international law and that Israel has a duty to protect civilians caught in the war.
Formal education has been suspended in Gaza because of the war, and hundreds of schools have been turned into shelters. The shelters have played a vital role in Gaza, which has been shattered by more than 10 months of war. Almost all of the enclave’s 2.2 million residents have fled their homes, and some people say they have been forced to move as many as 10 times, often in response to Israeli warnings.
In addition, more than half of all residential buildings in the enclave have been damaged or destroyed, mainly by Israeli airstrikes, the World Bank said in January. At the same time, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s schools and all 12 of its universities have been severely damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.
Some people have stayed with relatives. Hundreds of thousands now live in makeshift tents. Others have decamped to overcrowded school compounds, with families living in classrooms, corridors and yards.
In the close-knit Gazan society, established families seem to have sway in the shelters.
“We are the oldest generation here,” Mr. Kafarneh said. As new people arrive, he said, “We ask about that person, their political views, just to be aware of who they are.”
“We don’t allow anyone to enter with their rifle, whether he is a militant or from a big tribe or family.”
Israel’s recent attacks on the schools have deepened the misery and sense of insecurity for civilians who live there, not least because the attacks often come without warning.
Mai Riyad al-Basyouni, 22, who lived at a government school in Deir al Balah with her husband and 3-month-old daughter, said that women and children were particularly at risk because they stayed indoors at the school, whereas men were often at the markets during the day.
She said she had been at the school for nine months and wanted to leave because of the airstrikes but could not afford to rent elsewhere. A particular worry was shrapnel, which she said she feared could pierce her tent with ease.
“Hearing the news of targeting more schools makes my daily life more miserable, stressful and traumatic,” she said.
Mohammed Shehda al-Obwaini, 57, said he used to live in a school shelter west of Deir al Balah but left after it was hit a few weeks ago and has now pitched a tent for himself and his family near a soccer field.
He described the attack on the school where he had stayed as terrifying.
“Is Israel fighting the Palestinians or Hamas?” he said. “We have had enough suffering and killing. We have enough death among us.”
The Bomb Shelters Are Busy. So Are the Nail Salons.
Viktoria Gulieva sat in a hot-pink armchair wearing a denim tube dress over her pregnant belly and her dark hair slicked back in a tight bun. Her white Pomeranian dog perched on her lap. A salon worker delicately painted pale pink polish onto her toenails, which were spread apart by heart-shaped foam separators.
“We do our nails because this is like emotional support for us,” said Ms. Gulieva, 30, herself a beautician. “We do something to feel better. Because of everything going on, because of the war, we are on an emotional edge. If we get our nails done, we can at least look at our hands, and say, ‘Those look good.’”
Paying attention to beauty may seem a trivial concern when the very fate of Ukraine is at stake, with Russia stepping up its bombardment of Ukraine’s cities and Moscow’s troops grinding forward on the eastern front. But for many women, it is an important ritual of daily life.
The act of keeping up appearances has also become a small way for Ukrainians to show Russia that this war has not broken them.
Even a simple act of pampering can be difficult to carry out. Power outages and air-raid sirens can make it difficult for women to have their nails done — yet many clearly make the effort. Cases in point: a surly bank teller with polished tan fingernails punctuated by glittery pale swirls, a friendly waitress with fingernails painted like blue crocodile skin, a government worker in a Kyiv suburb who once attended up to a dozen funerals a day and helped supervise the digging of mass graves but who still sports a perfect French manicure.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian women have adapted. They still wear long shiny dresses in Kyiv, the capital, but with practical shoes, often white tennies — making it easier to move quickly if an air raid siren goes off. They tie their hair into complicated updos when a lack of power means no hot water. A female Ukrainian soldier on the front lines posted her beauty ritual on Instagram: how she braids her long reddish-brown hair, how she does a gel manicure wearing camouflage.
The general manager of L’Oréal in Ukraine recently also described how beauty rituals boosted people’s morale, calling it the “red lipstick effect.” Even women who have taken jobs in the mines — because the men who once worked there are serving in the army — sometimes sport long red fingernails.
“Our women are unstoppable,” said Donna Todorova, manager at Kukla salon, where Ms. Gulieva had her nails painted.
Women in Ukraine have a reputation for beautiful nails, and the country’s nail professionals — called “nail masters” here — are coveted hires at salons throughout Europe. Their manicures are often not bland monochromatic nails: Every nail has long been seen as its own canvas, often detailed like a miniature painting.
But after Russia’s invasion, nails became something else. Many women decorated their nails with patriotic symbols, painted blue and yellow for the country’s flag, or with sunflowers, ubiquitous in Ukrainian fields, or red poppies, officially designated as a symbol of remembrance for the war’s dead. A salon called Mimi Miss in Kyiv still advertises on Instagram by saying, “Choose us — invest in the death of the enemies,” next to patriotic blue and yellow hearts.
Fingernails also became ways to identify the dead. A clinic employee killed by missile debris in Kyiv in July was recognized by her pink manicure with the white polka dots, the victim’s daughter said. A heating plant operator shot by Russian forces while riding her bike in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in March 2022 was identified by her manicure: four red nails and the fifth, painted white, with a small purple heart bordered in silver.
Back then, when Russian troops pushed toward Kyiv, they took over a beauty salon in Bucha called Profi, near a major intersection and some of the worst carnage. Snipers set up in the salon window on the second floor, shooting at cars and buses, recalled the owner, Iryna Davydovych, adding that her family had stayed in the basement of their nearby home before escaping to live nearby with her mother. The Ukrainian Army then pushed the Russian invaders out.
“The Russians left behind destruction and a lot of trash,” Ms. Davydovych, 54, recalled.
In April 2022, just in time for the Easter holiday, Ms. Davydovych and her husband finished cleaning up the salon, and electricity was restored. The business reopened. Ms. Davydovych’s husband then joined the army. He’s still on the front lines.
“Sometimes you sit down and cry,” she said. “But in the morning you get up, put on lipstick, go out looking beautiful and water the flowers.”
Fifteen people now work at Profi, including four nail masters. Tetiana Kravchenko, known as Tania, is so popular that she is booked up weeks in advance. On a recent Wednesday, she painted the nails of Natalia Fomenko in designs of fluorescent green and black.
“We follow Tania around,” said Ms. Fomenko, who also brings her husband to the salon. “If she ever goes to Kyiv, we’ll follow her to Kyiv.” If Ms. Kravchenko isn’t working, Ms. Fomenko added, “it’s a catastrophe.”
“I’m always here,” Ms. Kravchenko said, bent over her work.
Now, perhaps in a nod to the third year of the war and to people’s moods, the patriotic symbols on nails are rarer. The most popular styles in Ukraine are nudes, French manicures and the occasional bright pastel, nail masters said. Ms. Kravchenko said that more women were opting for practical manicures. “Natural — it’s the new trend,” she said, waving her hands, which were manicured but not painted.
Still, at Kukla, one 21-year-old nail master — who decided on her future profession when she was in the ninth grade — likes to show off her artistic creations, in which she glues delicate butterflies onto fingernails or even pierces them with hoops.
Every customer at Kukla had a war story.
Ms. Gulieva’s family once owned their own beauty salon, on the left bank of the Dnipro River. In March 2022, a rocket destroyed the salon, shattering the panoramic windows and ruining much of its equipment for hydro peeling and permanent makeup, Ms. Gulieva recalled. She fled to Germany, along with her mother, sister and brother. But a few months later, Ms. Gulieva returned, against her mother’s wishes, to be near her husband, who had joined the army on the front line. Her mother and sister now work in German salons.
Clients sometimes call Kukla to ask about potential cancellations because of power outages or missile strikes, but that rarely happens. On July 8, when missile strikes killed more than 42 people across Ukraine, mostly in the capital Kyiv, workers and salon employees took shelter in a nearby subway station.
“When the air raid was over, the customers returned and the nail technicians continued their work,” Ms. Todorova said. “As far as I remember, nobody canceled their appointments that day.”
Dzvinka Pinchuk and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.
He’s Known as ‘Ivan the Troll.’ His 3D-Printed Guns Have Gone Viral.
After an attempted gang murder in the French city of Marseille last year, the police found what appeared to be a toy assault rifle, seemingly crafted from plastic and Lego parts.
“But the weapon was lethal,” Col. Hervé Pétry of the national gendarmerie recalled.
In the past three years, this model of homemade semiautomatic firearm, known as an FGC-9, has appeared in the hands of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, rebels in Myanmar and neo-Nazis in Spain. In October, a British teenager will be sentenced for building an FGC-9 in one of the latest terrorism cases to involve the weapon.
An online group known as Deterrence Dispensed publishes free instructions on how to build the weapon, a manual that says people everywhere should stand armed and ready.
“We together can defeat for good the infringement that is taking place on our natural-born right to bear arms, defend ourselves and rise up against tyranny,” the document says.
This American brand of libertarianism has historically been a tough sell in many other parts of the world. Even if some people believed it in theory, strict laws made buying a gun so difficult that the ideology was almost beside the point.
The FGC-9 is changing that.
“It’s not just a gun. It is also an ideology,” said Kristian Abrahamsson, an intelligence officer with the Swedish customs police. Dozens of FGC-9s have turned up in his country in recent years, he said.
The New York Times has charted the FGC-9’s growth from a hobbyist’s garage project to a lethal pistol wielded by insurgents, terrorists, drug dealers and militia members in at least 15 countries.
While countless 3D-printed guns have been designed and circulated on the internet, international law enforcement officials say that the FGC-9 is by far the most common. The gun is so desirable among far-right extremists in Britain that the possession and sharing of its instruction manual is being charged as a terrorist offense.
Nobody does more to promote the gun and the ideology than its co-designer, who goes by the online name Ivan the Troll. The figurehead of Deterrence Dispensed, he has appeared in numerous YouTube videos and podcasts, but always under his aliases.
Court documents, corporate records and information posted on his social media accounts link the Ivan the Troll persona to a 26-year-old Illinois gunmaker named John Elik. The nephew of a state representative, Mr. Elik has emerged as one of the most important figures in the nascent international industry of 3D-printed guns.
Police forces around the world see that industry as a threat to gun restrictions that have limited who can have access to firearms. On that, the authorities and gun rights supporters agree.
The Times sent an interview request and an article summary to Mr. Elik’s email address. A reply from an Ivan the Troll account declined to answer questions and said that he did not believe he would be treated fairly.
In the United States, 3D-printed guns are regulated by a hodgepodge of state laws. Illinois has restricted the sale and possession of homemade gun components, except by firearm dealers and manufacturers. Because he is a licensed manufacturer, there is no indication that Mr. Elik is violating that law. Illinois law requires manufacturers to add serial numbers to homemade gun components.
The videos posted online encourage viewers to know their local laws.
Most of the mass-produced weapons of the 20th century, even those now marketed for personal defense, were originally designed for militaries and hunters. The FGC-9, by contrast, was created with the explicit goal of arming as many everyday people as possible.
FGC is an abbreviation that represents what its creators think of gun control. Nine is for the 9-millimeter bullet it fires.
The use of the FGC-9 by insurgents opposed to the military junta in Myanmar is part of its creators’ stated plan, a realization of the hope that guns could be used to stand up to the state.
Mr. Elik, in his email to The Times, said it was wrong to focus on “European cops complaining about a small number of guns being recovered,” and shootings in which nobody was injured, “rather than the gun’s use as a tool of liberation.”
The Prototype
The gun’s chief designer was Jacob Duygu, a German national of Kurdish heritage.
Germany requires gun owners to be licensed, but Mr. Duygu wanted to own a firearm on his own terms. He made it his mission to give anyone the tools to do the same, especially in countries with strict gun control laws.
Mr. Duygu developed an affinity for American libertarianism and the Second Amendment right to bear arms, according to Rajan Basra, a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization who has studied the proliferation of the FGC-9.
Mr. Duygu was known online as JStark, in homage to Maj. Gen. John Stark, a military leader of the American Revolution.
Social media accounts linked to Mr. Elik have voiced similar views.
“Civilians need assault weapons because having a weapon made for killing people is very important for self defense,” one post read, adding, “If it’s made for killing people quickly and easily, even better.”
Mr. Duygu’s design was published in March 2020 with the stated goal of circumventing gun laws. Homemade firearms have been around for centuries, but Mr. Duygu’s was a breakthrough. The FGC-9 could be built entirely from scratch, without commercial gun parts, which are often regulated and tracked by law enforcement agencies internationally.
Anyone with a commercial 3D printer, hundreds of dollars in materials, some metalworking skills and plenty of patience could become a gun owner.
“It’s a game changer,” Dr. Basra said. “Now you have something that people can make at home with unregulated components. So from a law enforcement perspective, how do you stop that?”
The assembly instructions for the first iteration of the FGC-9 called for each gun to be etched with General Stark’s motto, “Live Free or Die.”
The release of the FGC-9 inspired gun enthusiasts to suggest their own modifications. Among them was Mr. Elik, who separately developed a do-it-yourself process for making the spiral grooves, or rifling, inside a gun barrel.
A year later, a new version of the FGC-9 was released, crediting Mr. Elik’s pseudonym as a co-creator.
Dr. Basra and a security researcher, Nathan Mayer, first linked Mr. Elik to the Ivan the Troll accounts using online clues after he was identified in a lawsuit as an owner of a website promoting 3D-printed guns. The Times replicated and built on that research, using photographs and videos that Mr. Elik posted of his home and shooting ranges on his family’s property, including his aunt’s.
His aunt, Amy Elik, is a Republican state representative and a staunch supporter of gun rights. She voted against the state’s ban on homemade firearms. She did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Mr. Duygu was found dead in 2021 of undetermined causes just days after he was questioned by the German police. Mr. Elik quickly became the highest-profile spokesman for the gun they created and went on to develop his own designs for partly 3D-printed weapons, including versions of a Kalashnikov and of an MP5 submachine gun.
“This pure marketplace of ideas wasn’t created by accident, even if it’s wildly more successful than Stark or I ever imagined,” one of the accounts linked to Mr. Elik wrote online.
Going Viral
The weapon first received high-profile attention in December 2020, when Matthew Cronjager, a British neo-Nazi, was arrested and accused of trying to recruit and arm a militia. The targets included the British government, Jews, gay people, Muslims and members of ethnic minority groups.
Mr. Cronjager, then 17, had downloaded a Deterrence Dispensed manual for making 9-millimeter ammunition and the plans for the FGC-9. He was arrested after trying to pay an undercover officer to manufacture the gun. Mr. Cronjager, who was later convicted and jailed for more than 11 years, said that he wanted to topple the government and start a revolution, court records show.
Since then, several people with white-supremacist and anti-immigrant leanings have been prosecuted for terrorism offenses in Europe after trying to obtain the weapon to commit mass shootings. Drug gangs and prison inmates in Brazil have also been found with the weapon, the authorities there say.
No law enforcement official has yet linked an FGC-9 to a homicide, though they say that may be because traditional forensic techniques are not always reliable on homemade weapons.
Ivaylo Stefanov, of Interpol’s illicit weapons unit, said, “Everybody thought it was going to take decades for the technology to be advanced and for the printers to be available to private citizens.”
Interpol is notified of FGC-9 seizures at least every two months, and Mr. Stefanov said that many more were probably going unreported. “You see it even in European countries that have never ever had such cases,” he said.
Ivan the Troll’s media message is that this is hypocrisy. Western governments, he has noted, have armed the world’s insurgents and authoritarian leaders with weapons of war. “I’m sharing a computer file,” he said in a 2022 interview. “If I’m guilty of sharing information, what does that make them?”
And while the FGC-9 has become a staple with some of the world’s far-right extremists, it has also been embraced by insurgent groups that are fighting Myanmar’s military junta, which has committed atrocities on its own people.
“A lot of people use them,” said a fighter there who goes by the call sign 3-D. He said the FGC-9 was often used for personal defense rather than for combat because its design left it susceptible to jamming in the harsh jungle environment.
As technology improves, Mr. Stefanov and others said, amateur gunmakers will most likely be able to use untraceable parts to build guns that fire like machine guns. The Biden administration is trying to regulate homemade gun components as firearms, a move that the Supreme Court will soon review.
Increasingly, the FGC-9 is being produced not only by individual hobbyists and extremists, but also by criminal operations that manufacture weapons to sell or rent. Makeshift factories have been found in Australia, France and Spain.
“There is an obvious ideological element,” said Colonel Pétry, the French officer. “But we must not be naïve. Above all, there is a desire to make themselves fabulously rich.”
Hannah Beech contributed reporting from Myanmar, and Sarah Hurtes from Brussels. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.
Love on Aisle 9? A TikTok Fad Fills Grocery Stores With Singles.
As a scorching summer draws to its close in Spain, love is in the air in an unexpected place — in air-conditioned supermarket aisles. But only for an hour a day, and with an unusual accessory: an upturned pineapple in your shopping cart to let fellow lonely hearts know you’re available.
The comedian Vivy Lin is being credited in the Spanish news media for starting the fad, after she and a friend, Carla Alarcón, recorded themselves shopping for groceries in Seville a few weeks ago.
In the video, Ms. Lin said she had noticed that there was a specific window of time — between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. — when the aisles in Spain’s largest superstore, Mercadona, are full of single men and women wandering aimlessly without buying much at all.
Ms. Lin winked at the camera and concluded there was only one thing they could be doing: “ligando,” which roughly translates to looking for a date. With a cheeky grin, she coined a new phrase, “the dating hour in Mercadona,” and uploaded her video to TikTok.
Other users took it from there. A brunette dressed to kill applied bright red lipstick and posed beside stacked shelves. Girls in sexy summer shorts and T-shirts cruised the aisles and goofed around beside the wines. A young man in a sharp suit and tousled hair smiled coyly and raised an eyebrow at fellow shoppers.
“I see it as being a phenomenon of humor more than of love,” Ms. Lin, the comedian, said in a telephone interview, adding, “I think the hookup pretext has been an excuse for people to go out and have fun, to make memes and record videos.”
The comedic nature of what are now thousands of videos on social media suggests most would-be lovers are having a laugh instead of genuinely looking for a romantic match.
Not long after Ms. Lin’s original video went viral, people started to place upside-down pineapples — a symbol used by swingers to show their availability — in their carts as a not-very-subtle mating beacon. According to the hastily developed rules of supermarket romance, if you take a fancy to someone else who has a turned-up pineapple in their trolley, you should let them know by gently crashing into them.
The phenomenon has struck a chord with young teens, hordes of whom have invaded supermarkets all over Spain, flooding the aisles with hormones and — in the view of some store employees — getting in the way of real customers. Two weeks ago, staff members at a Mercadona in Bilbao called the police to help evict swarms of adolescents who had filled the store’s aisles on a Thursday evening.
In response to the run on pineapples as dating props, flustered employees at Mercadona last week started to pull them from shelves shortly before 7 p.m. to avoid goods being manhandled and abandoned by customers with no intention of purchasing them.
An official at Mercadona confirmed in a telephone interview that the incident in Bilbao was an isolated episode, and said that no extra measures had been required in other stores.
Lidia Izquierdo, a 19-year-old studying to be a teacher in Barcelona, said that she had tried three times without success to find a partner in her local Mercadona stores. Her first attempt, she said, was thwarted by “too many 14-year-olds walking around with pineapples in their hands.” On her second outing, there were no pineapples so she improvised with canned fruit, but the stars were still not aligned. On her third visit, she said, a store employee was guarding the pineapples. She gave up and went home.
Ms. Izquierdo, who is single, said she was a firm believer in love at first sight, whether in the supermarket or at the bus stop. “That doesn’t happen on apps,” she said, vowing to soon return to her quest for true love at Mercadona.
To help supermarket daters find their perfect match, daytime television in Spain is now awash with tips. Hanging around the aisle with frozen products could signal a one-night stand, one program suggested. And for those over 40, the wine section may offer better odds.
Ms. Lin confessed over the phone that she was “no expert in hooking up” but rather “an addict of goofing around.” She said she had gotten the idea for her video from watching a participant claim on the Spanish version of the television dating show “First Dates” in 2017 that the best time to find a soul mate in supermarkets was between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., when you can easily spot singles because of the “beer and crisps” in their trolleys.
“People have asked me if it was a marketing campaign,” Ms. Lin said. “I wish. At least I would have been paid.”
Renowned Scholar of Islam Is Convicted of Rape in Switzerland
Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Swiss-born scholar of Islam, was found guilty on appeal of raping and sexually coercing a woman in Geneva in 2008, reversing a previous acquittal, the Swiss authorities said on Tuesday.
The Geneva Court of Justice said in a statement that Mr. Ramadan, 62, had been convicted by an appeals court and sentenced to three years in prison, with two of them suspended. The ruling, dated Aug. 28, overturned a lower court’s 2023 decision that had cleared Mr. Ramadan of all charges, the statement said.
It was the first rape conviction for Mr. Ramadan, a renowned Muslim philosopher and theologian who was once listed by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential people but who experienced a rapid fall from grace in 2017 and 2018 after several women accused him of sexual assault in the early days of the #MeToo movement.
Mr. Ramadan has always denied the allegations and characterized them as part of a smear campaign against him.
His lawyers denounced the ruling on Tuesday, saying it represented “the conviction of a man, and not of fact.” They said that they would appeal the conviction before the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.
“We are confident that it will fully restore our client’s innocence, as the first judges did,” the lawyers, Yaël Hayat and Guerric Canonica, said in a statement.
Mr. Ramadan was accused of raping the woman, a Swiss convert to Islam, and of subjecting her to brutal sexual acts in a Geneva hotel room in 2008. The plaintiff — who has not been publicly identified — filed her police complaint in 2018 after similar accusations against Mr. Ramadan came to light in France.
After the initial acquittal, the trial on appeal was held in May.
Mr. Ramadan had acknowledged that he and the plaintiff had kissed but said that he had rebuffed her advances and that she had falsely accused him to get revenge, according to the appeals court’s ruling.
But the judges “found that several testimonies, certificates, medical notes and private expert opinions were consistent with the facts reported by the plaintiff,” the Geneva Court of Justice said in its statement, which added, “The evidence gathered by the investigation thus convinced the chamber of the defendant’s guilt.”
Robert Assaël and Véronique Fontana, the Swiss plaintiff’s lawyers, said that the ruling “sweeps aside all the unrealistic arguments put forward by the defendant, who never ceased to smear and discredit the victim, in order to preserve his already tarnished image.”
“Our client is relieved, of course, and knows what she had to endure for the truth to come out,” they said in a statement on Tuesday.
Mr. Ramadan’s legal troubles are far from over. In June, he was ordered to face charges in Paris that he raped three women between 2009 and 2016; he has appealed that order to make him stand trial.
Mr. Ramadan is a grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s. Mr. Ramadan is the author of several books on Islam and on the Western world and was formerly a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford.
He gained a widespread following for offering what some considered a moderate, tolerant version of Islam. But critics, especially in France, have accused him of hiding radical views behind a polished media persona.
Husband on Trial in Rape and Drugging Case in France Is Taken to Hospital
A Frenchman who confessed to drugging his wife for years and bringing dozens of men into their home to join him in raping her was taken to the hospital on Tuesday just hours before he was due to testify in his trial, his lawyer said.
The condition of the man, Dominique Pelicot, 71, whose trial in Avignon, France, has shocked the country and packed two courtrooms with reporters from around the world, was not immediately clear.
His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, told reporters in the courthouse that Mr. Pelicot had been suffering from abdominal pain and discomfort in urinating since Friday, for which he had been excused from court on Monday.
On Tuesday, the presiding judge, Roger Arata, ordered Mr. Pelicot to undergo a medical examination and said that if he was admitted into the hospital the trial would be suspended until his condition improved.
Ms. Zavarro insisted that Mr. Pelicot, who had asked to testify, still planned to take the stand before his wife and three children, who have been in the courtroom since the trial began last week and have not communicated with him since his arrest in late 2020.
“I heard things this morning in the courtroom suggesting that obviously his absence would be on purpose: No way,” Ms. Zavarro said. “Let us be very clear, Mr. Pelicot has not shied away, Mr. Pelicot will not shirk, Mr. Pelicot will be there, he will answer all the questions. But there is this medical problem for which he did not plan.”
Testifying, she added, was “for him, essential.”
Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him. His lawyer has said that he hopes to use the trial to explain himself to Gisèle Pelicot, who was his wife for 50 years, and to his children.
U.K. Hedge Fund Tycoon Buys The Spectator Magazine
The Spectator, a 196-year-old magazine with a prominent place in British political life and longstanding ties to the Conservative Party, was on Tuesday sold to a hedge fund tycoon whose media interests also include a right-wing TV channel that has antagonized the country’s broadcasting regulator.
In a deal worth 100 million pounds, or $131 million, Paul Marshall, a press-shy multimillionaire who made his fortune through the hedge fund he co-founded, Marshall Wace, took control of The Spectator.
In recent years Mr. Marshall has reshaped himself as a media baron. He founded Unherd, a news and opinion website, and became a leading investor in the news channel GB News, which began broadcasting in 2021 and has emerged as a platform for hard-right political figures like Nigel Farage, who has his own prime-time talk show.
For more than three decades, The Spectator, which describes itself as “the oldest continuously published weekly in the English language,” was owned by the same publishing group as The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, two influential Conservative-leaning newspapers.
The Telegraph Media Group was owned by the Barclay family until last year, when RedBird IMI, a consortium backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the vice president of the United Arab Emirates, and the American investment firm RedBird Capital, assumed control of the debt-laden company.
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RedBird IMI, led by the American media executive Jeff Zucker, took over the Barclay family’s debts and tried to complete its acquisition of The Telegraph group and The Spectator. But it was thwarted by the British government because of antitrust and media freedom concerns.
Earlier this year, the government drafted legislation to block foreign states or associated individuals from owning British newspaper assets, prompting RedBird IMI to put The Spectator and Telegraph up for sale.
For Mr. Zucker, a former president of CNN, the decision dashed his audacious attempt to break into Britain’s media business. Since then, he has been looking for alternative buyers to make good on his initial investment.
“Our aim with this phase of the process has been to secure ownership from a viable buyer for The Spectator,” Mr. Zucker said in a statement. “We were committed to moving quickly and capitalizing on the strength of the asset and the significant interest from an eager marketplace.”
Bids for the Telegraph newspapers are due later in the month, and British press reports say Mr. Marshall is one of at least two finalists for those, along with National World, a newspaper group run by David Montgomery, a Northern Irish media executive and former tabloid editor with a reputation for cost cutting.
Known for its lively, often provocative, journalism, The Spectator has 122,500 paid subscriptions, of which 93,000 are in Britain, according to figures it released last year.
But it is the publication’s influence and prestige — along with its storied, sometimes incestuous, connections to the Conservative Party — that made it attractive to a string of previous owners.
Past editors of The Spectator include Boris Johnson, a former prime minister, and Nigel Lawson, a former chancellor of the Exchequer. The publication is famous for sponsoring a Parliamentarian of the Year award, which is a fixture on the political calendar.
It also hosts a summer party in London and a reception at the annual Conservative Party conference, where Pol Roger champagne, Winston Churchill’s favorite, flows freely — one reason, perhaps, why Alexander Chancellor, a former editor, once said, “The Spectator is more of a cocktail party than a political party.”
Whether the publication’s notoriously louche, mischievous journalistic culture will survive the change of ownership remains unclear.
Mr. Marshall, 65, is an evangelical Christian. A former supporter of the centrist Liberal Democrats, he quit that party in 2015 and supported the campaign for Brexit.
Alongside Legatum, a Dubai-based investment firm, he has invested heavily in GB News which has pushed the boundaries of the broadcasting code that regulates programming in Britain and imposes strict rules on political impartiality.
GB News sometimes seems to model itself on Fox News, giving a platform to hard-right politicians including Mr. Farage, the former Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Lee Anderson, a onetime Conservative lawmaker who defected to Mr. Farage’s Reform U.K. party, which campaigns against immigration.
The channel has received several rebukes from the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, for failing to observe impartiality obligations and, in one case, airing misogynistic views.
GB News has not yet broken even. It recorded pretax losses of £42.4 million pounds for the year to the end of May 2023, up from £30.7 million a year earlier. The broadcaster has pointed to a growing digital audience, saying its online page views rose 431 percent to 51.9 million.
Following the sale of The Spectator, the next pressing question is how the battle for ownership of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph will be resolved. That sale is being run separately.