The New York Times 2024-08-23 00:10:23


Officials Try to Salvage Negotiations for a Cease-Fire in Gaza

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Biden said that talks in Cairo could ‘remove any remaining obstacles,’ but Israel and Hamas are skeptical.

Last-ditch efforts to salvage talks on a cease-fire in Gaza continued on Thursday, hours after President Biden emphasized the “urgency” of closing the deal in a phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel amid dimming prospects for a breakthrough.

In the call on Wednesday, Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu discussed upcoming talks in Cairo “to remove any remaining obstacles” to the proposed cease-fire and hostage release deal, according to a statement from the White House.

There was no mention of when those talks might take place, although the White House had said a few days ago that senior negotiators hoped to reconvene in Cairo to finalize the agreement before the end of this week. Mr. Netanyahu’s office confirmed that the call had taken place but did not offer details. An Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Vice President Kamala Harris joined the call.

The Biden administration has been leading the latest push for a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, with Egypt and Qatar acting as mediators, and has presented a “bridging proposal” meant to close, or at least narrow, the gaps between the sides.

But a visit to the region this week by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ended without any apparent resolution to major sticking points — and in acrimony, with Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas officials trading blame for obstructing progress.

One main focus of disagreement is Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on maintaining an Israeli military presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow piece of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. The Israeli leader has argued that the area has served as a main conduit for weapons smuggling into Gaza, and that abandoning it would allow Hamas to quickly rearm.

Egypt and Hamas strongly object to continued Israeli control of the area, calling for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and Israeli security officials have suggested that other solutions can be found.

Israeli negotiators were taken aback and, in some cases, angered by Mr. Blinken’s statements this week that Mr. Netanyahu had accepted the American bridging proposal and that it was now up to Hamas, according to people familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the thinking within Israel’s top security and decision-making circles.

Those statements — which came after a nearly three-hour meeting on Monday between Mr. Blinken and Mr. Netanyahu — made it appear that the Israeli prime minister and the Biden administration saw eye-to-eye on an issue that Hamas clearly would not accede to, one of the people said, dooming the prospects of an agreement. Instead, they said, Mr. Blinken could have just called more vaguely for flexibility on both sides.

The details of the bridging proposal have not been made public. An Israeli official with knowledge of the talks, who was not authorized to speak about them publicly, cautioned that few people really know what is being said behind closed doors, and said that talks were continuing at various levels as part of a difficult negotiation.

Before departing Qatar, the last stop on his regional tour, Mr. Blinken apparently engaged in some damage control, saying, “The agreement is very clear on the schedule and the locations of I.D.F. withdrawals from Gaza,” referring to the Israeli military. He added: “Israel has agreed to that.”

In a follow-up call on Wednesday with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, Mr. Blinken underscored that the bridging proposal addressed the remaining gaps “in a manner that allows for swift implementation of the deal,” according to a State Department readout of the call.

Mr. Blinken and the emir “welcomed the next round of talks in Cairo,” the statement added, without specifying a date. A meeting between Mr. Blinken and the emir planned for earlier in the week in Qatar was called off because Mr. Al-Thani was feeling unwell.

The Biden administration, Egypt and Qatar have also pushed for a cease-fire in hopes that it will calm tensions between Israel and Iran, which has pledged to retaliate for the killings last month of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, two of its proxy forces in the region. Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister, will travel to Iran in the coming days for talks with senior officials, Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported on Thursday.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

KEy developments

A deadly Israeli airstrike hits the West Bank, and other news.

  • An Israeli airstrike hit the West Bank town of Tulkarm, the Israeli military and Palestinian news media reported on Thursday. Three Palestinians were killed in the Thursday morning strike, which hit a home in Tulkarm, according to Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited control in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A spokesman for the Israeli military, Avichay Adraee, said that an Air Force unit had targeted “armed terrorists.” Nearly 600 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank from the start of the war in Gaza in October through Aug. 12, according to the United Nations.

  • Israeli warplanes attacked more than 10 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon overnight, the Israeli military said in a statement on Thursday. Israeli forces have conducted at least two similar rounds of strikes against the powerful Iranian-backed militia this week. The two sides have traded cross-border strikes for months.

An E.U. naval ship rescues the crew of an oil tanker attacked by missiles in the Red Sea.

The crew of a Greek-flagged oil tanker that came under gun and missile attack in the Red Sea has been rescued after they were forced to evacuate the vessel into a lifeboat, a European Union naval mission said on Thursday. The attack appears to have been the most serious in weeks against commercial shipping off the coast of Yemen.

The Yemen-based Houthi militia, which has staged a series of attacks against commercial ships in the Red Sea in what it says is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, has not claimed responsibility.

The tanker, the Sounion, was sailing about 90 miles west of the Yemeni port of Hudaydah early on Wednesday when two small boats approached it, said a statement on social media from Britain’s maritime trade agency, which is based in Dubai.

“The first craft had three to five persons onboard while the second had approximately 10,” the statement said. “The two small craft hailed the merchant vessel, leading to a brief exchange of small-arms fire.”

The small craft retreated and the ship was then hit by three “unidentified projectiles,” starting a fire and causing the ship to lose engine power, it said. It was not clear on Thursday whether the fire had been extinguished.

The crew were rescued by a ship from an E.U. military mission, Operation Aspides, that has been mounted in response to attacks by the Houthi militia, according to a statement the mission posted on social media Thursday.

The statement included a photograph showing an enclosed lifeboat, typical in the oil industry, bobbing in the water and a second photo of crew members aboard a rescue speedboat.

After coming under attack, the ship’s captain called for help. The E.U. military destroyed what it described as an “unmanned surface vessel” that had posed an imminent danger to the Sounion. The crew was being transported to Djibouti, the statement said.

The stricken vessel, which was carrying 150,000 metric tons of crude oil, was still floating and had become a “navigational and environmental hazard,” according to the E.U. statement. A statement from Delta Tankers, the ship’s operator, said it would be moved to a safer place for repairs. It was not clear whether any oil was leaking.

The Houthi militia, which is backed by Iran, began firing late last year on ships entering the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal, which is a vital artery for vessels moving between Asia, Europe and the eastern United States.

The United States and Britain have launched strikes against the Houthis in response, but analysts have said they have done little to damage the militia’s military infrastructure. The attacks have continued, forcing ships to find alternative routes and disrupting global trade. Oil prices on Thursday were little changed, trading near their lowest levels of the year.

Over the course of dozens of attacks, at least two vessels have sunk and at least three crew members have been killed.

Jason Karaian contributed reporting.

Advocates for Palestinians vie for attention at the Democratic convention.

Behind the scenes at the Democratic National Convention, delegates from Uncommitted, a movement calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel, demanded that a speaker of Palestinian descent address the convention from the main stage, as relatives of a hostage being held in Gaza spoke on Wednesday evening.

The group urged the party in a statement on Wednesday to show balance “by ensuring Palestinian voices are heard on the main stage.” With the convention concluding Thursday, the group added, the absence of Palestinians addressing the gathering “sends a troubling message to our antiwar voters, suggesting they aren’t truly included in this party.”

The statement came after a Jewish magazine, The Forward, reported that the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was abducted from Israel on Oct. 7 in the Hamas-led attack that set off the war, would speak at the convention on Wednesday night. “We strongly support that decision and also strongly hope that we will also be hearing from Palestinians,” Uncommitted wrote.

Hours later, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, Chicago natives, took to the convention stage. Wearing pieces of masking tape with the number 320 — the number of days their son has been a hostage — they were greeted with a standing ovation and chants of “Bring them home!” Ms. Goldberg briefly broke down in tears.

“At this moment, 109 treasured human beings are being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza,” she said. “They are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.”

Ms. Goldberg noted that the hostages were from 23 countries, including eight Americans, one of which is her only son, who like the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, was born in Oakland, Calif. Part of his left arm was blown off by a Hamas grenade on the day he was abducted.

“This is a political convention,” Mr. Polin said. “But needing our only son and all of the cherished hostages home is not a political issue.” He called for a cease-fire, saying, “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners.”

Keith Ellison, attorney general of Minnesota — and in 2006, the first Muslim elected to Congress — also called for a cease-fire in Gaza and for the return of the hostages.

Uncommitted’s campaign to make the war in Gaza a focus of the convention comes as the death toll there has surpassed 40,000, according to Gazan health authorities. Hopes for the survival or recovery of the more than 100 hostages, some believed to be dead, who are still being held in the enclave have grown dimmer. The Israeli military announced on Tuesday that its forces had recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in Gaza, and the latest effort by the Biden administration to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas appeared to have reached a stumbling block, with many issues unresolved.

“The D.N.C. coincides with a critical moment in the negotiations,” Johnathan Dekel-Chen, the father of Sagui Dekel-Chen, a 35-year-old Israeli American hostage, said in an interview. He has been at the convention with the relatives of other American hostages talking to Democratic leaders about the need for a deal, arguing that without an agreement in the coming weeks, there’s a high risk of an escalation of conflicts in the Middle East.

“The moment is critical not just for the hostages but for the region,” he said.

Margaret DeReus, who heads the Middle East Institute for Understanding’s policy project, a nonprofit advocacy group working with Uncommitted, said in a phone interview from Chicago that as she and her colleagues have walked the convention floor — wearing stoles printed to resemble kaffiyehs, the black-and-white scarves that have become a symbol of Palestinians and bearing the words “Democrats for Palestinians” — many attendees have expressed strong support for a permanent cease-fire. But the official convention program has left her feeling “completely alienated,” she said, giving her “a feeling that the party wants to brush the issue of Gaza under the rug.”

Democratic leadership is out of touch with its base when it comes to the war in Gaza, Ms. DeReus argued. But she said she was hopeful that Ms. Harris would “say something that indicates a serious, tangible shift” from the Biden administration’s current policy of staunch support for Israel when she accepts the party’s nomination in a speech Thursday evening.

Rania Batrice, a Democratic strategist of Palestinian descent who was a deputy campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont when he ran for president in 2016, said Ms. Harris had used “much more humanizing” language when speaking about the plight of the Palestinians, in what she described as a welcome change in rhetoric. The shift is meaningful to Ms. Batrice and her community, she said. “But that won’t stop the bombings in Gaza.”

The War in Gaza Is Making Thousands of Orphans

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Is India a Safe Place for Women? Another Brutal Killing Raises the Question.

In December 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student boarded a bus in New Delhi a little after 9 p.m., expecting it would take her home. Instead, she was gang-raped and assaulted so viciously with an iron rod that her intestines were damaged. She died days later as India erupted in rage.

Nearly 12 years later, the nation is convulsing with anger once again — this time, over the ghastly rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor in a Kolkata hospital, as she rested in a seminar room after a late-night shift. Since the Aug 9. killing, thousands of doctors have gone on strike to demand a safer work environment and thousands more people have taken to the streets to demand justice.

For a country desperate to be seen as a global leader, repeated high-profile cases of brutal sexual assaults highlight an uncomfortable truth: India, by many measures, remains one of the world’s most unsafe places for women. Rape and domestic violence are relatively common, and conviction rates are low.

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Labor Dispute Halts Rail Freight in Canada, Raising Supply Chain Concerns

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Mike Lynch’s Body Found After Sicily Yacht Sinking, Official Says

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Sugar Industry Faces Pressure Over Coerced Hysterectomies and Labor Abuses

The sugar industry is facing pressure to clean up its supply chains and improve oversight after revelations that women in India, the world’s second-largest sugar producer, work in debt bondage and are coerced into getting hysterectomies.

In the wake of the report, a group of labor leaders in India went on a three-day hunger strike recently to demand better working conditions. One of the companies that buys sugar in Maharashtra, Coca-Cola, quietly met with Indian government leaders and sugar suppliers last month to discuss responsible harvesting. And Bonsucro, a sugar industry body that sets standards, said that it would create a human rights task force.

The investigation into the sugar industry, by The New York Times and The Fuller Project, revealed a range of labor abuses, including that female sugar cane cutters in the western India state of Maharashtra were pushed into illegal child marriages so that they could work alongside their husbands. Locked into debt to their employers, the women are forced to return to the fields season after season, the report found.

Women also described facing pressure to undergo hysterectomies for routine ailments like painful periods, adding that they usually had to borrow from their employers to pay for the surgery. That often ended the women’s periods and kept them in the fields, but such procedures can also have consequences including early menopause.

Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years, the investigation revealed. But multinational companies have done little in response. One mill that profited off abuses even received a seal of approval from Bonsucro. (Major brands like Coke, PepsiCo, Unilever and General Mills have used Bonsucro endorsements to bolster the images of their supply chains.)

Since the investigation was published, labor and environmental groups on Bonsucro’s member council have pushed to create a task force to improve inspections and to determine how inspectors missed the abuses. Bonsucro’s chief executive, Danielle Morley, had been aware that coerced hysterectomies were a problem in Maharashtra, the investigation found, but no one told inspectors to look out for it.

Companies were slow to agree to a task force, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the process, but they ultimately endorsed its creation.

Bonsucro said in an email that the working group had “received widespread support” from members. But Jason Glaser, who sits on the Bonsucro members council and is chief of La Isla Network, a Washington-based research group focusing on workers’ health and safety, said that he would like to see the brands “make more vocal and clear commitments.”

“They shouldn’t outsource the solution completely,” he added, referring to the task force. “They’ve made their money on the way things are, and the way things are is bad.”

Mr. Glaser said that the task force would initially focus on reports of coerced hysterectomies.

At the heart of the abuses is how workers are paid. Instead of wages, migrant workers in Maharashtra receive advances each season. Those function as loans that are repaid through work. With no documentation or rules governing the advances, workers often finish the season in debt and must return.

Workers said that they made the equivalent of $5 a day. Mill owners said that the workers had always been paid that way and that changing the practice would jeopardize their businesses by making it easier for workers to leave.

Maurice van Beers, a representative of the Dutch labor organization CNV Internationaal, said the industry’s focus needed to change. “I’ve been in discussions, sitting in a very luxurious conference room talking about sustainability, but it’s hard to talk about living wages for the poorest workers,” he said.

Coca-Cola and Pepsico have said that they are looking into the problems. Pepsico said that, when compared to Maharashtra’s total production, the company and its partners bought a relatively small amount of the state’s sugar.

After the investigation’s publication, Coca-Cola officials met with farm owners and Indian politicians to start a project called the Coalition for Responsible Sugarcane India.

Coca-Cola did not elaborate on the coalition’s goals, but said that it had expanded programs to work toward “continuous improvement” with suppliers in Maharashtra.

A union of cane harvesters in India said last week that the five labor leaders who had gone on hunger strike had carried out their protest at the sugar commissioner’s office in Pune, a city in Maharashtra.

Mr. Glaser of La Isla Network said that he would like to see a pilot project in which companies invested to improve the supply chain of a single sugar mill. That could cost $2 million to $3.5 million, he said, a tiny fraction of the profits of multinational companies. If successful, that could be a model.

“No one will go bankrupt or lose their competitive edge by making sure women aren’t forced to have hysterectomies,” Mr. Glaser said.

Qadri Inzamam, a reporter with The Fuller Project, contributed reporting.

Thailand Confirms Its First Case of New, Deadlier Mpox Version

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