A Palestinian official tells the BBC that Israel and Hamas disagreed over a proposal to extend the fragile ceasefire.

For every Palestinian Israel freed in the ceasefire deal, it arrested 16 more.

The Palestinian group agrees to resume talks, promising to free Edan Alexander and hand over four captives' bodies.

Gaza’s children lost over a year of education due to war damage, with many struggling to resume learning through rebuilt schools and online platforms.

Stefani Fox says the Trump administration is using their movement as an excuse to dismantle civil rights.

As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime.

It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned.

Rubio’s letter notified DHS that he had revoked both targets’ visas, setting in motion plans for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and attempt to deport them, according to a senior DHS official and another U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the operation against Khalil took shape.

In addition to the two names in Rubio’s initial letter, the State Department has also sent the names of “one or two” more students whose visas it has revoked, according to the DHS official, who described the first group of names as an opening move, with “more to come.”

The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said.

Khalil, 30, a graduate student who became a prominent leader of campus demonstrations against the war in Gaza last spring, was taken into custody one day after Rubio sent the letter to DHS. The circumstances of his arrest and detention have set off alarms about the Trump administration’s willingness to test First Amendment protections and wield its power over noncitizens in order to intimidate protesters.

Trump has said on social media that Khalil’s is “the first arrest of many to come.”

The ICE agents who arrested Khalil on March 8 were from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which typically handles counternarcotics, counterterrorism, and other transnational crimes, rather than civil immigration enforcement. Khalil’s attorney did not respond to inquiries today.

[Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants]

A copy of the charging document ICE filed—published yesterday by The Washington Post—suggests that the government’s formal allegations against Khalil were drafted in haste.

The document, called a Notice to Appear, identifies Khalil as a citizen of Algeria who was born in Syria. It states that he was admitted to the United States “at unknown place on or about unknown date,” even though DHS is the federal entity in possession of visa holders’ entry data.

The document then appears to make a significant error, according to Andrew Rankin, a Memphis immigration attorney who has been following Khalil’s case.

It states that Khalil became a legal permanent resident under a specific statute in immigration law, which is true, but refers to the wrong one. “The document was written very unprofessionally,” Rankin told me. “When DHS realizes what they’ve done, they’ll be begging the judge to let them correct it.”

Although the State Department has broad latitude to revoke a foreign student’s visa and DHS can deport them, someone with legal permanent residency—a green-card holder—has to be stripped of that status by an immigration judge before they can be deported.

That routinely happens when a green-card holder commits a serious crime. But Khalil has not been charged with a crime. Trump-administration officials are trying to remove him using an extraordinary and seldom-cited authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the secretary of state to personally determine that an immigrant’s presence in the United States has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

[Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext]

Troy Edgar, who was confirmed earlier this week as DHS deputy secretary, struggled to explain that rationale during a contentious NPR interview broadcast this morning. When Edgar claimed that Khalil had engaged in anti-Semitic political activities in support of Hamas, the NPR host Michel Martin pressed Edgar to say what specific laws he’d broken or whether he had engaged in pro-Hamas propaganda.

As Edgar grew flustered, he told Martin she could “see it on TV.”

“We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Edgar said.

Martin asked if protest activity constitutes “a deportable offense.” Edgar didn’t answer.

At Columbia, Khalil was one of the protest movement’s most prominent figures. Administration officials say his criticism of Israel fueled anti-Semitism on campus and aligned with the violent radicalism of terrorists. But their case for his deportation rests with the rarely tested authorities of the secretary of state to expel someone based on U.S. foreign-policy interests.

Immigration attorneys tracking the case say the administration is looking to test the boundaries of U.S. immigration law and speech protections. The First Amendment does not protect speech that incites violence, Rankin noted. Trump officials, including Rubio, claim that Khalil and other protesters threatened and intimidated Jewish students, but have not cited specific acts.

“There are kids at these schools that can’t go to class,” Rubio told reporters this week, referring to Jewish students, many of whom had faced harassment. “You pay all this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even go to class.”

“If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” he added. “If you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.”

The day after Khalil’s arrest, the government whisked him to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His attorneys said they were unable to speak privately with him for several days.

If U.S. immigration courts side against Khalil and declare him deportable, he could file an appeal. If he loses, his attorneys could ask a U.S. district court in Louisiana to stop his deportation. Because he is in Louisiana, his case would fall under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a reputation as the nation’s most conservative appeals court. Two DHS officials said the government moved him to Louisiana to seek the most favorable venue for its arguments.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration lawyer and the author of a widely used legal sourcebook, said the government’s claims against Khalil have no recent comparison, and would likely be precedent-setting. “This is a test case,” he said.

Khalil’s lawyers are trying to get him returned to New York. A district-court judge in New York has barred the government from deporting Khalil until his case is resolved, but the judge has not ordered the administration to return him to New York. Khalil is scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in Louisiana on March 27.

In a filing Thursday night, Khalil's attorneys told the district court in New York that their client was being punished for engaging in legally protected protest activity. “The Trump administration has made no secret of its opposition to those protests and has repeatedly threatened to weaponize immigration law to punish noncitizens who have participated,” his attorneys said, asking the court to bring Khalil back from Louisiana, order his release, and block the government’s case.

Trump-administration officials view the moves targeting foreign students as part of their wider immigration-enforcement crackdown. Trump is planning to invoke executive authorities, including a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as soon as tomorrow, according to a White House official who was not authorized to discuss internal plans.

Trump has grown frustrated that the pace of deportations has lagged behind what he promised on the campaign trail, and he has urged DHS officials to accelerate their efforts, the official said. He also said the president may try to use the 18th-century law to target specific groups, including suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Trump previewed that move while he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. The White House official cautioned that the timing was fluid and the administration may not publicize it in advance, because it is convinced that press leaks have hindered previous deportation operations.

Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.

Israelis want Benjamin Netanyahu to say sorry and go away. A survey released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute found that a staggering 87 percent of Israelis think the prime minister should take responsibility for the events of October 7, and 73 percent want him to resign either now or after the Gaza war. These figures might seem shocking to outsiders, but they are actually old news. Since October 7, the Israeli public has consistently told pollsters that it wants Netanyahu gone—a preference that has held through every twist and turn of the war and has, if anything, intensified over time.

The reason for this is simple: Netanyahu not only presided over the worst security failure in Israel’s history but has actively governed against the will of the country’s majority. He and his allies received just 48.4 percent of the vote in late 2022. Still, the Israeli leader did not seek to unite a polarized population by pivoting to the center. Instead he cobbled together a sectarian coalition with unpopular extremist constituencies: far-right messianic settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. Because the votes of both of these groups are necessary for the government to remain in power, they have been able to extort Netanyahu for ever-expanding giveaways and political gains. The result: On core issue after issue, Netanyahu has been the prime minister for the 30 percent.

[Anshel Pfeffer: Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]

Take the cease-fire deal that is currently in limbo in Gaza. Polls consistently show that some 70 percent of Israelis want the arrangement to continue until all of the hostages are free, even if that means releasing many convicted terrorists and ending the war with Hamas still at large. Likewise, a significant majority of Israelis reject any effort to resettle Gaza. But in his coalition, Netanyahu is beholden to the radical minority that wants not only to restart the war but also to ethnically cleanse Gaza in order to repopulate it with Jewish communities. And so the hostage deal teeters on the edge.

Or consider the question of ultra-Orthodox enlistment in the Israeli army. That army is not volunteer; it relies on a universal draft to fill its ranks. But since the country’s founding, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has been exempt from participation; its young men instead study in government-subsidized religious seminaries while their brethren defend the country. This arrangement was deeply unpopular, but for decades, Israelis grudgingly accepted it in exchange for ultra-Orthodox cooperation on more pressing political matters. But today, as Israel faces combat on multiple fronts, there is no more pressing matter than staffing the strapped armed forces. And given that the ultra-Orthodox community is now the fastest-growing demographic in Israel, its absence from the national defense is no longer tenable. Since October 7, polls show that about 70 percent of Israelis—including a majority of those who voted for the ruling right-wing government—oppose the ultra-Orthodox exemptions. A similar number opposes state subsidies to this community and its religious institutions. None of these preferences has changed government policy.

Netanyahu’s disregard for majority opinion predates October 7 and may be his government’s original sin. In January 2023, his coalition announced its first major policy initiative: a sweeping overhaul of Israel’s judicial system that would dramatically disempower the country’s supreme court. This extraordinary reordering of Israeli democracy was not conceived through public debate and brokered consensus, but rather produced by a conservative think tank and rammed through the Parliament on a narrow party-line vote. Polls found that the plan was opposed by—say it with me—some two-thirds of the Israeli public. For a time, mass demonstrations against it paralyzed the country, in the largest sustained protest movement in Israeli history. Only the cataclysmic events of October 7 shelved the overhaul—and now Netanyahu’s coalition is bringing it back.

The prime minister’s determination to thwart the Israeli majority has also affected personnel decisions at the highest level. On November 5, 2024, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Polls previously found that Gallant was the most popular elected politician in Israel. But the former army general had opposed the judicial overhaul, rejected Jewish settlement in Gaza, called for the territory to be returned to non-Hamas Palestinian governance, pushed for an earlier cease-fire deal, and repeatedly pressed to draft the ultra-Orthodox into the Israel Defense Forces. In other words, Gallant represented all of the consensus positions of Israeli society—and that’s why he had to go. On January 1, he resigned from Parliament entirely.

[Read: The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu]

These are not cherry-picked, incidental issues. They are the fundamental fault lines in Israeli politics, because they will determine the country’s future. And on every single one, Netanyahu and his government are on the opposite side of the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public. Technically, that’s all within the rules of the game. The prime minister’s coalition may not have gotten a majority of the vote, but thanks to a quirk of the Israeli electoral system, it did get the majority of seats in Parliament, and unless it collapses, it can govern as it wishes until the next election, in 2026. But morally and practically, Netanyahu’s blatant disregard for the preferences of the public is a disaster for Israeli democracy, because it undermines faith in the system’s ability to deliver for its people.

Seen in this context, it’s no wonder that polls since before October 7 have consistently shown the current government losing the next election. The war has sublimated the rage seething beneath the surface to the needs of national security. But once Israelis stop fighting Hamas in Gaza, they will inevitably turn their sights on their own leadership.

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The ongoing stalemate over extending a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has 2 million people still trapped in the rubble-strewn Gaza Strip with dwindling medical, food, and water supplies. Last week the Israeli government cut off all aid into Gaza in an attempt to force Hamas to agree to its terms. This week, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen ordered all electric power cut off to Gaza, a move that affects a very crucial piece of remaining infrastructure: a desalination plant.

In the throes of war, it can be hard to keep track of any one element of harm or destruction. There are so many places to look. But for people like Marwan Bardawil, his focus on just one thing—his job—is also his salvation, “All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues.”

For nearly 30 years, Bardawil has worked to grow and stabilize the water sector in Gaza.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we learn more about the dire water situation in Gaza through the experience of one man who until now has managed to keep finding ways to get clean water into Gaza.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: With every day that goes by, the cease-fire in Gaza—if we can even still call it that—seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan. American diplomats met with Hamas. But so far, no agreement, and no consensus, and for the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day.

About a week ago, Israel has once again cut off power, which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza, and power helps bring them clean water, and clean water helps keep them alive.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bardawil. He is a water engineer in Gaza, someone who was regularly calculating inflows, outflows; reviewing plans; and engineering new ideas to keep Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war—whatever is going on politically.

And something about this bureaucrat, trying day after day to keep the water on, really captured the growing desperation of the war. Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7 and continued to get more impossible by the day.

When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza. Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south. And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, caught up with him to try to learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people.

Claudine, welcome to the show.

Claudine Ebeid: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Claudine, there’s so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves—the thousands who have had their lives upended during the war. I know many have left the country. What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave?

Ebeid: Well, just to remind listeners, Marwan is 61 years old, he’s a father and grandfather, and he and his family were living in the north of Gaza, which was where Israel first launched its retaliatory attack to the October 7 attacks. So five days into the war, under Israeli air strikes, Marwan, his adult children, and two of his granddaughters—they flee the north on foot to the south of Gaza. Then, last summer, like almost a hundred thousand other Palestinians, he decides to flee once more, but this time from Gaza to Egypt.

Marwan Bardawil: I’m one of them: no house. And when you lost—when your house has become a rubble, you don’t just lose your house. You lost your house, your memories. So it’s just—it’s like you moved having nothing; you lost everything. Just, you are here; it’s like you saved your body from physical death.

Ebeid: Many people fled to Egypt in this little sliver of a window where the border was open, and people planned to get out through basically this company—this Egyptian company—charging US$5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child to get people out. So, you know, it’s not an altruistic endeavor.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ebeid: Ultimately, there were two reasons that really pushed Marwan to leave. From the professional side, he was starting to get pressure—counsel, I think, is the right word—from his boss that if he could get out, he should, because his work was really valuable to them, and they needed him alive.

Rosin: Oof.

Ebeid: The second reason was this moment that he described to me, where he was driving in his car, and the car in front of him exploded. You know, shrapnel from the car busted through his windshield and injured his shoulder. And I think it was just too close of call. You know, when he described that moment to me, he said three weeks later, he and his family—they were gone.

[Music]

Rosin: How did water work in Gaza before the war? Because I recall from talking to him that it wasn’t easy, even in the best of non-war circumstances, to keep water flowing.

Ebeid: It’s true. Water was never a sure thing in Gaza. It’s a total patchwork of a system there. Basically, they have a combination of water sources.

One is coming from Israel. That’s about 10 percent of their water, and that comes from three main connection points. The rest is coming from groundwater that gets treated. So the Palestinian Water Authority says that before the war, there were 306 groundwater wells as primary sources of water. They also have three desalination plants. They’re situated along the coast, and they’re basically treating seawater. The output is not huge.

And then they also have a lot of small-scale desalination plants and water tankers that are, you know, just kind of filling in the gaps. So it’s not an ideal system. You have a lot of moving parts. And the source water that you’re starting with is already not a great starting point.

Rosin: How much water did make it to Palestinians with that arrangement?

Ebeid: The average person in Gaza was getting around 80 liters of water a day. And most Americans—we use about 300 liters of water a day.

Rosin: Oh.

Ebeid: So that’s what was going on before October 7.

Rosin: Right, so that was the baseline before the war. Then comes October 7, and you’ve described the intense bombing campaigns that destroyed a lot of the north. How did that situation look in the eyes of a water engineer?

Ebeid: So pipes are getting blown up, and teams are rushing out to try to repair what they can, what damage is happening in various locations, and they don’t know what they’re walking into. We do know that there were two separate occasions in which workers who were either doing a water repair or heading to a repair were killed.

So the conditions were really dangerous. And I’m sure you and many people have seen images of the destruction in Gaza. And when I was in Egypt, Marwan shared some of his photos with me.

Ebeid: (Gasps.) Oh my God. It’s rubble.

Bardawil: Yeah.

Ebeid: This is the Palestinian Water Authority office in Gaza?

Bardawil: In Gaza, yes.

Ebeid: So the office itself got destroyed?

Bardawil: Yeah, it’s destroyed.

Ebeid: By the summer of 2024, almost every connection point, every desalination plant, every sewage station had either been totally destroyed or had sustained some amount of damage.

Rosin: So what did that mean for the people who were trapped in Gaza? Because there were still about 2 million people there. How did that change their lives?

Ebeid: This kind of massive destruction of water infrastructure—it does not just affect the water supply; it also leads to diseases. So by the summer of last year, we know that about 600,000 cases of acute diarrhea were reported and 40,000 cases of hepatitis A.

And those are diseases that come from contamination of water and from having an open sewage system. And then around that same time, humanitarian aid workers become extremely concerned because they find that a 10-month-old baby has tested positive for polio. And polio is something that can spread through contaminated water. And this was the first confirmed case in Gaza of polio in a quarter of a century. So they go on a massive campaign to vaccinate kids for polio, and that campaign is still ongoing today.

[Music]

Rosin: Now we’re a few weeks into the cease-fire. Maybe it’s a precarious cease-fire. It’s not really clear. What’s the current water situation?

Ebeid: For most of the war, people were getting somewhere near 3 liters of water a day, which is so little, and that was for cooking, for hygiene, for drinking. After the cease-fire, in January, some people in Gaza were starting to get around 7 to 10 liters a day.

Rosin: So a little bit better.

Ebeid: A little bit better. You know, not a crazy jump, but it was an improvement.

Last month, when I checked in with the Palestinian Water Authority, at least one connection point with Israel was flowing again, and one main desalination plant was reconnected to Israel’s power grid. And so that was helping.

Rosin: Okay.

Ebeid: But this week, as you mentioned, Israel cut off the electricity to that desalination plant. So it’s very possible the water situation could turn dire again very quickly.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ebeid: I will say that Marwan and his colleagues at the PWA do have a six-month plan that they have started implementing during this cease-fire. Whether they can continue to implement that plan is really up in the air at this moment.

Rosin: Even the fact that they have a six-month plan seems really important to note, because what that symbolizes is Gazans rebuilding for themselves, as opposed to the other visions, which are the U.S. or somebody else doing it for them, right?

Ebeid: Right. Trump’s vision is a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” as he called it. And in that plan, he talks about displacing all of the Palestinians that live in Gaza, and having them get absorbed by Arab countries, and then the U.S. taking ownership of Gaza. And, you know, presumably then whoever Trump wants to contract with will come in and rebuild Gaza.

However, last week, Arab countries came together in Egypt, and they agreed on a plan that could potentially include the water authority. They say their plan will cost $53 billion. It would be one that calls for rebuilding Gaza in a way that doesn’t displace Gazans, and it calls for a Palestinian government to manage the rebuilding. So that vision: very different from Trump’s vision. That vision is a vision of Gazans rebuilding Gaza.

Rosin: Okay, so there’s all this destroyed infrastructure, and there are competing visions for how to rebuild it. How does Marwan fit into all of this?

Ebeid: You know, Marwan has been building and rebuilding the water infrastructure for decades. You know, one of the reasons that I was interested in following him was that his personal life and his career really kind of let you see the track of what happened in Gaza since 1993.

President Bill Clinton: On behalf of the United States and Russia, co-sponsors of the Middle East peace process, welcome to this great occasion of history and hope.

Ebeid: The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. And this was a really important moment.

Clinton: We know a difficult road lies ahead. Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation. But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends. And the Quran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.

Ebeid: At that time, there was hope. There was hope that this would be an area that would be able to govern itself; it would be able to build for itself; it would be able to think about its infrastructure for itself. And Marwan’s life and his career sort of map out what happened.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: Marwan was right to be hopeful once, even though he wasn’t working with all that much. What does it look like to push through this time around, with even less?

[Break]

Rosin: Claudine, Marwan has been working on water in Gaza for, like, 30 years. So he knows how to operate with very few resources, very little autonomy. But still, I bet in the early days, like during the Oslo Accords, in the ’90s, the spirit of his work was probably really different.

Ebeid: Right.

Rosin: Did you talk to Marwan about this? Was there a younger Marwan who had a lot of energy and optimism, and was very excited about Gazans building Gaza?

Ebeid: Yeah, you know, he was born and raised in Gaza, studied water engineering in Gaza, and left for a small time to go be a water engineer abroad. After the Oslo Accords are signed, he sees this as his opportunity to come home and to put his engineering abilities to work in Gaza.

He’s there raising a family, and he describes, you know, the beginning as a very heady time. There was an idea that the Palestinian Authority was in charge, and that they were going to be able to build a water system.

Ebeid: Can you remember that time?

Bardawil: Of course I remember. And I remember we put a five-year plan, short term and long term, for the water sector in Palestine.

And I remember that I was in a team that consists of 11 persons. We had seven male and four female. And we are sitting in a hotel, and the hotel is like an office, because there was no offices at the time. We used to work ’til midnight on a daily basis.

We believed in the peace process. We believed that this process will continue and will end with something good.

Ebeid: That was the part that just hit me in my heart. When he is describing to me, like, they are young; they are full of hope. And he talks about getting plans from other small nations so that they can, you know, get an example of: What are the lessons learned? What are the things that we should be thinking about? Could you imagine? Like, We’ve studied to be water engineers, and now we get to, like, build our home’s water system.

Rosin: That’s an exciting thing. You get to do the thing that you care about most: bringing water to people, for your own people, in your own country. That’s a very powerful experience.

Ebeid: Yes, but more than a decade later, in 2006, Hamas wins an election, and with that comes a period of violence between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Eventually, Hamas controls Gaza. But the Palestinian Water Authority was allowed, I should say, by Hamas to continue doing its work. I think this is because they knew that the PWA knew what to do. They had the engineers, and people need water. And Marwan—he essentially keeps his head down during this time.

Rosin: What is it about him that just—did you get any insight into that? Like, what is it about him that just is able to keep focused on the task in these impossible situations?

Ebeid: I think Marwan is someone who feels a great responsibility—a great responsibility to the people of Gaza and also to his own family.

Bardawil: I am talking about myself. All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues, because it’s like, you will be burned by just thinking—

Ebeid: This is, like, your safe place, is to think about the water issues?

Bardawil: Yes, this is the safest.

Ebeid: I think it is a safe place to be to think about the thing that you have control over and you know what to do. And it’s based on plans, and it’s based on equations, and yes, sometimes it’s based on diplomatic effort and trying to get other countries to help you.

But it’s all in service of something that is a clear human necessity, which is water. And that is not something, to him, that is political. And yet, we are at this moment where politics will be the determining factor of whether people in Gaza will have access to water.

[Music]

Ebeid: Marwan is still working in what capacity he can for the water sector in Gaza from Cairo, but how long that will last is unknown. When and if Palestinians like him will be able to go back to Gaza is unknown. And the precariousness of this political moment for Gaza it’s really hard to overstate.

Rosin: Claudine, thank you so much for coming on.

Ebeid: Yeah. Thanks for having me to talk about this.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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