The Headlines - Hezbollah Fires Toward Tel Aviv, and Iran’s New President Addresses U.N.

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Plus, was your doctor’s message written by A.I.?   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Israel Says It Shot Down Missile Over Tel Aviv, by Victoria Kim, Gabby Sobelman and Aaron BoxermanIsrael’s Attacks on Hezbollah Achieved Short-Term Aims, Officials Say, but End Goal Is Unclear, by Ronen BergmanIsraeli Bulldozers Flatten Mile After Mile in the West Bank, by Erika Solomon, Lauren Leatherby and Aric TolerIn His First U.N. Speech, Iran’s President Aimed to Defuse Tensions With the West While Criticizing Israel, by Farnaz FassihiTrump Is Briefed on Iranian Assassination Threats, by Chris CameronWoman Accuses Sean Combs of Raping Her in Filmed Attack, by Julia JacobsThat Message From Your Doctor? It May Have Been Drafted by A.I., by Teddy Rosenbluth

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Michael Simon Johnson. Today's Wednesday, September 25th. Here's what we're covering. Early this morning in Tel Aviv, the Israeli military says it intercepted a missile fired by Hezbollah that appeared to be the militant group's deepest attack yet into the country. The missile triggered alerts and air raid

sirens and sent residents fleeing for shelters. Hezbollah said it was targeting the headquarters of Israel's foreign intelligence service in retaliation for assassinations of some of its leaders in the past week, along with the deadly explosions of hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies. The Times has learned that this recent surge in violence was kicked off almost by chance. Five current and former top Israeli officials say that Israel had gotten last-minute intel that its plan to blow up Hezbollah pagers was about to be exposed, so they rushed forward with the operation, kicking off a week of attacks and counterattacks that are still ongoing. On the one hand, Israel's attacks have been, in military terms, a tactical success.

Patrick Kingsley is the Times Jerusalem bureau chief. They have managed to infiltrate and destroy part of Hezbollah's communication networks. They have taken out several key commanders, and they say they have destroyed military targets, rocket launchers, weapons caches, all across Hezbollah's heartland in southern Lebanon. The flip side is that Israel appears no closer to achieving its strategic goals. The goal is to get Hezbollah to retreat from the border and make it safe for the roughly 60,000 Israelis who have been displaced from their homes since last October

to return to those homes. Hezbollah is still firing into northern Israel. They appear to be escalating in response to Israel's escalation. And a week into this raising of the stakes, it doesn't appear that Israel's gamble has yet paid off. Meanwhile, a new analysis by The Times shows that Israeli raids in the West Bank last month caused widespread destruction. Israel said their operations in the towns of Tul Karm and Janin were part of a counterterrorism

effort to root out Hamas and other militants in the occupied territory. Video verified by the Times showed Israeli troops bulldozing infrastructure, destroying businesses, and getting in the way of ambulances and emergency responders. Israel's conducted raids against militants in the West Bank for decades, but in the past few weeks, residents say that the destruction those raids have caused has been like nothing else they've ever seen. Erica Solomon is part of the team of Times reporters who looked through visual evidence of the Israeli raids. When you look at the videos that we've examined, it looks like a war zone. The streets have been completely ripped up. It's all dirt. It's cratered. They plowed through soccer fields that kids play on, all kinds of places that, so locals don't make sense as a target for military operations. So in a lot of cases,

after these Israeli bulldozers have gone through, people are left without any running water, with their sewage spilling into the streets, without any electricity. And what people would describe as like gears of a family business, decades sometimes that they had built up being detonated in an explosion, a bulldozer ramming through their jewelry shop, destroying their entire collection of jewelry. I spoke to a man who works in a square that has now been raided, I think, 18 times this year. And the feeling that people had, it was often such despair. Even before the latest raids, Jinin and Tulkarem were seen as places where militancy could thrive

because of a lack of economic opportunity. And what some business owners that we spoke to said was that now, with all of this destruction, that trend could be exacerbated, that more people could actually turn to militant groups. The Times sent the Israeli military a detailed list asking about the extent of the destruction. It acknowledged that there was, quote, unavoidable harm to civilian structures

and said it was necessary in order to look for mines and destroy weapons stockpiles. In New York, world leaders are gathered for the United Nations General Assembly, with many taking the stage to address the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to speak on Friday. And yesterday afternoon, Iran's new president, Massoud Pazeshkian, delivered his first speech to the UN through an interpreter. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others.

We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone. Unlike past Iranian presidents who've used the stage to threaten American presidents or deny the Holocaust, Pazeshkian struck a softer tone. He said Tehran was ready to negotiate about its nuclear program. He also extended an olive branch to Iran's Western adversaries, with one notable exception, Israel. It is imperative that the international community should immediately stop the violence and bring about a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and bring an end to the desperate barbarism of Israel in Lebanon

before it engulfs the region and the world. Analysts who watched the speech say that Pazeshkian's call for an end to violence is at odds with the country's own actions in the region. Iran has long supported and armed militant groups, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. On the same day as Pozeshkin's speech, Donald Trump's presidential campaign said that U.S. intelligence officials warned Trump about threats from Iran to assassinate him. Earlier in the year, the U.S. had tracked a potential Iranian plot to kill Trump,

and while intelligence officials confirmed that they'd briefed the campaign yesterday, they didn't specify if the briefing was about that previous threat or a new plot. There is no evidence that the assassination attempts against Trump in Pennsylvania and Florida were related to Iran. American officials say that Iran has been making an ambitious push to influence this year's presidential election. Iranian hackers breached Trump's campaign and tried to get into Kamala Harris's campaign. Iran has also made a widespread effort to spread disinformation about the election, with the apparent goal of sowing discord and undermining American democracy. The trauma of the assault has taken a toll on my mental health. Just over a week after hip-hop mogul Sean Combs was arrested on charges of sex trafficking,

another woman has come forward, accusing him of drugging her, tying her up, and raping her in 2001. It's a pain that reaches into your very core of who you are and leaving emotional scars that may never forgive you. Talia Graves filed a lawsuit against Combs yesterday and spoke at a news conference. She says she met Combs, who's also known as Diddy, through her boyfriend at the time, who worked on Combs' music label, and that the assault took place in Combs' recording studio. She says she was also assaulted

by Combs' bodyguard, Joseph Sherman. The lawsuit claims that the rape was filmed and Sherman and Combs showed the footage to other people for years following the assault. Sherman told the Times he's never met Graves and that he categorically denies the accusations. Representatives for Combs didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Six other women have also publicly accused Combs of sexual assault in the past year. Three additional lawsuits have accused him of sexual misconduct. He's currently being held without bail at a jail in Brooklyn. And finally, every day, doctors and patients across the U.S. send hundreds of thousands of messages to each other through a program called MyChart. It's used by nearly every hospital system in the country. But increasingly, some of the

doctors who use the platform are taking advantage of a new feature it offers that drafts their messages using AI. The feature has become popular as health systems try to handle a flood of messages from patients who got used to easy, direct communications with their doctors during the pandemic. The AI responses are meant to save physicians time. When a doctor opens up a message from a patient, they see a generated response from the AI tool that uses old messages and the patient's medical records. It can even match the physician's writing style. The doctor can then approve or edit the message before sending. But the program isn't always accurate. It can introduce errors, like telling a patient they've gotten a vaccine when they haven't.

And without strong federal regulations or widely accepted ethical standards, not every hospital system is disclosing to patients that they're using the AI tool. One doctor told The Times that if a patient found out a message that sounds like their doctor was actually drafted by an AI bot, they'd feel, quote, rightly betrayed. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a deeper look at the long, violent relationship between Hezbollah and Israel.

That's next in the New York Times audio app, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Simon Johnson. We'll be back tomorrow.