'Another Mother Mourns'
"Gathering String" is my home for an ongoing discussion on the news and the news industry itself: what it ignores, and what it distorts, how it shapes, and how it’s shaped. I hope you’ll join me.
“Another mother mourns her dead child” – those were the words of the anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean in late February, when the State of Texas executed Ivan Cantu, who for decades maintained his innocence after being convicted over 20 years ago of murdering his cousin and his cousin’s fiancée. As my colleague Taiyler S. Mitchell reported, serious discrepancies emerged in the case against Cantu over the years, and multiple jurors said they did not support execution. But the state carried out the killing regardless.
Cantu had written to the anti-death penalty activist in September, asking, “If I'm executed in Texas, will you hold my hand and pray with me as they kill me?” And she did. “I was there with him, standing near his face, holding his hand, and praying into his ear until the chemicals killed him,” Prejean wrote afterward. She spent the day following the execution with Cantu’s mother, who Prejean relayed let out a “loud sustained wail of grief” at the news of her son’s passing.
Prejean has said of her work with death row prisoners, “All I knew was: I couldn't let them die alone.”
And as the 200-day mark since Oct. 7 came and went this week, those words rang in my ears.
That day in October, I was shocked by the images of Palestinian militants breaking through Israel’s border wall, slaughtering some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking over 240 people hostage, around half of whom have since been released. Of the remaining captives, at least 34 – but potentially far more – are dead, according to Israeli authorities. Those still alive are used in hostage videos, Hamas’ attempt to pressure the Israeli government to reach a ceasefire, withdraw from Gaza, and negotiate the release of some of the more than 9,000 Palestinians in Israeli custody, including 3,500 held without charges.
The Israeli bombing campaign and ground invasion that followed Oct. 7 has stunned the world with its scale. Israel’s military actions have killed some 34,000 Gazans since Hamas’ attack – 72% are women and children, according to Palestinian authorities – and thousands are missing, many presumed buried under rubble.
How can we wrap our heads around these numbers?
“We have now identified more incidents where civilians have been killed since October 7 in Gaza than we did in eight years of the US and allied campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria,” Emily Tripp, the director of AirWars, a group that tracks casualties of airstrikes during war, told Al Jazeera Tuesday.
The civilian death toll in Gaza “per 100 attacks” – a measure of the rate and magnitude of civilian harm – is eight times greater than the estimated toll resulting from U.S.-led coalition actions in the 2017 battle for control of Raqqa, Syria, the military analyst Larry Lewis wrote in Just Security last month. (This is based on the “verified” 744 civilian deaths caused by the U.S.-led coalition in Raqqa, according to an AirWars estimate; even taking the “high estimate” of 1,600 deaths caused by the coalition, Israel’s campaign in Gaza is still nearly four times deadlier for civilians by this metric.) As Lewis observed, with the euphemism of an analyst, “It appears that Israel’s risk tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than in the past.”
According to Save The Children International Tuesday, “The monthly rate of attacks on hospitals & clinics [in Gaza] is higher than in any other conflict since 2018.”
One hundred days into the war, in January, roughly 24,000 people had been killed in Gaza. At the time, Oxfam noted that the death toll of civilians and combatants combined “exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.” One hundred days after that, 10,000 more Palestinians have been added to the death toll, maintaining Gaza as a deadlier war zone than even Ukraine and Syria.
Mass graves recently dug up in Gaza – Palestinian authorities said some bodies’ hands were bound, and the UN has called for an international investigation – only hint at the potential undercount in casualties.
The carnage in Gaza is plainly evident and unending; there isn’t any sign Israel will stop its campaign soon. It’s also the major reason I decided to start this newsletter.
When I joined HuffPost in 2022, I wasn’t hired to cover Israel or Palestine, but rather domestic politics, misinformation and conspiracy theories. As a reporter on the website’s national desk, I’ve written about vaccines, election denial, the U.S.-Mexico border, and American media, and I’m proud of that work.
But what’s happening in Gaza is historic and newsworthy, and so I’ve tried to write about it when I can. Around once a week, I’ve published a story on what’s happening in the Strip, the media and political reaction to it, and the protest movements here in the United States.
But it always feels like there’s more to say. What’s more, so many people in a position to cover the conflict on the ground are incapable: The Committee to Protect Journalists has confirmed the deaths of 92 Palestinian journalists and media workers since Oct. 7, likely a huge undercount given the difficulty of confirming casualties. Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza without military escort. And Palestinian journalists who are alive to cover the conflict are often severely impaired.
“I have become inclined toward silence, and struggle with the inability to carry out my journalistic tasks,” the Palestinian journalist Ibtisam Mahdi wrote in +972 Magazine this month – in a piece that laid out her grief at the death by Israeli airstrike of her brother and the detention of her father, and which detailed her desperate day-to-day search for food, shelter, electricity, cooking fuel, and internet connection.
In this context, simply speaking out can be a political act: As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, “When the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.” A Palestinian literary festival borrowed that phrase for its title in November: “But We Must Speak.”
But I’m a straight news reporter, not an opinion columnist or activist. Unlike King, Prejean, or Palestinian anti-war activists, I don’t intend to share opinions or advocate for specific policies here.
Instead, this newsletter is an opportunity to share research and reporting that hasn’t found a place in a complete HuffPost story. In journalistic lingo, these homeless details and factoids are “string.”
So this newsletter is “Gathering String.” It’s my home for an ongoing discussion on the news and the news industry itself: what it ignores, and what it distorts, how it shapes, and how it’s shaped. I hope you’ll join me.
Why Campus Protests Matter
I won’t write much here about the protests of Israel’s military action that have sprung up on college campuses across the United States. My colleagues at HuffPost have covered them well these past few days: see for example Shruti Rajkumar’s report on what student activists are demanding – for the most part, divestment from Israel, and ceasefire – and Christopher Mathias’ report on Christian nationalists marching outside of Columbia University.
But I do think it’s important to note one key dynamic these protests are employing – institutional access. By literally setting up camp at universities across the country, students are using their platforms to highlight the reaction of university administrators and law enforcement: Police, often in riot gear, have answered administrators’ requests by arresting students and clearing encampments, sometimes violently. Those arrests have in turn not only inspired more protests, but also widened the pool of protesters, including high-profile faculty like Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin, who a police officer slammed into the ground, and the chair of the university’s philosophy department, Noëlle McAfee, who was also taken away in cuffs. In New York, after police cleared one NYU encampment, students set up another – this time with the support of hundreds of UAW union members.
“I am a professor!” Fohlin objected as an officer pressed her face into the concrete. In a nutshell – and unintentionally – I think this communicated the essence of protestors' message. Israeli bombing has wiped out Gaza’s universities and has largely failed to distinguish between militants and professors. The campus arrests here in the states translate the situation in Gaza into an American political story.
The New York Times recently answered the question, “Why Gaza Protests on U.S. College Campuses Have Become So Contagious.” But critics pointed out that the Times failed to convey the most obvious motivation for the protests – that the United States is Israel’s primary source of weapons and aid.
Students at elite colleges are leveraging their access to campus to heighten the contrast between their position – ceasefire, divestment – with the United States’ official position – continue supplying Israel with money and weapons. And they’re using the dramatic university and police response to push the debate to the national stage, forcing a national conversation.
I visited Columbia’s protest encampment this week and asked students why it was so important to set up camp on Columbia grounds, rather than simply picketing outside on a public street.
“By being here, we are holding our ground,” Basil Rodriguez, one of the volunteer organizers of the protest, told me. “This is something that Palestinians continue to do, have done for generations, is hold our ground, simply exist, be here, speak for life, speak for hope and for the future in which all people are free, truly free, and equal.”
How do you start a newsletter in your free time? I don’t really know. I’ve spent nearly a decade as a professional journalist, but this is the first real writing project I’ve published on my own, independent of an employer. I was grateful for the interest this project received when I asked around about it, to my editors at HuffPost for letting me do it, to Alexander Kaufman, Phil Lewis and Abigail Koffler for their generous advice on how to write these and what they’re good for, and to my wife, Emily Shuham, for offering notes on this first issue.
One thing I know I want to do is ask questions of readers I trust – you – and answer questions in a way that helps me reflect on my job and how I’m doing it. I want your questions and comments on the news and the news industry. After several years of doing this work, I’m starting to get a sense of how the sausage is made, and I’m eager to talk about it with people who are engaged with current events.
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