Monday Briefing: Israel orders more evacuations

By Justin Porter

Good morning. We’re covering Israel’s order for more evacuations amid fear the conflict could widen and the Australian businessman who might testify against Donald Trump.

Plus part one of our series, India’s Daughters.

Israel increases evacuations as clashes with Hezbollah escalate

As conflict intensified on Israel’s border with Lebanon, Israeli authorities said they were expanding a state-funded evacuation plan to an additional 14 villages. Along with a rare airstrike on the West Bank, the fighting raised fears that the war could expand.

Israel’s military said that attacks from Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia that controls southern Lebanon, had resulted in civilian and military casualties. Amid concerns that the conflict could spill over, the Pentagon said on Saturday that it was sending an antimissile battery and battalions of the Patriot ground-based air defense system to the Middle East.

Israeli forces massed along the border with Gaza yesterday ahead of an expected ground invasion of the enclave. Israel’s military efforts to eradicate Hamas “may take a month, two, or three, but in the end, Hamas will no longer exist,” the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said yesterday.

Violence also has been surging across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israel carried out an airstrike against what it described as an underground “terror compound” beneath a mosque in the city of Jenin. The claims had not been independently verified. Two people were killed, according to Palestinian health officials.

Gaza aid: Humanitarian groups and the U.N. continued to warn that the first shipment of aid that arrived in Gaza on Saturday — 20 trucks carrying food, water and medicine — was just a fraction of what was needed. Another 14 aid trucks entered Gaza last night.

The toll: Israel’s bombardment continued “almost unabated,” while Palestinian armed groups continued with their “indiscriminate rocket firing,” the U.N. said. The death toll in Gaza has reached at least 4,385, and there are more than 13,500 injuries, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. In Israel, no new fatalities were reported, but injuries had increased to almost 5,000, the U.N. said.

A warning: The Israeli military warned that residents of northern Gaza who did not flee to the southern part of the enclave “may be considered a partner in a terrorist organization.” But many people there said that leaving was not an option because of the cost and that it would not guarantee safety.

“We can’t even afford to eat,” Amani Abu Odeh said. “We don’t have the money to leave.”

An Australian mogul may testify against Trump

Anthony Pratt, one of Australia’s wealthiest men, made his way into Donald Trump’s inner circle with money and flattery. In covert recordings, Pratt described Trump’s business practices as being “like the mafia.”

Their interactions were ultimately swept up in one of the two federal criminal cases against Trump, in which the former U.S. president is charged with taking classified documents from the White House when he left office. Pratt could testify against Trump at a trial next year.

In his interviews with prosecutors, Pratt recounted how Trump once revealed to him sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines — including the number of warheads they travel with and their stealthy proximity to Russian waters — an episode that Trump denies.

Indigenous Australians say ‘reconciliation is dead’

Australia’s rejection last week of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament — a proposed advisory body — is likely to lead to an irreversible shift in the nation’s relationship with its first peoples.

Many Indigenous people perceived it as a denial of their past and their place in Australia, which is far behind other colonized nations in reconciling with its first inhabitants. The defeat of the Voice could not only derail any further reconciliation, but could also unleash a much more confrontational approach to Indigenous rights and race relations in Australia.

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The Chinese video game Honkai: Star Rail combines a taste of the Qing dynasty with the digital age, like holographic bonsai and starskiffs inspired by the third-century poet Zhang Hua.

The game borrows from the emerging literary subgenre of silkpunk — created by Ken Liu, author of the “Dandelion Dynasty” series and translator of “The Three-Body Problem” — which Liu said imagined modern worlds founded upon East Asian traditions and mythology.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

To take control, she had to run

Nasreen Parveen was just 16, but her family had already arranged an engagement for her. The bruises that covered her body, inflicted by her future in-laws while she worked for them, she said, were evidence that a future of violence and pain lay before her. So she went out onto the ledge of a high window in her mother’s house in her village in West Bengal. Standing on the edge, she saw something that changed her mind. Instead of jumping to her death, she decided to run for her life.

This is part one in the series India’s Daughters, about one of the deepest fault lines in India’s politics and society: the conflict over young women’s futures as they reach for the new opportunities offered by a rapidly changing country.

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Play Spelling Bee, the Mini Crossword, Wordle and Sudoku. Find all our games here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. See you tomorrow. — Justin

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