The Daily - The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the intense week at the university. And Isabella Ramírez, the editor in chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, explains what it has all looked like to a student on campus.Guest: Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The New York TimesIsabella Ramírez, editor in chief of the Columbia Daily SpectatorBackground reading: Inside the week that shook Columbia University.The protests at the university continued after more than 100 arrests.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

You can hear the helicopter circling. This is Asa Chitravedi, I'm a producer with The Daily. Just walked out of the 116th Street station. It's the main station for Columbia's Morningside Heights campus. And it's day seven of the Gaza solidarity encampment where a hundred students were arrested last Thursday. So on one side of Broadway, you see camera crews, you see NYPD officers all lined up. There's barricades, steel barricades, caution tape.

This is normally a completely open campus. And I'm able to, all members of the public are able to walk through. Looks like international media is here. Have your IDs out. Have your IDs out. Students lining up to swipe in to get access to the university. ID required for entry. Swipe your ID, please. Hi, how are you? Sir, we're journalists with the New York Times.

You're not going to be able to get in. All right? Sorry. Thank you. It's total lockdown here at Columbia. Please have your IDs all ready to display. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the story of how Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators, and Congress

over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. I spoke with my colleague, Nick Fandos. It's Thursday, April 25th. Nick, if we rewind the clock a few months, we end up at a moment where students at several of the country's best-known universities are protesting Israel's response to the October 7th attacks, its approach to a war in Gaza.

At times, those protests are happening peacefully, at times with rhetoric that is inflammatory. And the result is that the leaders of those universities land before Congress. But the president of Columbia University, which is the subject we're going to be talking about today, is not one of the leaders who shows up for that testimony. who shows up for that testimony. That's right. So the House Education Committee has been watching all these protests on campus. And the Republican chairwoman decides, I'm going to open an investigation, look at how these administrations are handling it,

because it doesn't look good from where I sit. And the House last winter invites the leaders of several of these elite schools, Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, to come and testify in Washington on Capitol Hill before Congress. Now, the president of Columbia has what turns out to be a very well-timed pre-planned trip to go overseas and speak at an international climate conference. So Manoush Shafiq isn't going to be there. So instead, the presidents of Harvard and Penn and MIT show up and it turned out to be a disaster, right, for these universities. They were asked very

pointed questions about the kind of speech taking place on their campuses. And they gave really convoluted kind of academic answers back that just baffled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnectled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnect between the committee, and it wasn't just Republicans, Republicans and Democrats on the committee, and these college presidents. And that's when they were asked a hypothetical. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. And two of the presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth McGill of the University

of Pennsylvania, they're unwilling to say in this really kind of intense back and forth that this speech would constitute a violation of their rules. It can be, depending on the context. What's the context? Targeted at an individual. the context. What's the context? Targeted at an individual. It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? And it sets off a firestorm. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board. Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off. Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off.

Trustees of the universities start to wonder, I don't know that these leaders really got this under control. And eventually, both of them lose their jobs in a really high-profile way. Right. And as you've hinted at, for somewhat peculiar scheduling reasons, scheduling reasons, Columbia's president escapes this disaster of a hearing in what has to be regarded as the best timing

in the history of the American Academy. Yeah, exactly. And Columbia's watching all this play out, and I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair. But also a recognition that sooner or later their turn was going to come back around, and they were going to have to sit before Congress. Why were they so certain that they would probably end up before Congress and that

this wasn't a case of completely dodging a bullet? Well, they remain under investigation by the committee. But also, as the winter wears on, all the same intense protests just continue unabated. So in many ways, Columbia is like these other campuses, but in some ways it's even more intense. This is a university that has both one of the largest Jewish student populations of any of its peers, but it also has a large Arab and Muslim student population, a big Middle Eastern studies program. It has a dual degree program in Tel Aviv. And it's a university on top of all that that has a real history of activism dating back to the 1960s.

So when students are recruited or choose to come to Columbia, they're actively opting into a campus that prides itself on being an activist community. It's in the middle of New York City. It's a global place. You know, they consider the city and the world, really, like a classroom to Columbia. In other words, if any campus was going to be a hotbed of protest and debate over this conflict, it was going to be Columbia University. Exactly.

And when this spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Manoush Shafiq, Columbia's president, to come and testify. And this time, she has no excuse to say no. But presumably, she is well aware of exactly what testifying before this committee entails and is highly prepared. Columbia knew this moment was coming. They spent months preparing for this hearing. They brought in outside consultants, crisis communicators, experts on anti-Semitism. The weekend before the hearing, she actually travels down to Washington

to hole up in a war room where she starts preparing her testimony with mock questioners and testy exchanges to prep her for this. And she's very clear on what she wants to try to do. Where her counterparts had gone before the committee a few months before and looked aloof, she wanted to project humility and competence to say, I know that there's an issue on my campus right now with some of these protests veering off into anti-Semitic incidents,

but I'm getting that under control. I'm taking steps in good faith to make sure that we restore order to this campus while allowing people to express themselves freely as well. Okay, so then the day of her actual testimony arrives. And just walk us through how it goes. The Committee on Education and the Workforce will come to order. So Wednesday morning rolls around and President Shafiq sits at the witness stand with two of her trustees and the head of Columbia's new anti-Semitism task force. Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people. And right off the bat, they're put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what's been happening on campus.

For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick. Columbia undergraduate be an Israeli student with a stick? The Republican chairwoman of the committee, Virginia Fox, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafiq is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia's code of conduct? Mr. Greenwald. And she answers unequivocally. Dr. Shafiq. Yes, it does. And Professor Shafiq. That would be a violation of Columbia's rules. They would be punished. As president of Columbia, what is it like when you hear chants like,

by any means necessary, or intifada revolution? I find those chants incredibly distressing, and I wish profoundly that people would not use them on our campus. And in some of the most interesting exchanges of the hearing, President Shafiq actually opens Columbia's disciplinary books. We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation. These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken probably in the last decade at Columbia. She talks about the number of students that have been suspended, but also the number of faculty that she's had removed from the classroom

that are being investigated for comments that either violate some of Columbia's rules or make students uncomfortable. One case in particular really underscores this, and that's of a Middle Eastern studies professor named Joseph Massad. He wrote an essay not long after Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government, where he described that attack with adjectives like awesome. Now, he said they've been misinterpreted, but a lot of people have taken offense to those comments. Ms. Stefanik, you're recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to follow up on my colleague Rep. Wahlberg's question regarding Professor Joseph Massad. So let me be clear, President... And so Representative Elise Stefanik, the same Republican who had tripped up Claudine Gay of Harvard and others in the last hearing, really starts digging into President Shafiq about these things at Columbia. He is still chair on the website. So has he been terminated as chair? Congresswoman, I... And Shafiq's answers are maybe a little surprising.

I know you confirmed that he was under investigation. Yes, I can confirm that. Did you confirm he was still the chair? She says that Columbia is taking his case seriously. In fact, he's under investigation right now. Well, let me ask you this. Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair? And when Stefanik presses her to commit to removing him from a campus leadership position?

I think that would be, I think I would, yes. Let me come back with yes. But I think I just want to confirm his current status before I write. We'll take that as a yes, that you will confirm that he will no longer be chair. Shafiq seems to kind of pause and think and then agree to it on the spot, almost like she is making administrative decisions with or in front of Congress. Now, we did some reporting after the fact, and it turns out the professor didn't even realize he was under investigation. So he's learning about this from the hearing, too. So what this all adds up to, I think, is a performance so in line with what the lawmakers themselves wanted to hear that at certain points, these Republicans didn't quite know what to do with it. They were like the

dog that caught the car. Columbia beats Harvard and you, Penn. One of them, a Republican from Florida, I think at one point even more, well, you beat Harvard and pin. Y'all have done something that they weren't able to do. You've been able to condemn anti-Semitism without using the phrase, it depends on the context.

So Columbia's president has passed this test before this committee. Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs, So Columbia's president has passed this test before this committee. Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs, it seems like she has cleared that hurdle and dispatched with a congressional committee that could have been one of the biggest threats to her presidency. Without objection, there being no further business, the committee stands adjourned. But back on campus, some of the students and faculty who had been watching the hearing came away with a very different set of conclusions.

They saw a president who was so eager to please Republicans and Congress that she was willing to sell out some of the university's students and faculty and trample on cherished ideas like academic freedom and freedom of expression that had been a bedrock of American higher education for a really long time. And there was no clearer embodiment of that than what had happened that morning, just as President Shafiq was going to testify before Congress. A group of students before dawn set up tents in the middle of Columbia's campus and declared themselves a pro-Palestinian encampment in open defiance of the very rules that Dr. Shafiq had put in place to try and get these protests under control. So these students in real time

are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia's president has just said before Congress. Exactly. And so instead of going to celebrate her successful appearance before Congress, Shafiq walks out of the hearing room and gets in a black SUV to go right back to that war room where she's immediately confronted with a major dilemma. It basically boils down to this. She had just gone before Congress and told them, I'm going to get tough on these protests. And here they were. So either

she gets tough and risks inflaming tension on campus, or she holds back and does nothing, and her words before Congress immediately look hollow. And what does she decide? So for the next 24 hours, she tries to negotiate off-ramps. She consults with her deans and the New York Police Department, and it all builds towards an incredibly consequential decision. And that is, for the first time in decades, to call the New York City Police Department onto campus in riot gear and break this thing up.

Suspend the students involved and then arrest them. To essentially eliminate this encampment. Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafiq actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed

and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full-blown crisis. After the break, what all of this has looked like to a student on Columbia's campus. We'll be right back. Hello? Is this Isabella? Yes, this is she. Hi, Isabella. It's Michael Barbaro from The Daily. Hi, nice to meet you. Earlier this week, we called Isabella Ramirez, the editor-in-chief of Columbia's undergraduate newspaper, The Columbia Daily Spectator, which has been closely tracking both the protests and the university's response to them since October 7th. So, I mean, in your mind, how do we get to this point? I wonder if you can just briefly describe the kind of key moments that bring us to where we are right now.

I mean, since October 7th, there has certainly been constant escalation in terms of tension on campus. And there have been kind of a variety of moves that I believe have distanced sort of the student body, the faculty from the university and its administration. Specifically, the suspension of Columbia's chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And that became a huge moment in what was sort of characterized as suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, effectively rendering those groups, quote unquote, unauthorized. What was the college's explanation for that? authorized. What was the college's explanation for that? They had cited in that suspension a policy which states that a demonstration must be approved within a certain window and that there must be an advance notice and that there's a process for getting an authorized demonstration.

But the primary point was this policy that they were referring to, which we later reported was changed before the suspension. So it felt a little ad hoc to people. Yes, it certainly came as a surprise, especially at Spectator. We're sort of nerds of the university in the sense that we are familiar with faculty and university governance. We are familiar with faculty and university governance. But even to us, we had no idea where this policy was coming from. And this suspension was really the first time that it entered most students' fear. Got it.

You know, Columbia's campus is so known for its activism. And so in my time of being a reporter, of being an editor, I've overseen several protests and I've never seen Columbia penalize a group for quote unquote, not authorizing a protest. So that was certainly in our minds unprecedented. And I believe part of the justification there was, well, this is a different time. And I think that is a reasonable thing to say, but I think a lot of students, they felt it was particularly one-sided, right? That it was targeting a specific type of speech or a specific type of viewpoint, although the university, of course, in its explicit policies did not outline and was actually very explicit about not targeting specific viewpoints. So just to be really, so just to be super clear,

it felt to students, and it sounds like, journalistically, it felt to you that the university was coming down in a kind of uniquely one-sided way against students who were supporting Palestinian rights and may have expressed some frustrations with Israel in that moment. Yes. Isabella says that this was just the beginning of a really tense period between student protesters and the university. After those two student groups were suspended, campus protests continued. Students made a variety of demands. They asked that the university divest from businesses that profit from Israel's military operations in Gaza. But instead of making any progress, the protests are met with further crackdown by the university. And so, as Isabella and her colleagues at the college newspapers see it, there's this

overall chilling effect that occurs. Some students become fearful that if they participate in any demonstrations, they're going to face disciplinary action. So fast forward now to April, when the student protesters learned that President Shafiq is headed to Washington for her congressional testimony. It's at this moment that they set out to build their encampment. I think there was obviously a lot of intention in timing those two things. I think it's sort of inherently a critique on a political pressure and congressional pressure that we saw build up against, of course, Claudine Gay at Harvard and McGill at UPenn. So I think a lot of students and faculty have been frustrated at this idea that there are not only powers at the

university that are dictating what's happening, but there are perhaps external powers that are also guiding the way here in terms of what the university feels like it must do or has to do. And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes sort of to different places, right? Right. All eyes were going to be on Shafiq in D.C., but now a lot of eyes are on New York. Shafiq in D.C., but now a lot of eyes are on New York. The encampment is set up in the middle of the night, morning, prior to the hearing. And so what effectively happens is they caught Shafiq when she wasn't on campus, when a lot of senior administration had their resources dedicated to supporting Shafiq in D.C. And you have all of

those people sort of not necessarily out of commission, but with their focus elsewhere. So the encampment is met with very little resistance at the beginning. There were sort of public safety officers floating around and sort of watching. But at the very beginning hours, I think there was a sense of we did it. It would be quite surprising to anybody, an administrator, to now suddenly see dozens of tents on this lawn in a way that I think very purposely puts an imagery of we're here to stay. As the morning kind of evolved and congressional hearing continued. Then we started seeing university delegates that were coming to the encampment saying, you know, you may face disciplinary action for continuing to be here. I think that started around almost like 9 or 10 a.m.

They started handing out these code of conduct violation notices. Hell no! Hell no! Hell no! Then there started to be more public safety sort of action and presence. So they started like barricading the entrances. As the day progressed, there was more threat of discipline. The students became informed that if they continue to stay, they will face potential academic sanctions, potential suspension. The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be.

I think a lot of people were like, okay, you're threatening us with suspension, but so what? This is about the systems that Manoush Shafiq, that the board of trustees, that Columbia University is complicit in. What are you going to do to try to get us out of here? And that was obviously promptly answered. This is the new police department. You are to be arrested and an unauthorized encampment. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing. answered. My phone blew up, obviously, from the reporters, from the editors of saying, oh my God, the NYPD is on our campus. And as soon as I saw that, I came out and I saw a huge crowd of students and affiliates on campus watching the lawns. And as I kind of circled around that crowd, I saw the last end of the New York Police Department pulling away protesters

and kind of clearing out the last of the encampments. We love you. We love you. We love you. We love you. It was something truly unimaginable. Over 100 students slash other individuals are arrested from our campus, forcefully removed. And although they were suspended, there was a feeling of, you know, this traumatic event that has just happened to these students, but also this sense of like, okay, the worst of the worst that could have happened to us just happened. And for those students who maybe couldn't go back to, into campus, now all of their peers who were supporters or are in solidarity are, in some senses, further emboldened. They're now not just sitting on the lawns for a pro-Palestinian cause, but also for the students who have endured quite a lot.

So the crackdown sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD ends up, you're saying, sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD ends up, you're saying, becoming a galvanizing force for a broader group of Columbia students than were originally drawn to the idea of ever showing up on the center of campus and protesting. Yeah, I can certainly speak to the fact that I've seen my own peers, friends, or even acquaintances who weren't necessarily previously very involved in activism and organizing efforts suddenly finding themselves involved can i just i have a question for you which is all journalism student journalism or not student journalism is a kind of first draft of history and and i wonder if we think of this as a historic moment for Colombia, how you imagine it's going to be remembered?

Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be a historic moment for Colombia. I think that this will be remembered as a moment in which the fractures were laid bare. Really, we got to see some of the disunity of the community in ways that I have never really seen it before. And what we'll be looking to is where do we go from here? How does Columbia repair? How do we heal from all of this? But that is the big question in terms of what will happen. Nick, Isabella Ramirez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a

Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafiq did not quell much of anything. It seemed instead to really intensify everything on campus. I'm curious what this has looked like for Shafiq. It's not just the students who are upset. You have faculty, including professors who are not necessarily sympathetic to the protesters' view of the war, who are really outraged about what Shafiq has done here. They feel that she's crossed a boundary that hasn't been crossed on Columbia's campus in a really long time. And so you start to hear things by the end of last week like censure, no confidence votes, questions about, from her own professors, about whether or not she can stay in power. So this creates a whole new front for her. And on top of it all, as this is going on, the encampment itself starts to reform tent by tent. Oh, wow. Almost in the same place that it

was. And Shafiq decides that the most important thing she could do is to try and take the temperature down, which means letting the encampment stand. Or in other words, leaning in the other direction. This time, we're going to let the protesters have their say for a little while longer. The problem with that is that over the weekend, a series of images start to emerge from on campus and just off of it of some really troubling anti-Semitic episodes. on campus and just off of it, of some really troubling anti-Semitic episodes. In one case, a guy holds up a poster in the middle of campus and points it towards a group of Jewish students who are counter-protesting, and it says, I'm paraphrasing here, Hamas's next targets.

I saw an image of that. I mean, what it seemed to evoke was the message that Hamas should murder those Jewish students. I mean, that's the way the Jewish students interpret it. Right, it's a pretty straightforward and jarring statement. At the same time, just outside of Colombia's closed gates, protesters are showing up from across New York City. It's hard to tell who's affiliated with Colombia, who's not. There's a video that goes viral of one of them shouting at Jewish students,

go back to Poland, go back to Europe. In other words, a clear message, you're not welcome here. Right. In fact, go back to the places where the Holocaust was committed. Exactly. And this is not representative of the vast majority of the protesters in the encampment who mostly had been peaceful. They would later hold a Seder, actually, with some of the pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters in their ranks. But those videos are reaching members of Congress, the very same Republicans that Shafiq had testified in front of just a few days before. And now they're looking and saying, you have lost control of your campus, you've turned back on your word to us, and you need to resign. They call for her outright resignation over this.

That's right. Republicans in New York and across the country begin to call for her to step down from her position as president of Columbia. So Shafiq's dilemma here is pretty extraordinary. She has set up this dynamic where pleasing these members of Congress would probably mean calling in the NYPD all over again

to sweep out this encampment, which would mean further alienating and inflaming students and faculty who are still very upset over the first crackdown. And now both ends of this spectrum, lawmakers in Washington, folks on the Columbia campus, are saying she can't lead the university over this situation before she's even made any fateful decision about what to do with this second encampment. Not a good situation.

No, she's besieged on all sides. For a while, the only thing that she can come up with to offer is for classes to go hybrid for the remainder of the semester. So students who aren't feeling safe in this protest environment don't necessarily have to go to class. Right. And I think if we zoom out for a second, it's worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here, right, than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she's kind of ended up in the exact same thicket with people calling for her job with the White House, the mayor of New York City and others. These are Democrats maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don't know what's going on on your campus. This does not look good.

I mean, that reality, that taking a different tack that was supposed to be full of learnings and lessons from the stumbles of her peers, the fact that that didn't really work suggests that there's something really intractable going on here. And I wonder how you're thinking about this intractable situation that's now arrived on these college campuses. Well, I don't think it's just limited to college campuses, right? We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We've seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.

In our media. We've seen it in the media. But college campuses, at least in their most idealized form, are something special. They're a place where students get to go for four years to think in big ways about moral questions and political questions and ideas that help shape the world they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. And so when you have a question that feels as urgent as this war does for a lot of people, I think it reverberates in an incredibly intense way on those campuses. And there's something like, I don't know if it's

quite a contradiction of terms, but there's a collision of different values at stake. So universities thrive on the ability of students to follow their minds and their voices where they go to maybe even experiment a little bit and find those things. But there are also communities that rely on people being able to trust each other and being able to carry out their classes and their academic endeavors as a collective so they can learn from one another. So in this case, that's all kind of getting scrambled. Students who feel strongly about the Palestinian cause feel like the point is disruption, that something so big and immediate and urgent is happening that they need to get in the faces of their professors and their administrators and their fellow students. Right, and set up an encampment in the left campus no matter what their rules say. Right. And from the administration's perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that and that's an important process, but maybe there's some bad apples in your ranks. Or though you may have good intentions, you're saying things that

you don't realize the implications of, and they're making this environment unsafe for others. Or they're grinding our classes to a halt and we're not able to function as a university. So the only way we're going to be able to move forward is if you will respect our rules and we'll respect your point of view. The problem is that's just not happening. Something is not connecting with those two points of view. And as if that's not hard enough, you then have Congress and the political system with its own agenda coming in and putting its thumb on a scale of an already very difficult situation.

Right. And at this very moment, what we know is that the forces that you just outlined have created a dilemma, an uncertainty of how to proceed, not just for President Shafiq and the students and faculty at Columbia, but for a growing number of colleges and universities across the country. And by that, I mean, this thing that seemed to start at Columbia is literally spreading. Absolutely. We're talking on a Wednesday afternoon, and these encampments have now started cropping up at universities from coast to coast, at Harvard and Yale,

but also at University of California, at the University of Texas, at smaller campuses in between. And in each of these institutions, there's presidents and deans just like President Shafiq at Columbia who are facing a really difficult set of choices. Do they call in the police? The University of Texas in Austin this afternoon, we saw protesters physically clashing with police. Do they hold back? Like at Harvard where there were dramatic videos of students literally running into Harvard Yard with tents. They were popping up in real time. And so, Columbia really,

I think at the end of the day, may have kicked off some of this, but they are now in league with a whole bunch of other universities that are struggling with the same set of questions. It's a set of questions that they've had since this war broke out. And now these schools only have a week or two left of classes. But we don't know when these standoffs are going to end. We don't know if students are going to leave campus for the summer. We don't know if they're going to come back in the fall and start protesting right away. Or if this year is going to turn out to have been an aberration that was a response to a really awful, bloody war. Or if we're at the beginning of a bigger shift on college campuses

that will long outlast this war in the Middle East. Well, Nick, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The United Nations is calling for an independent investigation into two mass graves found after Israeli forces withdrew from hospitals in Gaza. Officials in Gaza said that some of the bodies found in the graves were Palestinians who had been handcuffed or shot in the head

and accused Israel of killing and burying them. In response, Israel said that its soldiers had exhumed bodies in one of the graves as part of an effort to locate Israeli hostages. And on Wednesday, Hamas released a video of Hirsch Goldberg Poland, an Israeli-American dual citizen whom Hamas has held hostage since October 7th. It was the first time that he has been shown alive since his captivity began. His kidnapping was the subject of a daily episode in October that featured his mother, Rachel. In response to Hamas' video, Rachel issued a video of her own, in which she spoke directly to her son. And Hirsch, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you, we are telling you, we love you. Stay strong. Survive. We love you. Stay strong. Survive. It was edited by Devin Taylor and Lisa Chow. Contains research help by Susan Lee.

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfork of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbarboro. See you tomorrow.