Feith Shimila Murunga says her boss groped, beat and raped her.
Mary Wanjiru Nyambura says she was thrown from a balcony.
Winfridah Kwamboka never even made it back home.
Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia
East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.
On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.
Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.
While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year.
Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.
There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.
But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.”
In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.
The line between their public and private roles sometimes blurs.
Mr. Muli’s labor committee, for example, has become a prominent voice encouraging workers to go overseas. The committee has at times rejected evidence of abuse.
Last month, four Ugandan women in maids’ uniforms sent a video plea to an aid group, saying that they had been detained for six months in Saudi Arabia.
“We are exhausted from being held against our will,” one woman said on the video. The company that sent her abroad is owned by Sedrack Nzaire, an official with Uganda’s governing party who is identified in Ugandan media as the brother of the president, Yoweri Museveni.
Nearly every staffing agency refused to answer questions or ignored repeated requests for comment. That includes Mr. Muli, Mr. Nzaire and their companies.
Kenya and Uganda are deep in a yearslong economic slump, and remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income. Even after other countries negotiated deals with Saudi Arabia that guaranteed worker protections, East African countries missed opportunities to do the same, records show.
Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justice declared in 2022 that worker-protection efforts had been hindered by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies.”
Undeterred, Kenya’s president, William Ruto, says he wants to send up to half a million workers to Saudi Arabia in the coming years. One of his top advisers, Moses Kuria, has owned a staffing agency. Mr. Kuria’s brother, a county-level politician, still does.
A spokesman for Mr. Ruto, Hussein Mohamed, said that labor migration benefited the economy. He said the government was taking steps to protect workers, including weeding out unlicensed recruiting firms that are more likely to have shoddy practices. He said that Mr. Kuria, the presidential adviser, had no conflict of interest because he does not work on labor issues.
In Uganda, recruiting-firm owners include a recently retired senior police official and Maj. Gen. Leopold Kyanda, a former military attaché to the United States.
Recruiting companies work closely with Saudi agencies that are similarly well connected. Descendants of King Faisal have been among the largest shareholders in two of the biggest agencies. A director of a Saudi government human rights board serves as vice chairman of a major staffing agency. So does a former interior minister, an Investment Ministry official and several government advisers.
Together, these agencies paint a rosy picture of work in Saudi Arabia. But when things go wrong, families say, the workers are often left to fend for themselves.
A Kenyan housekeeper, Eunice Achieng, called home in a panic in 2022, saying that her boss had threatened to kill her and throw her in a water tank. “She was screaming, ‘Please come save me!’” her mother recalled. Ms. Achieng soon turned up dead in a rooftop water tank, her mother said. Saudi health officials said her body was too decomposed to determine how she died. The Saudi police labeled it a “natural death.”
One young mother jumped from a third-story roof to escape an abusive employer, breaking her back. Another said that her boss had raped her and then sent her home pregnant and broke.
In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa said that when he learned his wife had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
“I told him that whether you send me the money or you don’t send me the money, me, I want the body of my wife,” Mr. Waiswa said.
A Saudi autopsy found that his wife, Aisha Meeme, was emaciated. She had extensive bruising, three broken ribs and what appeared to be severe electrocution burns on her ear, hand and feet. The Saudi authorities declared that she had died of natural causes.
Roughly half a million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says. Most of them are women who cook, clean or care for children. Journalists and rights groups, who have long publicized worker abuse in the kingdom, have often blamed its persistence on archaic Saudi labor laws.
The Times interviewed more than 90 workers and family members of those who died, and uncovered another reason that things do not change. Using employment contracts, medical files and autopsies, reporters linked deaths and injuries to staffing agencies and the people who run them. What became clear was that powerful people profit off the system as it exists.
The interviews and documents reveal a system that treats women like household goods — bought, sold and discarded. Some company websites have an “add to cart” button next to photos of workers. One advertises “Kenyan maids for sale.”
A spokesman for the human resources ministry in Saudi Arabia said it had taken steps to protect workers. “Any form of exploitation or abuse of domestic workers is entirely unacceptable, and allegations of such behavior are thoroughly investigated,” the spokesman, Mike Goldstein, wrote in an email.
He said the government had raised fines for abuse and made it easier for workers to quit. He said domestic laborers were capped at 10-hour workdays and were guaranteed one day off per week. He said the government now requires employers to pay their maids through an online system and will one day track people who repeatedly violate labor laws.
“Workers have multiple ways to report abuse, unpaid wages or contract violations, including hotlines, digital platforms and direct complaint mechanisms,” he said.
But Milton Turyasiima, an assistant commissioner with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, said that abuse remained rampant.
“We get complaints on a daily basis,” he said.
Selling a Dream
Recruiters fan out across East Africa, from impoverished hilltop villages to the cinder block neighborhoods of Nairobi and Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
They search for people desperate, and ambitious, enough to leave their families for low-paying jobs in a country where they do not know the native language. People like Faridah Nassanga, a slim woman with a warm but detached air.
“We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said, sitting outside her one-room concrete home in Kampala. Meals are cooked on a propane burner in the alley beside a trickling sewage gutter. She shares a triple-decker bunk bed with her mother and children.
Ms. Nassanga said a friend introduced her in 2019 to an agent from Marphie International Recruitment Agency, whose co-owner, Henry Tukahirwa, recently retired as one of Uganda’s highest-ranking police officers. Ms. Nassanga agreed to move to Saudi Arabia for a job paying about $200 a month.
She found her housekeeping job as pleasant as recruiters had promised. She had her own room. The woman she worked for sometimes even helped with chores.
Then one day, she said, her boss’s husband walked into her room and raped her. Afterward, she said, he kicked and slapped her. He threw her underwear at her as she retreated to the kitchen, Ms. Nassanga said.
When she became pregnant, Ms. Nassanga’s boss accused her of sleeping with the husband. The Saudi family put her on a plane back to Uganda, said Abdallah Kayonde, who runs a legal-aid group that is trying to get compensation for her.
Ms. Nassanga knows her employer’s name but not her phone number. The only records she has are from the recruiting agency.
Ruth Karungi, who owns the agency with her husband, the retired police official, said that when Ms. Nassanga showed up at the office with an infant, the company contacted the Saudi partner agency, which did not respond.
The company then notified the Saudi Embassy. “We trusted that they would address the case through the proper diplomatic channels,” Ms. Karungi said by email.
She said she did not know if anyone had followed up.
Now, Ms. Nassanga is back sharing a one-room home with her mother, her two older children and her toddler — a boy with a notably different complexion and hair from his siblings.
‘An Important Destination Country’
Saudi Arabia has a wage hierarchy for foreign workers, with East Africans near the bottom at about $200 to $250 a month.
Over the years, some countries have fought for better wages and protections for their workers. The Philippines, for example, negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia in 2012 that raised wages.
That sent staffing agencies looking for cheaper labor elsewhere.
Few Ugandan workers arrived in the kingdom in 2017, Ugandan government data show. Five years later, the number was 85,928.
African governments stood to benefit from remittances. Mr. Muli’s committee called on Kenya in 2019 to “embark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.”
“The current notion that foreign workers in Saudi Arabia go through suffering” needed “to be corrected,” the committee added.
Mwanakombo Ngao was hospitalized in a mental institution after returning home. She has no recollection of what happened in Saudi Arabia.
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Esther Kerubo Moranga said her Saudi boss abused her. Now, she says, her uncle beats her for returning home without money.
Josephine Uchi says she worked a demanding housekeeping job while also caring for a Saudi family of 12. She was allowed four hours of sleep a night.
The African countries provide a “new and lower-cost services market,” one of Saudi Arabia’s largest staffing agencies, Maharah Human Resources Company, wrote in 2019.
Some of King Faisal’s descendants, through a holding company, have been important shareholders in both Maharah and in another major staffing agency, Saudi Manpower Solutions Company, or Smasco.
Al Mawarid, yet another big staffing company, also has deep government ties. Its chairman, Ahmad al-Rakban, was executive director of administration for the Saudi National Guard. The chief executive, Riyadh al-Romaizan, is chairman of a government-backed industry council. Tariq al-Awaji, a former top official at the Interior Ministry, is a company director. Another board member, until recently, was an official in the Investment Ministry.
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In recent years, Al Mawarid has paid about $4 million to acquire workers from Macro Manpower, the firm owned by Mr. Nzaire, the brother of Uganda’s president, corporate filings show.
(East African recruiting agencies make money from per-worker fees from Saudi companies. Those companies, in turn, get fees from people who hire maids.)
Al Mawarid’s chief executive, Mr. al-Romaizan, declined to answer questions.
Attacked With Bleach
Mary Nsiimenta, a single mother with big, mournful eyes, cleaned house for a family with five children in Najran, in southern Saudi Arabia. She said the children, ages 9 to 18, hit her with a stick and put bleach in her eyes.
(Several women told The Times that they were assaulted with bleach or forced to soak their hands in it as punishment.)
According to Ms. Nsiimenta, her employer was stingy with her salary. After she repeatedly asked to be paid, she said, the family locked her on a third-story rooftop.
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As time dragged on, she felt sure she would die there, she recalled.
“The sun was too much,” she said. “Hot. No food. I lost control.”
She jumped, landing hard.
“I crawled out like a snake” to the street, she said. Passers-by took her to a hospital where, medical records show, doctors repaired her spine. She reported the abuse to doctors and the police, she said, but they told her to return to work.
Ms. Nsiimenta refused, and the Saudi placement agency returned her to Uganda in 2023. In chronic pain and incontinent, she cannot work. Friends and relatives are raising her children. “My life is destroyed,” she said.
Trading Abuse for a Type of Prison
Saudi law says that, when a worker needs to go home, an employer, recruiter or the Saudi government is obligated to pay.
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“Under no circumstances does a worker bear any financial responsibility for repatriation,” wrote Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman.
But workers and worker-rights advocates say that laborers are often forced to pay. Those without money can be detained.
Because visas are tied to employment, workers who leave their jobs can lose their legal status. To help address that, the Saudi government paid a company, Sakan, to provide housing and legal assistance to foreign workers in trouble.
Hannah Njeri Miriam ended up at a Sakan center in 2022, about a year after she left Kenya’s Rift Valley for Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Miriam’s employer fired her after a dispute. Jobless and homeless, Sakan was the only place to go. Once there, according to her family, the staff said she could leave only if she paid about $300 for her travel.
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She called home, saying she was being mistreated and underfed. Nobody could afford to help. The Kenyan agency that had sent her abroad had gone out of business.
Finally, her family got a call from another woman at the center. She said Ms. Miriam had tried to escape through an air-conditioning opening but had slipped and fallen two stories. A forensic report said that Ms. Miriam had died of head wounds. The Saudi police later said that she died of “congestive cardiac and respiratory failure.” Sakan’s chairman declined to comment.
Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman, declined to comment on individual deaths but said that every case was thoroughly investigated. He did not comment on the inconsistencies between autopsies and police reports and would not say how many people had been arrested or prosecuted in labor cases.
Mr. Goldstein said the government stopped funding Sakan in 2023. Now, he said, it pays the recruiting agency Smasco to run worker-assistance centers.
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Three Kenyan women spoke to The Times from inside a Smasco center. The women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that they could not go home unless they paid about $400. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Returning Home
As migration to Saudi Arabia surged, reports of deaths and injuries spread across East Africa. Bodies began arriving. Each story brought new outrage.
People should not have been surprised. The leaders of Kenya and Uganda had ample warning of abuse, yet they signed agreements with Saudi Arabia that lacked protections that other leaders demanded.
The Philippines deal in 2012, for example, guaranteed a $400 monthly minimum wage, access to bank accounts and a promise that workers’ passports would not be confiscated.
Kenya initially demanded similar wages, according to a government report, but when Saudi Arabia balked, Kenya agreed to a deal in 2015 with no minimum wage at all.
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The treaty contained little beyond a promise to establish a committee to monitor labor issues. The commission was never formed, a government report said.
Mr. Mohamed, the Kenyan president’s spokesman, said that the government later negotiated $225 monthly wages. He said Kenyan workers were simply not as highly regarded in Saudi Arabia. “Philippines is able to dictate the price,” he said.
When Uganda cut its agreement with the Saudi government, they made no mention of a minimum wage. The issue of worker mistreatment was well discussed at the time. The Saudi ambassador to Uganda even wrote a column in a Ugandan newspaper assailing critics who “offend and abuse the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” by publicizing abuse.
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In 2021, a Kenyan Senate committee found “deteriorating conditions” in Saudi Arabia and an “increase in distress calls by those alleging torture and mistreatment.” The committee recommended suspending worker transfers.
When Mr. Ruto was elected president in 2022, though, the campaign to send workers abroad intensified. His government reached a new Saudi labor agreement the following year without a wage increase or substantive new protections.
“It’s a cycle of abuse that no one is addressing,” said Stephanie Marigu, a Kenyan lawyer who represents workers.
Now, a few times a month, rural Kenyans head to Nairobi to collect a coffin from the airport.
Hundreds of people gathered in September at a village school in southwestern Kenya. They paid respects to Millicent Moraa Obwocha, who had left her husband and young son behind months earlier.
Her employer sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband, Obuya Simon Areba, said. Things got so bad last summer, he said, that she asked her Saudi recruiter to rescue her.
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A few days later, her husband got the call that she was dead. She was 24. The Kenyan government attributed her death to “nerve issues.”
Her employer, Abdullah Omar Abdul al-Rahman Hailan, said that Mr. Areba’s account was “misleading and incorrect” and called a Times reporter “a clown.”
At the funeral, Ms. Obwocha’s body lay in an open coffin in a white dress and veil.
Beside her was a six-foot-tall photograph. In it, she smiles with her fingers held up in a V. She is standing outside the airport, brimming with optimism.
At 95, He’s the World’s Oldest Speedskater. He’s Gunning for 100.
When Iichi Marumo competed in his first international race seven years ago in Moscow, the Japanese speedskater moved down the ice at about the pace of a brisk jog. It took him three times as long to cross the finish line as most of the other skaters that day.
It didn’t matter, because Mr. Marumo was also three times as old. He was 88, and his time was still fast enough to earn him a silver medal in his age category of 85 and up.
Ever since, he has won only gold. Now 95, in his most recent race, a national competition in Japan in January, he competed in a category that was created just for him: 95 and over.
So far, he has the category all to himself.
“I win a gold medal every time I appear,” Mr. Marumo said in an interview at his home in Chino, a small city in the rugged mountains of central Honshu, Japan’s main island. As proof, he pulled out a plastic shopping bag filled with more than 20 gold medals, including from races in the Netherlands and Canada.
A small man with slightly bowed legs and an impish smile, Mr. Marumo has been skating his whole life, but he began his competitive career at an age when most people would feel lucky to still be alive. On his wall, plaques from Guinness proclaim him to be the world’s oldest male competitive speedskater. His closest rival is a Norwegian skater who is five years younger. (The oldest currently active female competitor is an 80-year-old Dutch skater.)
The collection caps a remarkable near-century of life. Mr. Marumo survived World War II despite volunteering to fly a kamikaze mission, was awarded by Japan’s emperor for teaching other farmers how to profit by growing celery, and he publishes a short monthly magazine dedicated to traditional Japanese poetry.
To be a speedskater at his age no longer involves much speed. In compression pants and a skintight race suit, he shuffles and glides down the ice, taking care not to fall. Still, he is greeted with enthusiastic cheers, which he returns with a wave and a smile.
Racing wasn’t even his idea: A friend convinced him to do it as a sort of dare. Now he sees it as a fun way to spend his remaining time.
“I never expected to be an international racer,” Mr. Marumo said.
He has become a minor celebrity in Japan, a demographically aging society that has seen a surging enthusiasm for senior sports. The country produces some of the world’s oldest competitors in winter events, including two Japanese women who also hold Guinness World Records as the oldest downhill and cross-country skiers. But they are still five or more years younger than Mr. Marumo.
“He stands out as the poster boy of senior winter sports in Japan and maybe the world,” said Kenji Takai, the director of the Japan Association for Winter Masters Sports. “He’s inspiring people to try to do what he’s doing.”
Mr. Marumo and his fellow silver-haired athletes are also pushing the boundaries of senior sports. In speedskating, the term Masters is typically used for those aged 30 years and up, but Mr. Marumo is more than three times that age.
At the Masters level, speedskating is divided into age categories that are five years long, so entrants can compete against other skaters of similar physical strength. Since Mr. Marumo’s first domestic race, in 2016 at the age of 86, Japan’s skating federation has had to create three new age categories just for him, including his current 95-and-over.
“I hope he continues until we have to create a fourth new category, for those aged 100 and over,” Mr. Takai said.
Mr. Marumo says he wants to be skating when he’s 100, though he may not make it. He has had a few falls, but the worst came during his most recent race in January. The track was outdoors, and when the starting pistol sounded, a blizzard had blown in. Mr. Marumo fell early and couldn’t get back on his feet. Rather than give up, however, he crawled along the ice all the way to the finish line.
It took him 17 minutes to complete the 500-meter course.
“My left leg froze from the pain,” he recalled, “but I had to finish.”
Afterward, he announced that he was retiring from the sport before having surgery for a hernia. But he has since had second thoughts and now says he will race again next year if he feels strong enough.
Mr. Marumo said he first skated around 1940, when he was about 10. In those days, he tied handmade metal blades onto wooden sandals and raced against his elementary school classmates across frozen rice paddies. His childhood ended at the age of 15, when he was convinced to volunteer for the suicide missions that Japan was launching against the advancing Americans in the closing days of World War II. Trained to be a radioman in a two-seat bomber that was to ram into a warship, the war ended before his plane was sent.
Getting a second chance is what taught him to make the most of life, he said. After returning to the farm where he grew up, he saw a few stalks of celery growing. The vegetable was then rare in Japan, but he figured out how to make it flourish in the local soil, turning it into a cash crop in this alpine region. In 1970, Emperor Hirohito recognized Mr. Marumo with an award for promoting agriculture.
He also became an enthusiast of tanka, a type of short poem. Mr. Marumo said the brisk rhythms resemble the martial songs that had once convinced him to volunteer to die during the war, but he has used his poems to celebrate peace. In 2002, he took over the magazine dedicated to tanka, which he has edited and published ever since.
After the war, he kept up ice skating mainly for exercise. As a City Council member in the late 1980s, Mr. Marumo convinced leaders to build the city’s own speedskating rink. But he never imagined that he himself would one day race competitively.
He was already 86 when a friend persuaded him to enter a race. “There’s no one else your age competing,” the friend told him. “You’ll get a medal just for showing up.”
Becoming a competitive racer has not changed his lifestyle, he said. The skating remains his main source of exercise, and he does little or no additional training. “My philosophy is not to overdo it,” he said.
He admits travel can be exhausting, especially long flights overseas, but his forgetfulness makes it harder. He once showed up at the airport without his passport, which caused him to miss his flight — and almost the entire competition.
Still, Mr. Marumo says he is hooked on speedskating, which has become a new way to celebrate a life that was almost cut short by war — and that he’s not ready to give up on yet.
“I retired once,” Mr. Marumo said. “I don’t want to do that again.”
Houthis Vow Retaliation Against U.S., Saying Yemen Strikes Killed at Least 53
The Houthi militia in Yemen has vowed to retaliate after President Trump ordered large-scale military strikes on targets controlled by the group that it says killed at least 53 people.
The group, which is backed by Iran, said that women and children were among those killed in the strikes on Saturday, the most significant U.S. military action in the Middle East since Mr. Trump took office in January.
For more than a year, the Houthis have launched attacks against Israel and threatened commercial shipping in the Red Sea in solidarity with their ally Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza. The Houthis suspended the campaign in January after a cease-fire was reached in Gaza but have vowed to step up attacks again after Israel instituted a blockade on aid to the enclave this month.
The U.S. airstrikes targeted Houthi-controlled areas across Yemen, including the capital, Sana, as well as Saada, al-Bayda, Hajjah and Dhamar Provinces, according to reports from Houthi-run media channels. The strikes killed at least 53 people and wounded 98, Anis al-Asbahi, a spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry, said on Sunday.
The casualty figures could not be independently verified, and the United States has not given any estimates for the number of people killed or wounded in the strikes.
On Sunday, Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, described the U.S. weekend attacks on Yemen as both successful and effective. “We hit the Houthi leadership, killing several of their key leaders last night, their infrastructure, the missiles,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” He cast the Houthis as “essentially Al Qaeda with sophisticated Iranian-backed air defenses and anti-ship cruise missiles and drones” that have attacked the entire global economy.
The U.S. Central Command, which posted a video of a bomb leveling a building compound in Yemen, said that Washington had employed precision strikes to “defend American interests, deter enemies and restore freedom of navigation.”
U.S. airstrikes also targeted a power facility in the northwestern town of Dahyan, causing a nightlong electricity blackout, residents said.
A United Nations spokesperson expressed concern about the American strikes while also noting recent Houthi threats to resume attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
The Houthi-run Al-Masirah television channel reported that 13 people were killed and nine others wounded in airstrikes on al-Jeraf, a district in Sana that is considered a stronghold of the group. In Saada Province, in the northwest, 10 people, including four children, were killed when airstrikes hit two buildings, the report said.
Residents in Sana shared images and videos on social media showing shattered windows and fireballs rising from sites that were struck. Others posted anguished messages as the airstrikes hit.
Abdul Rahman al-Nuerah, a resident of Sana, said the blasts had shattered the windows of his home and terrified his four children. “I instantly embraced and comforted them,” Mr. al-Nuerah said by telephone. “Children and mothers are afraid and still in shock.”
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi leader, vowed retaliation against the United States, calling the strikes unjustified. “We shall respond to the escalation by escalating,” he wrote on X.
The Houthi rebels, who control most of northern Yemen, had temporarily halted attacks in the Red Sea when a cease-fire took effect in Gaza in January. But last week, they said they would target any Israeli ships violating their ban on Israeli vessels passing through the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden.
The Bab el-Mandeb is a strait between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, which opens into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform that the strikes were also intended as a warning to Iran, the Houthis’ main backer.
“Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY!” he wrote. He also warned Iran against threatening the United States, saying, “America will hold you fully accountable, and we won’t be nice about it!”
Some military analysts and former American commanders said on Sunday that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping. “This is long, long overdue,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said in a telephone interview on Sunday.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Sunday that the United States would conduct an “unrelenting” campaign of strikes against the Houthis until the militant group ceased its actions in the Red Sea.
“This isn’t a one-night thing. This will continue until you say, ‘We’re done shooting at ships. We’re done shooting at assets,’” Mr. Hegseth told Fox News on Sunday. “This campaign is about freedom of navigation and restoring deterrence.”
Iran strongly condemned the strikes.
Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, called them a violation of international law regarding the use of force and respect for national sovereignty.
And Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force, denied on Sunday that his country was making policy decisions for the rebels in Yemen. The Houthi militia “makes its own strategic decisions” and Tehran plays “no role in setting the national or operational policies” of the group, he was quoted as saying by Iranian state news agencies.
Days after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to redesignate the Houthis a “foreign terrorist organization,” calling the group a threat to regional security.
The order restored a designation given to the group late in the first Trump administration. The Biden administration lifted the designation shortly after taking office, partly to facilitate peace talks in Yemen’s civil war.
Last year, the Biden administration labeled the Houthis a “specially designated global terrorist” group — a less severe category — in response to attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Saturday told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that all sides should cease from the “use of force” in Yemen and enter a “political dialogue,” according to the Russian foreign ministry. Moscow has condemned past U.S. and British strikes on Yemen.
Hezbollah, another armed proxy for Iran in the region, voiced its condemnation of the U.S. strikes on Yemen and described it as a “war crime,” according to a statement on Sunday.
Carol Rosenberg, Eric Schmitt and Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.
Vatican Releases First Photo of Pope Francis Since He Was Hospitalized
The Vatican on Sunday released the first photo of Pope Francis since he was hospitalized 31 days ago, showing him facing the altar in the small chapel that is part of his private suite at a hospital in Rome.
Francis celebrated Mass with other priests for the first time since he was admitted to the Policlinico A. Gemelli hospital, the Vatican said. He continued his physiotherapy — both motor and respiratory — on Sunday, and he seemed to be “benefiting from it,” the Vatican said.
The pontiff is shown in the photo wearing a purple stole, reflective of this being the season of Lent.
Earlier in the day, balloons in the Vatican colors of yellow and white were held aloft by dozens of children who had gathered in the square outside the hospital and chanted “Papa Francesco” and cheered “Viva la Pace” — hurray for peace.
Many held up signs, hoping that the pope might peek out of the windows of his 10th-floor hospital suite to see their art. They offered encouragement, wishing that the pope get well soon. One boy with a boisterous group of blue-and-yellow capped “castorini,” or beavers, as children too young to be Cub Scouts are known in Italy, held a sign that said “Ciao Papa Cesco, I love you a lot.”
The pope did not appear at the windows of his 10th-floor suite, but he acknowledged the children’s presence in his traditional Sunday blessing and prayer.
“I know that many children are praying for me; some of them came here today to Gemelli as a sign of closeness,’’ the pontiff said in offering his traditional Sunday blessing, which was not delivered live for the fifth time. “Thank you, dearest children! The pope loves you and is always waiting to meet you,’’ Francis wrote.
The Rev. Enzo Fortunato, the president of the pontifical committee for World Children’s Day, who organized the gathering, said “children transmit joy” and their presence in the square was a “symbolic medicine for Pope Francis.”
Francis was admitted to the Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14 with respiratory infections and bronchitis that developed into pneumonia in both lungs. He suffered several setbacks, including mild kidney failure and a few respiratory crises. He was in critical condition until last Monday, when doctors said he was no longer in imminent danger of dying from pneumonia.
Even so, his condition remains complex because of his age — 88 — as well as his pre-existing lung disease. In 1957, Francis had part of his right lung removed.
His condition has been stable for the past week. The Vatican said Saturday that Francis still required “inpatient medical therapy, motor and respiratory physiotherapy,” treatments that “show further, gradual improvements.” The Vatican also said doctors were gradually reducing the need for noninvasive mechanical ventilation at night, substituting it with high-flow oxygen therapy.
In Sunday’s written address, Francis acknowledged his frailty.
“I am facing a period of trial, and I join with so many brothers and sisters who are sick: fragile, at this time, like me,” he said. “Our bodies are weak but, even like this, nothing can prevent us from loving, praying, giving ourselves, being for each other, in faith, shining signs of hope.”
Some 50 children from Caivano, an impoverished town on the outskirts of Naples, woke up at dawn to be at the Gemelli hospital.
“The pope for them is the pope of peace, he’s their hero in a contemporary world where heroes are in short supply,” said Andrea Iacomini, spokesman of Unicef Italy, who accompanied them.
Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down to their lowest level in decades. Once-crowded migrant shelters are empty. Instead of heading north, people stranded in Mexico are starting to return home in bigger numbers.
The border is almost unrecognizable from just a couple of years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people from around the world were crossing into the United States every month in scenes of chaos and upheaval.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr., facing a swell of public outrage during the 2024 election campaign, clamped down on asylum seekers and pushed Mexico to keep migrants at bay. By the end of his term, the border had quieted significantly and illegal crossings had fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency.
Now, President Trump has choked off the flow of migrants even more drastically, solidifying a sweeping turn in U.S. policy with measures that many critics, especially those on the left, have long considered politically unpalatable, legally untenable and ultimately ineffective because they don’t tackle the root causes of migration.
“The entire migration paradigm is shifting,” said Eunice Rendón, the coordinator of Migrant Agenda, a coalition of Mexican advocacy groups. Citing Mr. Trump’s array of policies and his threats targeting migrants, she added, “Families are terrified.”
Mr. Trump is employing several hard-line tactics simultaneously: halting asylum indefinitely for people seeking refuge in the United States through the southern border; deploying troops to hunt down, and, perhaps just as crucially, scare away border crossers; widely publicizing deportation flights in which migrants are sent home in shackles; and strong-arming governments in Latin America — like Mexico’s — to do more to curb migration.
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Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews were once exempt from military service — but now they are being drafted.
One of those new draftees, Yechiel Wais, was excited, hoping the military would help him integrate into Israeli society.
Chaim Krausz tossed his draft orders, believing armed service would undermine his religious ideals.
And Itamar Greenberg responded by turning himself in to a military prison: He would rather serve time than fight.
Israel’s Newest Army Recruits: the Ultra-Orthodox
They weren’t supposed to fight.
At Israel’s founding in 1948, the new nation’s leaders agreed that ultra-Orthodox men — known as the Haredim, or God-fearing, in Hebrew — would be spared from mandatory military service. In exchange, Haredi leaders lent their support for the largely secular state.
The arrangement held for Israel’s first 75 years, until the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
The resulting war in Gaza pulled hundreds of thousands of Israelis into battle — but hardly any ultra-Orthodox. The dynamic exacerbated tensions that had been simmering for years.
The Haredim, who average more than six children per family, now make up 14 percent of the nation, up from 5 percent in 1948. In 40 years, they are on track to account for half of all Israeli children.
As the numbers of Haredim have grown, many Israelis have become frustrated that their own sons and daughters are sent to fight while the Haredim receive government subsidies to study the Torah.
Last summer, the tensions broke open. Under pressure, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that ultra-Orthodox men were no longer exempt from service. The military has since sent draft orders to 10,000 Haredi men. Just 338 have shown up for duty.
Israel is now confronting one of its messiest and most fundamental dilemmas: Its fastest growing sect won’t serve in the military.
After the Supreme Court decision, The New York Times began following three Haredi teenagers who represent the divergent paths for the Haredim and Israel.
Chaim Krausz, 19, studies the Torah for 14 hours a day, just like his father before him. He has protested the Supreme Court decision and believes armed service is not only a sin, but also a threat to ultra-Orthodox traditions.
Itamar Greenberg, 18, a former ultra-Orthodox seminary student, has also protested against the Israeli state, but his reasons are not religious. “They’ve been committing a massacre in Gaza,” he said.
Yechiel Wais, 19, also once studied in a seminary, but had dreams of a life outside his strict ultra-Orthodox community and left for the work force. Then his draft orders arrived.
“It’s not an entry ticket to Israeli society,” Mr. Wais said of a position in the Israeli military. “But it’s the minimum requirement.”
The soldier
Growing up, Mr. Wais wore a black-and-white suit. Like most ultra-Orthodox males, it was practically his only outfit.
But one year for Purim, a Jewish holiday when many children wear costumes, he dressed up as an Israeli soldier. He lived near an Israeli Air Force base and loved watching the F-16 fighter jets from behind a fence.
The idea of him, a Haredi boy, growing up to be a soldier felt impossible. “I didn’t even fantasize about it,” he said.
Ultra-Orthodox men are supposed to devote themselves to a life of study and prayer. For many, that includes isolation from the outside, secular world: no internet, no television and no radio.
At Mr. Wais’s home, even the CD player was “kosher” — its radio antenna removed. One day, when Mr. Wais was listening to music, he suddenly heard a voice through static. His headphones had unwittingly picked up a radio signal. After that, he spent hours surreptitiously listening to the radio, discovering a very different world.
It was the beginning of his exit from a strict ultra-Orthodox life. When he turned 17 in 2022, he told his parents he wanted to leave the yeshiva to work. They were stunned, but acquiesced. They took him to a mall to shop for clothes for his new life.
He found a job outside Tel Aviv. Then, when he heard about the Supreme Court decision, he found a new path, fighting for his country.
The student
Mr. Krausz has no interest in secular Israeli society.
He spends most of his time under the tutelage of rabbis who warn against a long list of sins, including any contact with women outside his family before marriage. He hardly leaves his densely packed ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, where signs — including above his family home — warn passers-by to dress modestly so as not to offend residents.
It is how he wants to live.
Thousands of Haredi men in Israel receive government subsidies to study the Torah, while their wives often work. In Israel, 53 percent of Haredi men are employed, versus 80 percent of Haredi women. For Israelis who are not ultra-Orthodox, employment rates exceed 80 percent.
The Haredi population is also soaring — from 40,000 in 1948 to 1.3 million today.
Mr. Krausz is one of 18 children. In his four-room house, people sleep around the dining room table. He wants the same big family. “The more the better,” he said. His parents are searching for a wife for him.
The government had long funded at least a fifth of yeshivas’ budgets; donors cover the rest. Then earlier this year, an Israeli court halted public funding to yeshivas that teach military-age men, part of the push to get more Haredim into the military.
The decision doesn’t bother Mr. Krausz. One of the reasons he resists military service is that he opposes the concept of the Israeli state.
Mr. Krausz’s sect, Yahadut Haharedi, says there should not be a Jewish state until the messiah arrives.
The activist
In the weeks before his new life in the military, Mr. Wais headed out for a night out with friends. Sliding into the car, Mr. Wais wrinkled his nose and said, “The lefty sitting next to me is sweaty.”
That “lefty” he referred to was his friend, Mr. Greenberg, who was indeed far to the left ideologically — and sweaty. He had come directly from an antiwar demonstration and had stickers on his shirt to show for it.
The two had met on social media months earlier and formed a friendship as young Haredi men trying to fit into broader society.
At age 12, Mr. Greenberg began questioning his faith with a censored version of the internet as a guide, dreaming of life outside his community. “The only way to become a part of Israeli society is to get drafted,” he recalled thinking. “That was one of the most accurate realizations I had in my life.”
By 16, his views had evolved further — and to the left. He became a vegan, stopped believing in God and developed a fierce opposition to the Israeli occupation.
He also opposes the drafting of the ultra-Orthodox, but for different reasons than most. “It’s important to integrate the ultra-Orthodox people into Israeli society,” he said. “And to work for equality. But I don’t care about equality in killing and oppression.”
In the car to Jerusalem, Mr. Wais and Mr. Greenberg jokingly exchanged digs. They drank colorful cocktails at a friend’s apartment and then headed to a Haredi haunt that served traditional Jewish foods like chopped liver and cholent, a slow-cooked stew. Eventually the conversation turned to politics.
“I’m not willing to take part in a system that commits such crimes,” Mr. Greenberg said to Mr. Wais in the car.
“Which crimes?” Mr. Wais responded.
“Do you want a list?” Mr. Greenberg said.
It would be their last night out together. Both had been drafted. While Mr. Wais was preparing for basic training, Mr. Greenberg was preparing to report to a military prison as a conscientious objector. His ultra-Orthodox family reluctantly accepted his new views, including his father, a rare Haredi man who serves in the Army reserves.
He was not accepted by his bunk mates. Once in prison, Mr. Greenberg realized that his fellow inmates were not activists like him, but soldiers accused of crimes. They taunted and threatened him, he said, and guards sometimes put him in solitary confinement for his own protection. “They hate the army,” he said of the other prisoners, “but they hate me more.”
Last month, after 197 days incarcerated across five separate prison stints, Mr. Greenberg walked out of the prison for what he hoped was the final time. “The army’s decided to release me,” he said, dressed in a green sweatshirt with smiley faces.
“But the broader goal was to build a better future, for everyone from Jordan to the sea,” he added. “I’m not done with that yet.”
An ultra-Orthodox platoon
Over the past several decades, hundreds of Haredi men had defied their community and volunteered for military service, but most had been kept away from combat. Mr. Wais wanted to be different: He wanted to fight.
“I don’t like war,” he said. “But I like action in the street — the soldiers and rockets.”
Yet after a medical exam revealed he needed ear surgery, military officials told him he was not cut out for combat. Instead, he would maintain aircraft.
In August, he arrived at an air force base in Israel’s north and was assigned to a unit with two dozen other Haredi soldiers. They shed their traditional black-and-white garb for mechanics’ jumpsuits, but kept their kipas, or traditional skullcaps. Many also still wore payot, or side curls, common among the ultra-Orthodox. Mr. Wais had shaved his years earlier.
Their barracks and lunch tables were separated from other soldiers to avoid mixing with women, which could violate Haredi principles. Their food was cooked to even stricter kosher standards. They prayed and studied religious texts for two to three hours a day — the most Mr. Wais said he had studied since leaving the seminary.
“There isn’t a soldier here who could complain how we’re being treated with regard to religious issues,” he said.
On a recent day, Mr. Wais and two fellow Haredi soldiers went through final training on maintenance for an F-16 fighter jet. They were the same jets he used to watch as a child.
Afterward, the soldiers gathered for a sermon from a Haredi rabbi. They were set to graduate from training the next day.
“We are in the middle of the biggest war of all,” the rabbi, David Viseman, told the teenagers.
“You have to prepare your souls to cling to goodness in the world,” he added. “To erase evil.”
Now he is working as an aircraft technician in a special ultra-Orthodox unit of the Israeli Air Force’s 105th Scorpion Squadron.
“We are the new pioneers,” he said. “We are marching at the head of a movement.”
An ultra-Orthodox protest
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To Mr. Krausz, the evil are the Haredim in the military.
“It’s the way I look at any Jew who breaks the Shabbat,” he said, referring to the Jewish day of rest. “It’s forbidden to love them.”
He was more forgiving of secular soldiers. “Of course they don’t know better,” he said, puffing on a strawberry-kiwi-flavored vape at his dining room table, shelves of religious texts behind him.
His biggest fear is that the ultra-Orthodox faith won’t survive if Haredi men must fight.
After the Supreme Court decision, Mr. Krausz joined thousands of other Haredi men in the streets. They crowded around an enlistment office and harassed the Haredi draftees going in.
The Israeli Army said in a statement that Haredi men who ignore draft orders “may face criminal sanctions.”
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Yet unlike Mr. Greenberg, who turned himself in to the authorities, Mr. Krausz and his peers have largely avoided consequences.
Any effort to force them to serve, Mr. Krausz warned, would not be taken lightly.
“We are willing to die to not go to the army,” he said.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Haifa, Israel.
In most countries, working as a housekeeper or nanny is a relatively safe profession.
Yet as we traveled across Kenya and Uganda, from crowded and poor urban neighborhoods to far-flung farming villages, we heard many variations on the same horror story: Young, healthy women set off for domestic jobs in Saudi Arabia, only to return beaten, scarred or in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyans, nearly all of them women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years. At least 55 died just last year, twice as many as the previous year.
Autopsies only raised more questions. The body of a woman from Uganda showed extensive bruising and signs of electrocution, yet her death was labeled “natural.” We found a surprising number of women who fell from roofs, balconies or, in one case, an opening for an air-conditioner.
How could this be? This was hardly some obscure industry with fly-by-night players. East African women are recruited by the thousands and trained by well-established companies, then sent to Saudi Arabia through a process regulated and approved by the Ugandan, Kenyan and Saudi governments.
Worker advocates have long blamed archaic Saudi labor laws. But we wondered if something else was at play. We spent nearly a year trying to figure it out.
Workers are being sold a dream that, often, becomes a nightmare.
We interviewed more than 90 workers and their families, and carefully analyzed employment contracts whenever we could.
We found that women from Kenya and Uganda are lured to Saudi Arabia with promises of better wages and opportunities.
Recruitment agencies and their brokers give misleading information about wages and make workers sign contracts they can’t read.
Some agencies market women as products. Agency websites offer workers “for sale” to Saudi clients. We saw one that had a click-to-collect option.
When women arrive in the kingdom, employers often confiscate their passports and belongings. Kenyan housekeepers in Saudi Arabia work for $250 or so a month. But many women told us that their new bosses shortchanged them or denied them wages, declaring, “I bought you.”
Powerful people are making money off these women.
Using the employment contracts and, whenever we could find them, autopsies, police reports or legal documents, we began looking into companies that profited off these women.
Corporate records and securities filings led us to powerful people, including officials who could be protecting these workers.
High-ranking officials in Kenya and Uganda and their families, we found, own stakes in staffing agencies.
Fabian Kyule Muli, for example, is a member of Kenya’s Parliament and also owns an agency that sends women to Saudi Arabia. He is the vice chairman of a parliamentary labor committee, a job in which he can pass laws protecting workers. The committee has at times been a champion for sending more people to Saudi Arabia, and has denied that workers are hurt there.
In Saudi Arabia, members of the royal family, including descendants of King Faisal, have been major investors in agencies that supply domestic workers. Senior Saudi officials also hold high-ranking positions with staffing agencies.
Despite years of mounting evidence of abuse, leaders including President William Ruto of Kenya have vowed to send more workers abroad. One of his top advisers owned a staffing company. So does Sedrack Nzaire, whom Ugandan media identifies as the brother of that country’s longtime president, Yoweri Museveni.
Women who are abused have little recourse.
In interviews, women told us through tears that their bosses in Saudi Arabia denied them food, raped them, assaulted them with bleach or stabbed them.
Yet East African governments have ignored calls from activists and human rights groups to negotiate better labor agreements with Saudi Arabia. The employment treaties include only minimal worker safeguards.
The Saudi government says its law enforcement and courts protect workers against abuse and help them seek recourse. But women told us they were unable to access such resources, and police sent them back to abusive employers or government-funded facilities that felt like prisons.
Many abused workers must pay for their own flight home, despite regulations saying that they should not have to do so. Our reporting found that desperate workers often returned home broke, disabled and suicidal.
And in the cases of serious injury or death, families have to navigate a web of red tape, apathy and impunity. In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa told us about learning that his wife had died in Saudi Arabia.
Her employer gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
“I told him that whether you send me the money or you don’t send me the money, me, I want the body of my wife,” Mr. Waiswa told us.
Two days before last Christmas, Dr. Pierre S. Prince took an exciting new job as director of Haiti’s largest public hospital, which the United States spent tens of millions of dollars renovating and is so deep in gang territory that it has been closed for a year.
Dr. Prince, a 57-year-old thoracic surgeon, looked forward to returning to the State University Hospital of Haiti, which had been ravaged by the 2010 earthquake that decimated the country’s capital.
He did his residency there and was going to oversee a new wing, a 500-bed facility with nearly $100 million in renovations and a range of services, including operating rooms, orthopedics and a maternity and neonatal unit.
On Christmas Eve, as he headed to work, gangs attacked a news conference scheduled to announce the hospital’s partial reopening, killing a police officer and two reporters, and seriously injuring seven other journalists. The reopening never happened.
The situation worsened last month: Videos that circulated on social media and were verified by The New York Times showed an older building at the general hospital, as it is commonly known, engulfed in flames. Gang members had apparently set it on fire.
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