Jared Kushner and Bibi Netanyahu at the dedication of the US embassy in Jerusalem. Photo: US Embassy.

Here comes the conman
Coming with his con plan
We won’t take no bribe
We’ve got to stay alive

– Bob Marley, “Crazy Baldheads”

+ Jared Kushner’s investment enterprise, Affinity Partners, is the largest shareholder in an Israeli company called Phoenix Financial, which holds at least $438 million in nine companies with Israeli military contracts, including Israel’s largest arms-maker Elbit Systems, Reshef Technologies, which manufactures fuses for shells, and the drone camera firm, Next Vision. Kushner’s holdings in the firm are worth more than $1 billion.

+ At least 1,439 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, and another 5,052 wounded, since the Trump-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza went into effect on October 11, 2025. That amounts to more than 18 total casualties and 4.2 deaths a day. In comparison, the US averaged 1.8 deaths per day during the “active” phase of the  Iraq War.

+ As the rainy season approaches in the Gaza Strip, at least 450 camps for displaced Palestinians have been identified as being at high risk of flooding. These sites provide shelter for an estimated 464,402 people.

+ The school year started in Gaza on September 19, yet more than 200,000 children remain out of school due to funding shortfalls and bombed-out schools.

+ Last week, 147 Palestinians were displaced from their homes by Israelis in the West Bank, three times the weekly average for 2026.

+ Over the weekend, Israeli settlers attacked Bilal Kayed, a 75-year-old Palestinian man, while he was working on his land during the annual olive harvest in Sebastia, a village northwest of Nablus. The settlers beat him with clubs and then poured boiling water on his body. Is there any other country in history, aside from the pre-bellum American South and Apartheid South Africa, where this kind of racist terrorism was a fact of daily life?

+ On Sunday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir uploaded to social media footage of himself inside the cell of Palestinian prisoner Hassan Salama, taunting him with threats to have him executed: “I want to kill you. … I want you executed.” Salama is serving 48 life sentences over his alleged role in a series of Hamas-orchestrated attacks on Israel. Since 1996, Salama has spent a total of more than 14 years in solitary confinement.

+ To rephrase Tacitus, “They made a rubble of Gaza and called it real estate.”

The Tal as-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah was turned to rubble by Israeli airstrikes and bulldozers. Image: Google Earth.

+ Al Jazeera:

“A recent assessment by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) found that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by 9 percent since a “ceasefire” took effect nearly a year ago. Overall, about 82 percent of structures in Gaza, roughly 200,000 buildings, have been damaged, and about two-thirds of those have been destroyed, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.”

+ Palestinian journalist Mohammed Abdul Aziz al-Najjar was decapitated in an Israeli airstrike outside of his home near Khan Younis in Gaza. Al-Najjar, a father of three children, was the 263rd Palestinian journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since October 13, 2023.

+ Trump on Gaza…(You try to decipher what the hell he’s saying here. I gave up.)

TIME: Let’s talk about Israel. You have a Board of Peace that you’ve assembled, had a big ceasefire agreement last year, but Hamas has not disarmed. They haven’t laid down their arms. What are you going to do about that?

Trump: I think I’ll probably sit in the Situation Room and make an appropriate decision. My decisions are correct ones. I mean, look at our country. I was moving. This country is booming during a conflagration. You know, during—some people would say it’s a war, some people would say it’s not really a war. When we get a war this year—you know, nothing’s happened for the last two weeks, right? And somebody drops a bomb, and nothing happens, and they drop a bomb. No, I think that you’ll find out what I’m doing.

+ This week, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued an emergency alert warning that restrictions on movement, illegal settlements and settler violence are making everyday life “untenable” for the civilian Palestinian population in the Occupied West Bank.

+ From M. Gessen’s review of “NAZA” in the New York Times…

More than halfway through the film “NAZA,” Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.

The word doesn’t appear in the movie again….

Take the number of official targets and multiply it by the number of bystanders it’s permissible to kill in order to reach the targets, and pretty soon, Abraham says in the film, “you end up with all of Gaza.” Anyone can die, and the death will be “just war.” The difference between the practice depicted in “Checkout,” the comedy, and the unrelenting, unbearable horror described in “NAZA” is scale. Now, it’s industrial. That’s what makes it a genocide. It really is that unequivocal, and perhaps this is why the makers of “NAZA” didn’t need to use the word more than once.

+ There were more than 2,000 attacks by Israeli settlers, security forces and military against Palestinians (almost all of whom were civilians) in the Occupied West Bank in September alone.

+ A joint investigation of the effects of Israeli checkpoints on Palestinians in the West Bank by the Palestine Reporting Lab, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), WIRED, and Evident found that:

* Palestinians lose 100 minutes a week waiting at checkpoints. This amounts to 77 hours a year, an increase of 50% since October 7, 2023.

* 94% of the West Bank’s 3.5 million Palestinian residents say a checkpoint or gate separates them from close relatives. A quarter of parents say their children have never met close relatives who live elsewhere in the West Bank.

* Nearly two-thirds say checkpoints have blocked access to medical care.

* 30% say checkpoints affected their ability to start or complete a university education.

+ I spent quite a few hours last week compiling a list of musicians and bands that had taken some kind of public stand against the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. I came up with about 200 musicians and posted the list with links to their music in a Gaza Diary column on Wednesday, noting that readers should send me the names of groups or artists that I’d overlooked. Almost immediately, I got an email from my friend Benjamin Lyons, who runs a jazz label in New Orleans, with a list of about 50 groups in N’awlins alone, which remains (prove I’m wrong) the music capital of North America, if not the world. All those groups were intriguing, but perhaps none more so (at least in name) than Labia Menorah, who describe themselves as a “New Orleans-based queer-led Yiddish folk/funk band! Long Live Diaspora! Free Palestine!” Here’s the poster for their Purim gig…