Prosecutors Intend to Show Long Pattern of Threats and Baseless Claims by Trump - The New York Times

Prosecutors Intend to Show Long Pattern of Threats and Baseless Claims by Trump

"In a court filing, federal prosecutors laid out plans to use the former president’s trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election to show a yearslong history of using lies and intimidation.

Dec. 5, 2023, 3:47 p.m. ET

Trump Federal Election Case

Former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team will have a chance to contest whether prosecutors should be allowed to offer all of this evidence during the trial.Sophie Park for The New York Times

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When former President Donald J. Trump goes on trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors intend to tell a sweeping story, informing the jury about everything from his support for the far-right Proud Boys to his decade-long history of making baseless claims about election fraud, according to court papers unsealed on Tuesday.

The prosecutors said in the papers that they also planned to offer evidence about how Mr. Trump and his allies had threatened his adversaries over the years and encouraged violence against them. And they indicated that they intended to tie Mr. Trump more closely to the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, than the indictment in the case initially suggested.

Moreover, the prosecutors said they planned to demonstrate how the former president had continued to display “steadfast support” for the people involved in the events of Jan. 6 — among them, Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, and a group of inmates at the District of Columbia jail who call themselves the “Jan. 6 Choir.”

“The defendant’s embrace of Jan. 6 rioters is evidence of his intent during the charged conspiracies, because it shows that these individuals acted as he directed them to act,” the prosecutors wrote. “Indeed, this evidence shows that the rioters’ disruption of the certification proceeding is exactly what the defendant intended on Jan. 6.”

The court papers, originally filed under seal on Monday night in Federal District Court in Washington, contained an array of allegations against the former president that prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith want to introduce at the election interference trial even though they technically fall outside the span of the conspiracy charges Mr. Trump is facing.

Takeaways From Trump’s Indictment in the 2020 Election Inquiry

The indictment portrayed an attack on American democracy. Smith framed his case against Trump as one that cuts to a key function of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. By underscoring this theme, Smith cast his effort as an effort not just to hold Trump accountable but also to defend the very core of democracy.

Trump was placed at the center of the conspiracy charges. Smith put Trump at the heart of three conspiracies that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to obstruct Congress’s role in ratifying the Electoral College outcome. The special counsel argued that Trump knew that his claims about a stolen election were false, a point that, if proved, could be important to convincing a jury to convict him.

Trump didn’t do it alone. The indictment lists six co-conspirators without naming or indicting them. Based on the descriptions provided, they match the profiles of Trump lawyers and advisers who were willing to argue increasingly outlandish conspiracy and legal theories to keep him in power. It’s unclear whether these co-conspirators will be indicted.

Under the federal rules of evidence, prosecutors are permitted to introduce proof at trial that either predates or postdates the scope of an indictment if it can help them prove a defendant’s motive or intent to a jury.

The election subversion indictment accuses Mr. Trump of three overlapping conspiracies, reaching from around Election Day 2020 to the day the Capitol was attacked. They include illegally seeking to reverse his loss to President Biden, to deprive millions of people of their right to have their vote counted and to disrupt the lawful transfer of power.

But the papers unsealed on Tuesday with a handful of redactions suggest that prosecutors want to tell the jury a far broader story. That narrative encompasses what they describe as Mr. Trump’s expansive history of using lies, acts of retaliation and threats of violence to get what he wants.

The prosecutors, for instance, told Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, that they planned to show the jury a Twitter post that Mr. Trump wrote in November 2012. The message, they said, made “baseless claims” that voting machines had switched votes from Mitt Romney, who was then the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, to President Barack Obama.

They also want to tell the jury about Mr. Trump’s repeated claims during his 2016 presidential campaign that the election had been — or was going to be — marred by “widespread voter fraud.”

In a similar fashion, the papers said that Mr. Smith’s team intended to mention occasions on which Mr. Trump “refused to commit to a peaceful transition of presidential power if he lost the election.” They cited a news conference in September 2020 where Mr. Trump, when asked if he would step down in defeat, said, “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens.”

Prosecutors said they planned to offer evidence that an employee of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign “encouraged rioting” at a vote counting center in Detroit after he learned that the results were “trending in favor” of Mr. Biden. Around the same time, the court papers said, a crowd of people broke into the center “and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count.”

Mr. Trump’s “endorsement and encouragement of violence” will also be part of the broader trial story, according to the papers.

For example, prosecutors want to tell the jury about Mr. Trump’s remark at a presidential debate with Mr. Biden in September 2020 when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” The far-right group ultimately played a leading role in the Capitol attack, breaching barricades and assaulting the police, and four of its members, including Mr. Tarrio, wound up convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy.

Prosecutors also want to tell the jury how during an appearance on “Meet the Press” just three months ago, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and other Jan. 6 defendants “have been treated horribly.” Moreover, they want to mention Mr. Trump’s continuing support for the so-called jailhouse choir, many of whose members, prosecutors pointed out, “were so violent” on Jan. 6 “that their pretrial release would pose a danger to the public.”

Mr. Trump’s legal team will have a chance to contest whether Mr. Smith’s prosecutors should be allowed to offer all of this evidence during the trial. Judge Chutkan will ultimately make decisions about what should be admitted.

The government’s filing was the latest set of court papers to lay out a road map for what the election interference trial might look like. The proceeding is currently set to start in early March.

Last week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed papers suggesting that they plan to use the trial to attack the “deep state” and question the findings of several government agencies that the election had been conducted fairly.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.  More about Alan Feuer"

Prosecutors Intend to Show Long Pattern of Threats and Baseless Claims by Trump - The New York Times

Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel-Hamas War - The New York Times

Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel

"Gen Z and young Millennials often see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians — a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival.

Dec. 5, 2023Updated 5:46 p.m. ET

Marc and Judith Kornblatt sit on a bench in Tel Aviv, surrounded by their son, Jake Kornblatt, his wife, Tamar Asnko, and their daughter Louisa Kornblatt.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

By Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy

Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy talked to more than two dozen Jewish Americans, including those within the same families, about their views on Israel.

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Marc Kornblatt prepared uneasily last month for his daughter, Louisa, to arrive for 10 days with the family. Her homecomings once brought the comfort of movie nights and card games, but this year was different.

Mr. Kornblatt sang under his breath some lyrics from “West Side Story”: “Get cool, boy.” He and his wife discussed: How would they greet their child? Would they acknowledge the emotional distance, the slights that had piled up from afar?

He and his wife, Judith, had moved away from Madison, Wis., to live in Tel Aviv, where they felt a real sense of belonging as Jews. Around the same time, their daughter, attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, came to oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. 

The political divide between two generations within the family has grown into a painful chasm during the war between Israel and Hamas. Until late November, it was addressed mostly in tense exchanges on WhatsApp. “Really sad that you seem out of touch with where our heads are at,” Mr. Kornblatt had messaged his daughter after she told her parents about a friend speaking out in support of people in Gaza.

As she packed her bags to go to Tel Aviv, his daughter questioned how her parents could argue about a political solution that felt morally urgent to her: a permanent cease-fire.

“It feels so simple — just don’t murder people. Don’t kill people. Just stop it,” said Louisa Kornblatt, 31, who now lives in Brooklyn. “It feels so simple, and a lot of my mom’s responses are like, ‘It’s so complex.’”

Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

“It feels so simple — just don’t murder people. Don’t kill people. Just stop it. It feels so simple and a lot of my mom's responses are like, ‘It’s so complex.’”

Louisa Kornblatt

The ideological rift between the Kornblatt parents and their daughter is a clash between an older generation of American Jews, who believe Israel has a right to defend itself and that its very survival is at stake, and a younger generation more likely to view Israel as a great military power and an occupying force.

That’s not the case in every family, of course. Many Jewish college students have been vocal and firm in defending Israel; plenty of Jewish Americans in the Boomer generation have criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Many American Jews are united in a fear of rising antisemitism, and last month, tens of thousands of them attended the March for Israel in Washington, D.C.Yet some Jewish families are grappling with internal divisions, in the heart of a holiday season that is forcing difficult conversations.

“This is an acute, painful moment for many Jewish American families,” said Jackson Schwartz, a Columbia University senior who has found himself pulled to the left even of his liberal parents on the subject of Israel.

For at least a half-century, American Jews — the substantial majority of whom tend to be liberal and vote Democratic — have largely supported the Jewish state across the spectrum of age, partisanship and religious denomination. Recent polling suggests that that is changing.

Even before the war, younger American Jews were generally less attached to Israel than their elders, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey. (Most of the people interviewed for this article did not identify as Orthodox, a small segment of the American Jewish population who tend to have a stronger attachment to Israel than others do.)

A survey that the Democratic pollster GBAO Strategies conducted in November, a few weeks after the start of the war, for the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, found a striking generation gap in American Jews’ attitudes toward President Biden’s strong support for Israel: Eighty-two percent of those 36 or older supported the president, but only 53 percent of those 18 to 35 felt that way.

Jim Gerstein, who conducted the survey, said that younger American Jews have little or no memory of an underdog Israel surrounded by enemy states or terrorized by suicide bombings. Instead, they grew up when Israel had developed into a thriving economic and regional military power, backed by the United States and largely insulated from its neighbors — a perspective that inclined them to judge Israel more harshly, especially under the conservative leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Jewish voters are very liberal, and younger Jews even more so, and hold a different perspective of Israel than older generations,” he said.

‘How do I bridge this?’

The parents of Mr. Schwartz, the Columbia student, said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.

“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.

Still, he said he felt that his son’s education downplayed “the fact that Israel is and has been surrounded by terrorists who do want to destroy them.”

Jonathan Taubes, who grew up in a right-leaning modern Orthodox community in New Jersey, understands that his own perception of Israel is starkly different from that of his parents, who remember the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. His mother is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Recently, she went to visit Mr. Taubes in Brooklyn, and began discussing her fears of anti-Jewish hatred as soon as she walked into his apartment.

Mr. Taubes, 30, felt torn between wanting to comfort his mother and feeling uneasy with her exclusive focus on Jewish pain.

“I was sort of trying to hold both sides — a progressive left one, and a defensive Jewish one,” he explained. “It’s a feeling of discomfort, like, how do I manage this, how do I bridge this?”

“There’s this feeling of being alienated from the world, but then the added layer of strife and division within our own family,” Mr. Taubes added. “It’s an extra layer of pain.”

In interviews with more than a dozen young people, many of them described feeling estranged from the version of Jewish identity they were raised with, which was often anchored in pro-Israel education. Many young Jews said they believed in Israel’s right to exist and condemned the Hamas attacks, but they believed at least as passionately in Palestinian rights, and condemned Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, its settlements and its treatment of Palestinians broadly.

Mica Maltzman, a junior at Brown University, grew up ensconced in her Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., surrounded by Jews who were pro-Israel and politically liberal.

“My parents were supportive of Israel, but not the government,” she said. “In Hebrew School, it was, ‘This is the Jewish state that we need as a homeland.’”

Ms. Maltzman grew more critical of Israel throughout high school. Since Oct. 7, she has been active with a group called BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, which organized a sit-in at a university building in November. Ms. Maltzman said that during conversations with her parents, who declined to be interviewed, she had sensed them returning to their earlier brand of support for Israel after years of growing more critical.

“I’m so terrified and horrified by what Israel is doing,” she said. “Fighting with my parents, who will defend various aspects of Zionist ideology, it’s been a constant back and forth.”

‘Did we not talk about the Holocaust enough?’

For Judith Kornblatt, 68, fears of antisemitism lurked throughout childhood. Her mother had fled Austria in 1938, just as the Nazis were taking over, and settled eventually in Evanston, Ill. Ms. Kornblatt, who taught Slavic languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recalled that when the family learned Nazis were planning a march in the neighboring city of Skokie, her mother went into a panic, and flew to Texas to visit a friend.

Her husband, Marc Kornblatt, 69, a children’s book writer, blogger and filmmaker, recalled growing up in suburban New Jersey, where prep school classmates sometimes taunted: “Jew! Jew!”

“From the beginning, I knew antisemitism much differently than my own children — certainly different than Louisa, who felt comfortable saying to her friends ‘I can’t go tonight, we’re having Shabbat dinner,’” Mr. Kornblatt said. “Judith and I talk about this: Did we not talk about antisemitism and the Holocaust enough with our children?”

Louisa Kornblatt grew up in Madison, spent summers at Jewish sleep-away camp, and shared her parents’ belief that the safety of Jewish people depended on a Jewish state. That began to change when she started attending a graduate program in social work at U.C. Berkeley in 2017.

Ms. Kornblatt, who sometimes uses the pronouns they/them, said classmates and friends challenged her thinking. Ms. Kornblatt felt one person “pull away” from their friendship, a change that Ms. Kornblatt attributed to her ties to Israel. Another sent  an email  saying that because she wasn’t vocally pro-Palestine,  Ms. Kornblatt was on “the wrong side of history.”

Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

“Judith and I talk about this: Did we not talk about antisemitism and the Holocaust enough with our children?”

Marc Kornblatt, with his wife, Judith

At Berkeley, she read Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other Black feminist thinkers, who prompted her to consider “questions around power, privilege and whiteness.”

Ms. Kornblatt came to feel that her emotional ties to Jewish statehood undermined her vision for “collective liberation.” Over the last year, she became increasingly involved in pro-Palestine activism, including through Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist activist group, and the If Not Now movement.

“I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,” she said. “It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.”

As Ms. Kornblatt’s political views were shifting, her parents moved in the opposite direction, becoming so attached to Israel that they decided in 2019 to make it their home.

The Kornblatt parents had long felt a unique sense of comfort when spending time in Israel, and realized during a visit to Tel Aviv that they might want to put down roots there. Louisa’s older brother Jake Kornblatt, 35, who is politically aligned with their parents, also made Tel Aviv his permanent home.

“We felt like, for the first time, we weren’t going to be the other,” the elder Mr. Kornblatt said.

What he hadn’t expected, he added, was that moving to Israel would bring on a new kind of isolation. “When I moved to Israel, all of a sudden I was a Jew and colonialist and apartheid lover,” he said, referring partly to comments from American friends and students on social media.

J. Lo and geopolitics

When Louisa Kornblatt arrived at her parents’ home on Nov. 17, the tensions were briefly broken. They watched a Jennifer Lopez movie, “Marry Me.” They played cards. But the day after her arrival, her parents went to the square in Tel Aviv where families of hostages being held in Gaza were rallying for their release, while Louisa went to an antiwar, pro-cease-fire protest.

In Tel Aviv, Mr. Kornblatt asked his daughter why she did not denounce Hamas’s attacks on social media. She wanted to know why her father did not emphasize the historical context — the occupation and Palestinian displacement — that shaped the current war.

The Kornblatt parents have acknowledged the deaths of Palestinian civilians in Israel’s bombardments; Louisa has acknowledged the deaths of Israeli civilians in the Hamas attack.

Jake Kornblatt said he has come to accept and learn from some of the language his sister taught him — like the term “occupation” — but that he struggles with her stark perspective on “good guys and bad guys.”

Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

“Has there been racism, has there been a lot of injustice, have there been war crimes potentially? Yes, but there’s more to it than that.”

Jake Kornblatt, with his wife, Tamar Asnko

His sister seems to have “this idea of this insidious plan of Zionists coming in and wanting to subjugate people,” he said. “Has there been racism, has there been a lot of injustice, have there been war crimes, potentially? Yes, but there’s more to it than that.”

He disagrees with her use of the word apartheid to describe Israel. “If you use this type of language, the other side is not going to be able to listen to you,” he said.

Tamar Asnko, 36, an Israeli Jew who is married to Jake, said she doesn’t agree with Louisa on everything, though she found their recent discussions in Tel Aviv interesting.

Ms. Asnko moved to Israel from Ethiopia when she was 4, and Israel is the only place she calls home. “It’s complicated,” she said. “There isn’t black and white here. There’s a middle ground. I feel like people who don’t live here don’t understand the middle ground.”

In the final days of her visit, Louisa Kornblatt felt tension in her parents’ home. She walked into the apartment after volunteering to help Palestinian families harvest olives in the West Bank. She gave her father a hug and noticed that he didn’t hug her back.

Mr. Kornblatt told his daughter that he was hurt that she would use her precious time on a visit with family to volunteer in the West Bank. “Does this have to be the time?” she recalled him asking her, to which she replied: “Yeah, this is the time.”

In the final 45 minutes before departing for the airport, as Ms. Kornblatt was packing, the family had one last noisy argument about what political solutions to the war were possible. Then they walked outside to get her a taxi, and hugged one another.

“I didn’t leave with any doubt that my family loves me,” Ms. Kornblatt said.

Nadav Gavrielov contributed to this story."

Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel-Hamas War - The New York Times

“There Simply Is No Safe Place in Gaza”: Aid Groups Demand Ceasefire as Israel Intensifies Its War

US breaks record for most mass shootings in single year after weekend murders

“Country has had 38 mass shootings – in which at least 203 people have died – so far this year, passing previous high of 36

Chris Michael

People hold a vigil on 2 November for the victims of the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. Photograph: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

A series of murders over the weekend have propelled the United States to a grisly new record: the most recorded mass shootings in a year.

Two attacks on Sunday occurring within a couple of hours of each other in Texas and Washington state were the year’s 37th and 38th mass shootings. Authorities believe a murder-suicide was responsible for the death of five family members in Vancouver, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, just across the border in Washington, while in Dallas a 21-year-old with a previous aggravated assault charge shot five people in a house, including a toddler.

It is the highest number of mass shootings in any year since at least 2006, breaking the previous record of 36, reached last year.

Another attack occurred on Sunday in New York City, when a 38-year-old man stabbed four of his relatives – including two children – as well as another woman and two police officers before they shot him. That was the country’s 41st mass killing of 2023, according to an Associated Press database.

Chart of mass shootings

At least 203 people have died this year in mass killings, defined as incidents in which four or more people have died, not including the killer. The FBI uses a similar definition.

Despite the media attention they attract, most mass shootings do not happen in public spaces, with at least 26 of this year’s 38 happening in private homes or shelters, according to the Washington Post.

Different groups count mass shootings and killings in different ways. Some, such as the Gun Violence Archive, include events in which multiple people are shot regardless of number of deaths, and so report much higher figures. Its tally for the year is 630 mass shootings.

Mass shooting deaths dropped in 2020 during the Covid pandemic to 21, but have since rebounded to a new record.

The Fourth of July long weekend was overshadowed by 16 shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.

But the deadliest attack of 2023 happened in Lewiston, Maine, on 25 October when an army reservist murdered 18 people in a bowling alley and a bar. Previously the year’s worst attack had been in January when a man shot 11 people in Monterey Park, California, with a semi-automatic rifle during a Lunar New Year celebration.“

Israel-Hamas War Israeli Forces Enter Southern Gaza’s Largest City as Fears Grow for Civilians

Updated 

Dec. 5, 2023, 10:32 a.m. ET14 minutes ago

Current time in:

Gaza City Dec. 5, 5:46 p.m.

1. 

   Injured Palestinians arriving at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday.

   “Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

2. The scene at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday.

   Reuters

3. An Israeli artillery unit near the border with Gaza on Tuesday.

   Gil Cohen-Magen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

4. People paraded to Jerusalem on Tuesday to call for the release of all hostages still held in Gaza.

   Oded Balilty/Associated Press

5. Palestinians stood in line for water amid shortages in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Tuesday.

   Mohammed Salem/Reuters

6. Bodies lined up at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday.

   Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

7. Palestinians prepare to bury the dead in Khan Younis on Tuesday. 

   Reuters

8. People traveled with their possessions near a camp in Rafah on Tuesday.

   Mohammed Salem/Reuters

9. Displaced Palestinians erecting makeshift shelters in Rafah on Tuesday.

   Mohammed Salem/Reuters

10. A room damaged by a rocket in Ashkelon, Israel, on Tuesday.

    Amir Levy/Getty Images

11. Israeli tanks near the border with Gaza on Tuesday.

    Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

12. The funeral of an Israeli soldier on Tuesday in Kfar Etzion in the West Bank.

    Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Here’s what we know:

Israel’s renewed strikes have killed hundreds since Friday, Gazan officials say, raising questions about its stated efforts to reduce harm to civilians.

• Israeli forces say they are fighting in ‘the heart’ of Khan Younis.
• The U.S. says Israel must do more to protect civilians. Experts see little change.
• Fighting puts a spotlight on Khan Younis, a crowded city of refuge.
• The U.S. says Hamas ‘reneged’ on a deal to release all the women hostages.
• Here’s how The Times is covering the war.

Palestinians inspecting the damage in a residential building in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, following Israeli airstrikes on Monday.Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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.”

Maps: Tracking the Attacks in Israel and Gaza

Israel expanded its evacuation orders in southern Gaza, ahead of an expected ground invasion in the south.

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.

A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said on Monday that Hamas had “reneged” on an agreement to release all the women it was holding hostage, and that the group’s officials “were never able to provide a credible reason why.”

“We hope they will change their mind and release those women,” he said at a news conference in Washington.

The United States is in discussions with its allies to set up a naval task force to guard ships traveling through the Red Sea after the latest attack on several commercial vessels in what appears to be an escalating extension of Israel’s war with Hamas by Iranian-sponsored proxy forces.

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said on Monday that such patrols or escorts could be the appropriate response to the targeting of ships in the region. He compared the mission to similar task forces in the Gulf, where Iranian naval forces have at times been aggressive with other ships, and off the coast of Somalia, where pirates have preyed on private vessels in the past.

Reporting inside Gaza is extremely challenging right now. Israel has prevented journalists from entering the region except when accompanied by its military, and then only under certain conditions, while Egypt, along its border, is also blocking access. Communications have been limited, in part because of the Israeli siege of the enclave. Many Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killedin airstrikes. And even before the war, Hamas restricted what reporters could cover in Gaza, limiting their movement, interrogating their sources and translators and expelling foreign reporters for work deemed objectionable.

The Times, along with other news organizations, has asked the governments of Israel and Egypt for direct access to Gaza because reporting on the ground is vital to understanding this crisis. Throughout the war, The Times has been working with journalists who were already in Gaza when the siege began. We have been interviewing residents and officials in Gaza by phone and using digital apps. We have asked people in the area to share their stories with us on video, which we then confirm are real. We also verify photos and social media posts using similar techniques, scrutinizing them to determine where and when they were taken or written and cross-checking with other sources, such as satellite imagery. We cross reference any information we gather with interviews with the U.N. and other international organizations, many of which have employees in different parts of Gaza.

In general, we try to avoid relying on a single source and we seek to include detailed information whenever possible”