Political chaos and daily scenes of devastation, three years after the October 7th attacks. Plus:

• Millions from the opioid settlement are going to law enforcement

• Inside South Africa’s rapidly growing private-security industry

• What to read if you loved “East of Eden”

Three years since Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood terrorist attacks, and the beginning of Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza which followed, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still clinging to power. It is a position that was unthinkable in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, David Remnick writes today, when it became clear that Netanyahu had presided over “the worst disaster in the history of the state.”

The Prime Minister’s failures have continued to mount: he was judged by many as insufficiently committed to freeing the hostages taken by Hamas; and he has prevented a government-wide reckoning about the security lapses that failed to thwart the attacks. And recent reporting has suggested that he was more aware of the threat than previously known, which he has denied. Amid all this, Israel’s military campaigns across the Middle East have eroded support for the nation among governments and people around the world; in Gaza, more than seventy thousand people have died.

Photograph by Bashar Taleb / AFP / Getty

This October, the early days of the school year in Gaza bear very little resemblance to the memories that Mosab Abu Toha recalls from his childhood. Abu Toha—who received a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for his essays in our pages about the Palestinian experience and who now lives with his family in Syracuse, New York—writes today about the grim routines and unthinkable horrors experienced by the children of his sisters who have stayed behind. Mornings begin before sunrise, waiting in line for water; walks to tents being used as makeshift schools are sometimes interrupted by Israeli gunfire; students attend lessons just three days a week; school supplies are expensive and scarce; his nephews study under a big tent “surrounded by bombed-out houses and mounds of rubble.” “This year is the fourth in a row in which Gaza’s children are being deprived of a fundamental human right,” Abu Toha writes. “I wonder how much children can learn in such devastating circumstances.”

In Israel, meanwhile, the outcome of the coming elections on October 27th are far from certain—Netanyahu has recently used the foiled hijacking of a FlyDubai flight as a chance to rally nationalistic pride. “He will do and say anything to deflect attention from his failures,” Remnick writes. And as for the election, which many Israelis have judged the most consequential in their lifetimes, he notes, “damn near anything could happen.”

Editor’s Pick

How the Billions from the Opioid Settlement Are Spent

Illustration by Carl Godfrey; Source photographs by Getty

Beginning in 2022, companies involved in the manufacture and distribution of prescription opioids agreed to pay around fifty billion dollars to all fifty states and the District of Columbia. And while some of the money has gone to recovery programs, in states such as West Virginia, nearly half of the money allocated to local governments in 2024 and 2025 was being spent on general law-enforcement expenses like squad cars and shooting ranges. Meanwhile, organizers and directors of programs to support people in recovery, or in active addiction, are finding it difficult to secure funding, Oliver Whang reports. Read or listen to the story »

More from The New Yorker

A scene from “Fear Fokol.”

• Our latest short documentary, “Fear Fokol,” goes inside South Africa’s rapidly growing private-security industry, which employs armed patrolmen to protect Johannesburg’s wealthy neighborhoods.

• Yesterday, the couple at the center of the surrogacy scandal covered in the latest series from our investigative podcast, In the Dark, was arrested outside Los Angeles, on charges including conspiracy to commit child abuse. Listen to “The Journey,” which lays out the shocking case, and read Ava Kofman’s earlier reporting on the story.

• In Ethiopia, a long-simmering conflict recently exploded into open war. It’s been made all the more fraught by a complicated constellation of schemes and interests in the broader region, Ishaan Tharoor writes.

• The most-clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was about why illness is so hard to write about.

Our Culture Picks

• A book: If you loved “East of Eden,” Inkoo Kang recommends picking up Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko,” a nearly century-spanning exploration of the effects on one family of Japan’s colonization of Korea.

• A bite: At Trudie’s Tavern, the lamb schnitzel “put me in mind of a meal that might be found in a lush and gently ominous Mitteleuropa folk tale,” Helen Rosner writes, “and also, a little bit, of a cowboy-style chicken-fried steak.”

• A show: “Elf Lyons Is the Woman on the Edge,” at SoHo Playhouse, in Manhattan, is a genuine, absurd, and furious exploration of love and heartbreak.

Cartoon by Jon Adams

“Buckley 2000, go to City Hall and protest this tax on the rich for me.”

Puzzles & Games

• Today’s Crossword Puzzle: A beginner-friendly puzzle.

• Catalogues: Can you sort the items into the correct order?

• Shuffalo: Can you make a longer word with each new letter?

• Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.

P.S. Read the poem “Obit,” by Mosab Abu Toha: “To the shadow I had left alone before I / crossed the border, my shadow that stayed / lonely and hid in the dark of the night, / freezing where it was, never needing a visa.”

Austin Elias-de Jesus contributed to today’s edition.

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