Dozens of Palestinians injured in Gaza protest
Black smoke from burning tires mixed with streaks of tear gas fired by Israeli forces Friday as several thousand Palestinians staged a sixth weekly protest on the Gaza-Israel border. At least 70 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli fire, the lowest casualty toll since the protests began.
Hundreds of demonstrators broke into the Gaza side of a cargo crossing with Israel, damaging pipelines that carry fuel and gas into Gaza, the Israeli military said. Photos on social media showed large flames near the Kerem Shalom crossing, near where the borders of Gaza, Israel and Egypt converge.
Palestinian officials said protesters smashed some equipment near the crossing but were unaware of any damage to pipelines. The Israeli military called the incident a “cynical act of terror” that harms Gaza civilians.
Elsewhere, witnesses said small Israeli drones faced off against flaming kites that were flown by Palestinians over the border fence in recent weeks to set ablaze dry wheat fields on the Israeli side. The witnesses said two kites with burning rags were brought down by the drones, while two other drones crashed after being hit by stones.
The protests are part of a weekly campaign organized by Gaza’s Hamas rulers. The marches each Friday are aimed, in part, at breaking a decade-old blockade of the territory that imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Islamic militant group took control there in 2007.
The Islamic militant group Hamas has said the protests would culminate in a mass march on May 15, with some officials suggesting a possible border breach at the time and others saying the protests might continue beyond that date.
Israel has warned that it will prevent such a breach at any cost.
May 15 is the day Palestinians commemorate their mass uprooting in the 1948 war over Israel’s creation. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from homes in what is now Israel. Two-thirds of Gaza’s residents are descendants of refugees.
Despite the risks faced by the protesters near the border, turnout has been sustained by the widespread desperation of blockade-linked hardships of life in Gaza. Virtually all of the territory’s 2 million people are barred from travel, about two-thirds of young people are unemployed and power is on only a few hours a day.
On Friday, 229 protesters were hospitalized, including 70 with bullet wounds, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Three of the wounded were in serious condition.
Since late March, 40 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,700 wounded by Israeli army fire. Friday marked the first weekly protest in which no Palestinian were reported killed by sundown.
Yehiyeh Amarin, 18, said he and his friends will keep going to the border until the blockade has been lifted.
“If no solution happens by May 15, we will continue the protests or we die,” he said.
A federal judge on Friday asked pointed questions about special counsel Robert Mueller’s authority to bring charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and suggested that prosecutors’ true motive is getting Manafort to “sing” against the president.
Manafort’s lawyers argued at a hearing in Alexandria that the tax and bank fraud charges are far afield from Mueller’s mandate to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether any coordination with Trump associates occurred.
“I don’t see what relationship this indictment has with what the special counsel is investigating,” U.S. Senior Judge T.S. Ellis III, a Reagan appointee, told government lawyers at Friday’s hearing.
The Virginia indictment alleges Manafort hid tens of millions of dollars he earned advising pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine from the Internal Revenue Service, money earned from 2006 through 2015. The indictment accuses Manafort of fraudulently obtaining millions in loans from financial institutions later, after his Ukrainian work dwindled. Prosecutors say that part of the conspiracy stretched from 2015 through January 2017, including the months while he was working on the Trump campaign.
Under questioning from Ellis, government lawyers admitted that Manafort had been under investigation for years in the Eastern District of Virginia before Mueller was ever appointed special counsel. And Ellis said it was implausible to think charges against Manafort, which primarily concern his business dealings and tax returns from about 2005 through 2015, could have a real connection to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Ellis suggested the real reason Mueller is pursuing Manafort is to pressure him to “sing” against Trump, though he also noted that such a strategy is a “time-honored practice” for prosecutors and not necessarily illegal. Ellis went on to say that defense lawyers are naturally concerned defendants in that situation will not only sing but “compose” — make up facts.
“You really care about wanting information you could get from Mr. Manafort that would relate to Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution, or impeachment, or whatever,” Ellis said.
Later Friday, President Trump praised Ellis during a speech to the National Rifle Association and called him a “highly respected judge.” Trump read news articles highlighting Ellis’ quotes about the case and his suggestion that the special counsel’s goal is to squeeze Manfort. “I’ve been saying that for a long time,” Trump said.
At the hearing, government lawyer Michael Dreeben responded to Ellis that the special counsel’s mandate is broad, and that Manafort fits within that jurisdiction because of his connections to the Trump campaign and to Ukrainian and Russian officials.
“We needed to understand and explore those relationships and follow the money where it led,” Dreeben said.
Dreeben also argued that the Justice Department has broad discretion to set its own rules for what should be designated to the special counsel’s jurisdiction, and that a judge has no role trying to regulate it.
“We are the Justice Department,” Dreeben said of the special counsel’s office. “We are not separate from the Justice Department.”
That argument provoked Ellis’ ire to an extent and prompted him to question the wisdom of granting unfettered power to a special counsel with a $10 million budget.
“I’m sure you’re sensitive to the fact that the American people feel pretty strongly about no one having unfettered power,” Ellis said.
He asked Dreeben whether the special counsel had already blown through its $10 million budget; Dreeben declined to answer.
Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, has argued that a special counsel should be tightly constrained in how it operates. He noted that the law authorizing the special counsel was passed to replace the old independent counsel law, which was derided for allowing overbroad, yearslong investigations during the Reagan and Clinton administrations.
Downing has argued that the charges should be dismissed if Mueller lacked authority to bring them. Ellis suggested another remedy would be to simply hand the case back to regular federal prosecutors.