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*Israeli Forces Enter Southern Gaza’s Largest City as Fears Grow for Civilians*
Israeli troops are fighting in “the heart” of southern Gaza’s largest city, a military commander announced on Tuesday, describing some of the heaviest combat of the two-month war amid growing concerns that there is almost nowhere left for civilians to flee.
After days of warning civilians to leave the city, Khan Younis, Israeli forces stepped up their attacks overnight. Intense bombing was heard early Tuesday from inside Nasser Hospital, the city’s largest, where many Palestinians who have sought shelter were sleeping in hallways.
In the days since the collapse of a seven-day truce, as Israeli forces have turned their focus to southern Gaza to root out what they say are Hamas fighters holed up there, Biden administration officials have said they had warned Israel to work harder to avoid harming Gazan civilians than it did in the war’s early weeks, and that Israel’s military appeared to be heeding that advice.
But more than 300 people were killed in Gaza each day between Saturday and Monday, according to figures released by Gazan health officials, a daily toll that resembled those from the earlier weeks of the war. The U.N. humanitarian office said that the period from Sunday to Monday afternoon “saw some of the heaviest shelling in Gaza so far.”
Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, was densely populated before the war, and it has become more crowded as people have fled the north to escape Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion.
Even before Israeli forces said on Tuesday that they were fighting in “the heart” of the city, conditions there were grim, with little access to running water or sanitation. People sleep in the open, and aid workers have largely stopped distributing water and flour because of the intensity of the fighting and Israeli bombardments, U.N. officials have said.
*Accounts of Sexual Violence by Hamas Are Aired Amid Criticism of U.N.*
A meeting at the U.N., organized in part by Sheryl Sandberg, accused the body of ignoring the rape and mutilation of women in the Oct. 7 assault on Israel, and heard gruesome details from witnesses.
The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.”
Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault on Israel, took long pauses as he spoke those words on Monday at an event at the United Nations.
“Horrific things I saw with my own eyes,” he said, “and I felt with my own hands.”
Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several who were killed on Oct. 7 “who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others had mutilated faces, or multiple gunshots to their heads.
Since the Oct. 7 attack, during which more than 1,200 people were killed and some 240 people were kidnapped, Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence — rape and sexual mutilation — particularly against women.
Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny from human rights groups, or the news media, amid the larger war between Israel and Hamas — and until a few days ago, they had not been specifically mentioned or condemned by UN Women, the United Nations’ women’s rights agency, which has regularly spoken out about the plight of Palestinian women and girls.
Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by an international social justice community — women’s groups, human rights groups, liberal celebrities, among others — whose causes they have supported in crises around the world.
On Monday, some 800 people, including women’s activists and diplomats representing about 40 countries, crowded into a chamber at U.N. headquarters in New York for a presentation laying out the evidence of large-scale sexual violence, with testimony from witnesses like Ms. Mendes and Mr. Greinman.
“Silence is complicity,” Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, told those assembled. She, along with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, was among the event’s primary organizers. “On Oct. 7, Hamas brutally murdered 1,200 souls and in some cases, they first raped their victims,” Ms. Sandberg added. “We know this from eyewitnesses, we know this from combat paramedics, we would know this from some victims if more had been allowed to live.”
Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sex crimes, which it said would violate Islamic principles.
But ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head.
Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said in an interview that it had documented “violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen,” on Oct. 7, against women and some men. “I am talking about dozens.”
*Reports Say Pope Francis Is Evicting U.S. Cardinal From His Vatican Home*
Word of the action against Cardinal Raymond Burke came after the prelate’s increasingly pointed critiques of the reform-minded pope.
Almost as soon as Pope Francis became the head of the Roman Catholic church in 2013, Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, emerged as his leading critic from within the church, becoming a de facto antipope for frustrated traditionalists who believed Francis was diluting doctrine.
Francis frequently demoted and stripped the American cleric of influence, but this month, the pope apparently finally had enough, according to one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Francis told a meeting of high-ranking Vatican officials that he intended to throw the cardinal out of his Vatican-subsidized apartment and deprive him of his salary as a retired cardinal.
The news of the possible eviction was first reported by the conservative Italian newspaper La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, which is close to Cardinal Burke and recently sponsored a conference featuring the prelate criticizing a major meeting of bishops convened by Francis. The newspaper’s report comes only weeks after Francis removed another vocal conservative critic, Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas, after a Vatican investigation into the governance of his diocese.
“If this is accurate, it is an atrocity that must be opposed,” Bishop Strickland said in a post on the social media platform X on Monday. “If it is false information it needs to be corrected immediately.”
The Vatican did not correct it. Asked about the report on Tuesday, the Vatican’s spokesman, Matteo Bruni, declined to confirm or deny it, telling reporters that “I don’t have anything particular to say about that.”
He said questions regarding the report should be put to Cardinal Burke. An email to Cardinal Burke’s secretary was not returned.
Francis told the heads of Vatican offices last week about his decision to punish Cardinal Burke because he was a source of “disunity” in the church, according to The Associated Press, which based its report on an unnamed official who attended the meeting. Another official told The A.P. that Francis later explained that he removed Cardinal Burke’s privileges because he was using them in his campaign against the church.
Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, also confirmed the report about the possible eviction with an anonymous prelate, who told the paper that the pope intended to take “measures of an economic nature and canonical penalties” against Cardinal Burke.
*What We Know About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks on Israel*
Israel has accused Hamas of committing abuses against large numbers of women. Hamas denies the allegations.
From the first days after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has accused Hamas terrorists of committing widespread sexual violence.
The Israeli authorities say they are investigating reports of sexual assault and have compiled considerable evidence — from witnesses, emergency medical workers and crime scene photographs — that they took place.
But they say it has been extremely difficult to collect the evidence because most of the victims are dead.
Many activists say that too little credence has been given to what they believe was a pattern of widespread rape during the attacks by Hamas.
The activists have complained that some news outlets questioned the veracity of the allegations and that international organizations like the United Nations were too slow to speak up about the issue.
Jewish women’s groups have organized a conference to take place at the United Nations on Monday to focus attention on the issue.
Hamas officials have denied the reports of sexual violence and said that any atrocities were committed by other armed groups that poured into Israel after Hamas fighters breached the barrier fence surrounding Gaza. But extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence of killings, including videos posted by Hamas fighters themselves, support the allegations.
This is what we know.
Israel Accuses Hamas of Mass Rape
Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, has said that “dozens” of women and some men were raped by Hamas militants on Oct. 7.
“We are investigating sexual crimes against both women and men perpetrated by Hamas terrorists,” Mr. Binyamin said in an interview with The New York Times. “There were violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen, of both women and men. I am talking about dozens.”
“This is an ongoing investigation,” Mr. Binyamin added. “I cannot get into details.”
Mr. Binyamin said a team of investigators had gathered “tens of thousands” of testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the attack, as well as from soldiers and emergency medical workers. He said intelligence officers were combing through banks of video imagery and photographs of the Hamas incursion. They have not shared any information about interviewing victims of rape.
Autopsies, forensic evidence and confessions from captured Hamas fighters also corroborate that sexual crimes were committed, he said.
The Israeli authorities have released little information about specific crimes and victims but in mid-November, police officials shared a video of an Israeli woman who said she had watched Hamas terrorists gang raping a young woman whom they captured during a music festival in the Negev desert. The witness, whom the police did not identify, said she had been hiding during the festival and had seen Hamas terrorists taking turns raping a young woman, mutilating her and then shooting her in the head.
Her testimony was consistent with other witness accounts from the music festival.
Top Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have accused Hamas of using rape as part of a broader campaign of atrocities.
“We’ve had hundreds massacred, families wiped out in their beds in their homes, women brutally raped and murdered,” Mr. Netanyahu said in early October.
Activists Seek Broader Condemnation
Women’s rights activists have expressed dismay about what they see as a lack of credence given to claims that sexual assault was widespread on Oct. 7. So far, no survivors of rape or assault have spoken publicly about their experiences.
“We have come so far in believing survivors of rape and assault in so many situations,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive and a leading voice on women in the workplace, in an opinion piece for CNN. “Yet this time, many are ignoring the stories that these bodies tell us about how these women spent the last moments of their lives.”
“Not loudly condemning the rapes of October 7 — or any rapes — is a massive step backward for the women — and men — of the world,” Ms. Sandberg said.
Many people in Israel and elsewhere have complained that it took too long for organizations like the United Nations to issue condemnations, a delay that they took to imply that the initial reports of sex crimes had not been believed.
U.N. Women, the United Nations organization dedicated to gender equality and female empowerment, issued a statement last week calling for all accounts of gender-based violence that occurred on Oct. 7 to be investigated and prosecuted.
“We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks,” the organization said.
The statement came a day after the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, acknowledged “numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted” in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, posted on X on Nov. 29, “In every other massacre in which such heinous sexual crimes were committed,” U.N. Women had “issued an immediate and harsh condemnation.”
“But when Israeli women are the victims,” he added, the organization “casts doubt on the allegations.”
*Nigeria’s President Calls for Inquiry After Military Strike Kills at Least 85 Civilians*
Many of the victims were women and children gathered for a religious celebration. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu described the attack as a “bombing mishap.”
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of Nigeria on Tuesday called for an investigation into a drone attack by his country’s military that killed scores of civilians on Sunday, the latest in a series of accidental bombings that have hit local populations.
The strike occurred on Sunday evening in a village in the northern state of Kaduna, where armed groups have been rampant. Many of the victims were gathered for a Muslim celebration, according to the local authorities.
As of Tuesday, at least 85 people had been pronounced dead, including children, women and older people, Nigeria’s main emergency body, the National Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement.
At least 66 others were injured, and the search for more bodies was continuing, it said. Although there have been other accidental bombings in the past decade, Amnesty International said that this one was by far the deadliest and that the death toll was closer to 120 people.
Mr. Tinubu called for “a thorough and full-fledged investigation” into what he called a “bombing mishap,” describing the events as “very unfortunate, disturbing and painful,” according to a statement released by the Nigerian presidency.
On Tuesday, Nigeria’s chief of army staff, Lt. Gen. Taoreed Lagbaja, visited Tudun Biri, the village hit by the strike, and admitted the army’s responsibility. He said that aerial patrols had “observed a group of people and wrongly analyzed and misinterpreted their pattern of activities to be similar to that of the bandits.”
Since he was sworn in as president in May, Mr. Tinubu has made tackling insecurity a high priority. Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, with 220 million people, has been tormented by Islamist groups in the east and countless armed gangs carrying out widespread killings and abductions in its northern and western states.
At least 700 civilians were killed from July to September, according to SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian risk consultancy. Kidnappings of priests, teachers, schoolchildren and commuters have plagued the country for years.
Nigeria’s security forces have struggled to contain the violence. Its military is the largest in West Africa and has been a major recipient of American security assistance, but it has also been accused of widespread human rights abuses, including forced abortions and indiscriminate killings.
“Despite reports of civilian casualties from Nigerian Armed Forces airstrikes and other concerns, the flow of U.S. weapons into Nigeria has not slowed,” researchers at Brown University and the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit group, wrote in a report published last year.
Isa Sanusi, the country director of Amnesty International in Nigeria, said the strike on Sunday had killed at least 120 civilians, according to his organization’s own tally.
“The Nigerian military is used to not being held to account and getting away with these atrocities,” Mr. Sanusi said in a telephone interview. “That is making them less diligent and more reckless.”
Before the strike on Sunday, at least 90 civilians had been killed in aerial strikes carried out by the Nigerian Air Force in the past five years, according to a Reuters analysis of a tally by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based crisis monitoring organization.
The tally did not include civilian deaths in the three northeastern states where most of the extremist violence has taken place.
*Can Boris Johnson Keep His Cool at U.K.’s Covid Inquiry?*
Britain’s former prime minister will face tough questions when he testifies this week before an official inquiry into the pandemic.
Boris Johnson, the ousted prime minister who led Britain through the pandemic, will testify before an official inquiry on Wednesday, giving his first detailed public account of how he grappled with a rampaging virus that divided his government, laid the seeds for his political downfall and nearly killed him.
Mr. Johnson, who left Parliament earlier this year after he was found to have deliberately misled lawmakers over a series of boozy parties that broke lockdown rules, will face hard questions: Should he have moved faster in imposing a lockdown in March 2020? Did he take the coronavirus seriously enough? Did he even understand basic data about its spread?
He can point to some genuine victories: Britain’s rollout of a vaccine in early 2021 was one of the fastest of any major country. His decision to reopen the British economy later that year — widely criticized in advance amid a spike in Covid cases — was vindicated, as other countries followed suit.
But all told, Mr. Johnson’s performance was unsteady, erratic and even irresponsible at times, according to several former cabinet ministers and aides who have testified in the inquiry since public hearings began in June. Some said his chaotic leadership style may even have contributed to driving up the Covid death toll in the United Kingdom that now stands at 230,193.
“We had a prime minister who didn’t know what to do, and was consumed by Brexit,” said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “To me, the lesson is: Try to elect leaders who are competent.”
Mr. Johnson is the latest political figure to be scrutinized by the Covid-19 inquiry, an independent, public examination of Britain’s response to the pandemic, led by a former judge, Heather Hallett, that is expected to continue until 2026.
One of the most charismatic communicators in British politics, Mr. Johnson is famous for his clever phrasemaking, humorous asides and sunny optimism. But none of those traits are likely to help him during two days of forensic interrogation, while his mastery of the details — never a strong suit — and his response to potentially hostile questioning could be critical.
“Can he maintain a serious, contrite and vaguely reflective demeanor, or does he get rattled and annoyed?” asked Jill Rutter, a former senior British civil servant and senior research fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe, a research institute in London. “Does he degenerate into making jokes?”
Mr. Johnson has had time to prepare for the hearing, and his allies have leaked details of his prepared testimony to British newspapers. He may have learned lessons from his appearance in March before a Parliamentary committee, which investigated whether he lied to lawmakers over the lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street. After a strong start, he became irritable and defensive, failing to impress the committee, whose scathing report led to his quitting Parliament.
This time, Mr. Johnson will face some people whose relatives died in the pandemic (he himself was treated in an intensive care unit in April 2020 during a serious bout of Covid-19).
“For someone who likes to play the jokey entertainer, to be the center of attention and to bluster around, I think this is probably about the least ideal setting you could imagine,” Ms. Rutter said.
Though Mr. Johnson is the inquiry’s marquee witness so far, by a long shot, the hearings have produced no shortage of drama, not least because of the release of a trove of text messages between government officials, which has given its lawyers plenty of grist for awkward questions.
Dominic Cummings, Mr. Johnson’s former chief adviser, apologized at the inquiry for WhatsApp messages in which he described senior officials with a string of profanities, often scatological in nature. His disparagement of a female colleague prompted accusations that he had encouraged an atmosphere of misogyny in Downing Street, which Mr. Cummings denied. He insisted he had been “much ruder about men.”
Certainly, Mr. Cummings laid some serious charges on Mr. Johnson’s doorstep, including that he was AWOL during the first days of the pandemic because he was working on a book on Shakespeare that he owed his publisher (Mr. Johnson denies that).
He said that the prime minister played down the severity of the virus, predicting it would “be like swine flu,” and that his views changed direction like a defective shopping cart.
And the government’s chief scientist, Patrick Vallance, wrote in his diary that Mr. Johnson was swayed by the view of some in his Conservative Party that Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.”
Mr. Cummings’s credibility as a witness was not helped by the fact that he had traveled in violation of lockdown rules and then fell out badly with Mr. Johnson, who fired him. Yet his testimony that the government’s first instinct was to pursue a policy of “herd immunity” — allowing the virus to spread unchecked through the population so people could build up natural immunity — was powerful.
Other witnesses have portrayed Downing Street as an undisciplined workplace led by an idiosyncratic prime minister who struggled to make, and stick to, decisions. According to one senior aide, Mr. Johnson at one point suggested he should be injected with the virus on live television to demonstrate that it did not pose a threat.
For all the attention the inquiry has captured, some experts say the focus on personalities and infighting so far has generated more heat than light. They question whether it will help Britain learn the right lessons to respond more effectively to the next pandemic, or whether it will remain an exercise in blame-shifting and buck-passing.
In part, that is a function of timing. While the pandemic is no longer the country’s No. 1 political issue, the hearings are occurring less than a year before a likely general election. Unlike in the United States, where in 2020 Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democrat, defeated the Republican incumbent, Donald J. Trump, in part because of his handling of Covid, in Britain, the Conservative Party remains in power.
This means that some of the ministers who are still scheduled to face questioning, most notably Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, will have to face voters and are therefore less inclined to acknowledge any fault.
“Everyone is quite defensive about why it wasn’t their fault,” Professor Sridhar said. “But this wasn’t an individual failure. It was a system failure.”
Mr. Sunak, who was chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the pandemic, is expected to testify soon. He might be helped by Mr. Johnson’s appearing first. But the stakes are high because Mr. Sunak’s grip over the Tory Party is weak as it badly trails the opposition Labour Party in opinion polls.
One of Mr. Sunak’s policies will almost certainly come under question: the Eat Out to Help Out program, an August 2020 initiative that lured Britons back into restaurants by subsidizing their meals. The policy may have exposed more people to infection, contributing to a second wave that winter. The inquiry was told that England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, referred to it in his diary as “Eat out to help out the virus.”
“You will get the spectacle of a serving prime minister being subjected to questioning,” Ms. Rutter said. “It’s obviously something he would much rather not have.”
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