The Gaza Doctrine

 

 

 

Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern.  

 

Neve Gordon

On Friday, March 13, nearly two weeks into the Lebanese front of “Operation Roaring Lion,” Israeli forces bombed Burj Qalaouiyah, a village in the country’s south. The strike destroyed a health care center, killing twelve doctors, paramedics, nurses, and patients; The New York Times reported that “only one severely injured worker survived.” Among the victims, according to the journalist Lylla Younes’s reporting for Drop Site, was a paramedic who had spoken last fall at a memorial service for several colleagues killed by an Israeli airstrike during the previous war in Lebanon. “Even if we are killed one by one,” he reportedly said then, “we will not abandon our duty.”

The US and Israel’s illegal war on Iran, launched in the late stages of negotiations to renew a nuclear deal, spread quickly to Lebanon. Hezbollah joined the fray on the second day, after a US–Israeli strike killed Ali Khamenei in Tehran. Israel has conducted near-daily airstrikes in Lebanon in the fifteen months since the two countries signed a truce, killing more than three hundred people, but since March 2 its fighter jets have been relentlessly bombing south Lebanon, Beirut, and other cities; it recently launched a ground incursion in the south. Where in Iran the US and Israel are operating side by side, in Lebanon Israel has taken the lead, with the US providing arms and other support.

A grave toll has been exacted from both fronts. Within less than two weeks more than four million civilians have been displaced in the two countries, up to 3.2 million in Iran and more than a million in Lebanon, where Israel has by now issued evacuation orders that cover 14 percent of the country’s territory. The total death toll is already in the thousands, with over twenty thousand more injured. As of Thursday, according to a UN statement drawing on statistics from the Iranian Red Crescent, more than 65,000 civilian sites have sustained damage in Iran alone.

Among them are a disturbingly high number of medical centers. The Red Crescent reports that US–Israeli strikes have so far damaged 236 health facilities. By March 11 the World Health Organization (WHO) had verified eighteen of these attacks, reporting that they alone caused the deaths of eight health care workers. On the war’s second day airstrikes did significant damage to the Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, where footage and photographs showed the building’s blown-out, debris-strewn façade and broken equipment and shattered glass inside the wards. The head of Iran’s medical council, Mohammad Raeiszadeh, disclosed on state media that the strike disabled the hospital’s in vitro fertilization department; witnesses told the state-run television network Al-Alam that newborn infants and other patients had to be evacuated.

In Lebanon, health infrastructure appears to be under still more direct attack. The country’s health ministry has documented at least 128 Israeli strikes on medical facilities and ambulances in the south, mostly affiliated with the region’s Islamic Health Association (IHA), which have killed forty health care workers and wounded over a hundred more. By March 11, before the strike on the medical center in Burj Qalaouiyah, the WHO had already confirmed twenty-five of these attacks; a further forty-nine primary health care centers and five hospitals had needed to close, it noted, “following evacuation orders issued by Israel’s military.” The result is that services have shrunk even as the need for medical care intensifies. The attacks on health care seem designed to encourage the mass displacement: in an interview with the Guardian, an IHA emergency worker called them part of a campaign “to prevent life in our region and push people to flee.”

Since the start of Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, critics have charged that Israel is expanding its Gaza doctrine—a combination of mass displacement, mass killing, and mass destruction of civilian infrastructure—to other parts of the Middle East. (In some sense this is a return of “the Dahiyeh doctrine,” named after the neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs that the Israeli military ruthlessly pummelled during the 2006 Lebanon War—only in Gaza the destruction was not confined to a specific area and the people living within it but became the military’s modus operandi throughout the territory.) Israel, surprisingly or not, has embraced the accusation, dropping leaflets on Beirut reminding the city’s residents of the Israeli military’s “great success in Gaza.” One of the more pronounced features of the Gaza doctrine—and of contemporary warfare more generally—is turning life-saving medical sites like hospitals, health clinics, and ambulances into targets: it was the “deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems” that Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) cited to argue that the Israeli military’s conduct in the Strip met the legal definition of genocide. The reports emerging out of Iran and Lebanon raise the deeply troubling prospect that Israel hopes to replicate that “success” abroad.

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The 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols give medical units “specific protection” in addition to the “general protections” afforded to civilian structures during war. Under these constraints, belligerents cannot attack medical units unless they “commit, outside their humanitarian function, acts harmful to the enemy.” But even when medical units commit such acts, the specific protections oblige warring parties to weigh the advantage they expect to derive from an attack against the harm it is likely to generate, issue a warning, and allow enough time for evacuation.

By any measure, Israel’s assault on Gaza’s health system violated these principles countless times. None of the Strip’s thirty-six hospitals were spared. Many were subjected to prolonged siege, often while sheltering large crowds of displaced people, before being raided and dismantled. In March 2024, as PHRI has documented, thousands of patients, staff, and displaced people at al-Shifa—the largest hospital in Gaza—suffered two weeks under attack “without food, water, electricity, or medical care.” By the time Israeli forces pulled back, “the hospital was in complete ruin” and at least eighty bodies—and possibly hundreds—lay buried around it in mass graves. Between October and December 2024, as Israel’s army carried out the “general’s plan” in North Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital weathered “more than eighty days of siege, bombardment, and systematic obstruction of humanitarian access,” in PHRI’s words, before a raid left it “completely inoperative.”

In a pattern that Israel now seems to be repeating in Lebanon, these attacks served as engines of mass displacement. In a recent lecture at Queen Mary University of London, Guy Shalev, the director of PHRI, stressed that Israel’s assault on Kamal Adwan was directly tied to the military’s efforts to drive the Palestinian population to the south. When the last lifeline is destroyed and “people have no medical center that can treat their family members,” he explained, “they leave.”

The harm generated by these strikes reverberates broadly. Ever since March 2025, when Israel demolished the Turkish–Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the only cancer hospital in Gaza, the 10,000 patients the facility treated each year simply have had nowhere to go. “To have cancer in Gaza means death, and before death, it means a lot of suffering and pain,” the Palestinian oncologist Sobhi Skaik told The Lancet Oncology. Since an additional 2,000 to 2,500 people in Gaza are diagnosed with cancer annually, the hospital’s destruction will undoubtedly cause thousands of excess deaths in the years to come.

This kind of analysis can be extended to the harm caused by Israel’s destruction of five of the seven dialysis units in Gaza, including the only kidney center in northern Gaza. In a letter to the British Medical Journal in March 2025, the Gazan physician Abdullah Wajih Kishawi reported that 44 percent of the dialysis patients in the Strip—or close to five hundred people—had died in the previous year and a half, either through direct injury or because they were unable to access dialysis; since Israel’s blockade stopped the flow of immunosuppressive medication, he speculated, many of Gaza’s 450 kidney transplant patients had likely died as well. The enclave’s surviving dialysis recipients, as the Gaza-based medical intern Amro Hamada wrote in these pages last year, were stuck in “a constant balancing act between hope and exhaustion.”

In some instances, when critics accused Israel of illegally attacking health care facilities and other protected sites in Gaza during the first two years of the assault on the Strip, they were met with simple denials. Pressed by the BBC about Israel’s then-ongoing attack on al-Shifa, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog dismissed the reports as “spin by Hamas,” even as all evidence suggested otherwise. In other cases, drawing on a playbook they had used extensively since the 2008–2009 war on Gaza, Israeli political and military spokespeople accused Hamas of misusing the medical facilities by shielding combatants or weapons within them. Doing so, after all, invokes the one legal exception that may nullify both general and specific protections for these facilities.

The case of al-Shifa is instructive. Weeks before Israel first sent troops into the hospital in November 2023, its spokespeople began building a legal case to support an attack. “The claims were remarkably specific,” a Washington Post investigation noted. Israel alleged, in the paper’s account, “that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.” The military’s spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, insisted they had “concrete evidence.” At that press briefing he presented a 3-D animated clip depicting the hospital as a shield for Hamas’s headquarters, showing a series of underground tunnels beneath the facility that were allegedly being used “in order to do command and control for terror activities.”

The Post noted that the Israeli military “released multiple sets of photos and videos showing alleged evidence of Hamas military activity inside and underneath the hospital” over the course of its prolonged occupation of al-Shifa, including footage of Hagari exploring a tunnel shaft in the complex. The paper’s investigation concluded, however, both that “the rooms connected to the tunnel network…showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas” and that none of the footage showed “that the tunnels could be accessed from inside the hospital wards.” Even if the proof the Israeli military claimed to provide had turned out to be authentic, it would have fallen well short of proving that Hamas had been misusing the hospital to hide its “command and control center”—and, regardless, the attack on the hospital would have hardly met the proportionality threshold, given the services al-Shifa provided to the population. It was perhaps the highest-profile example of an oft-repeated pattern. Between October 2023 and January 2026 Israel attacked health care facilities 937 times in Gaza alone, time and again failing to offer any concrete evidence that they were being misused for “acts harmful to the enemy.”

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The statistics about the current attacks on Iran and Lebanon’s medical systems—as reported by the respective countries’ health ministries—index a range of violations. Already on March 6 the head spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry reported that the US–Israeli strikes had put nine hospitals out of service, destroyed more than a dozen “pre-hospital emergency bases,” and damaged multiple local-level and rural health facilities. Among the Tehran medical centers that sustained damage in the war’s first days, Al Jazeera reported, were the Motahari Hospital, which specializes in burn victims, and “the main building of the province’s medical emergency services” in the city’s downtown. In Ahvaz strikes reportedly damaged a children’s hospital; in Sarab and Hamedan, as the director of the WHO noted, local sources related that they damaged emergency rooms.

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

A woman filming the debris at Gandhi Hospital after a US–Israeli airstrike damaged the facility, Tehran, Iran, March 2, 2026

By Monday the death toll of health care workers in Lebanon had risen to at least thirty-eight. That same day alone, Younes reported, six paramedics were killed in separate strikes on three different ambulances, one of which was responding to a call after yet another strike hit a house in the southern village of Kfar Sir. “Some of our personnel have been killed at our medical centers, others while they were out in the field, trying to pull people out from under the rubble,” a spokesperson for the Islamic Health Association told Younes.

He added that “the exact place they went to do their rescue work was targeted again once they arrived.” The Guardian reports that since March 2 Israel has carried out at least five “double-tap” strikes of this kind, whereby an initial strike is followed by a pause during which first responders often arrive, before the area is bombed again. A number of legal scholars maintain that this tactic likely violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which prohibits targeting civilians, the wounded, or those placed hors de combat.

When pressed about these attacks on medical facilities and other civilian infrastructure, Israel and the US have repeatedly reached for responses out of the Gaza playbook. After a strike killed 175 people, most of them young children, at a girls’ school in southern Iran on the first day of the war, President Trump denied responsibility, suggesting to reporters as late as March 7 that an Iranian missile had misfired. On March 11 The New York Times reported that an ongoing military investigation had made a preliminary finding that the school was hit by a US Tomahawk missile. The previous day, in a press briefing, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth had accused Iran of “moving rocket launchers into civilian neighborhoods near schools, near hospitals to try to prevent our ability to strike. That’s how they operate…. They target civilians. We do not.”

After Israel’s attack on the health care facility in Burj Qalaouiyah, meanwhile, an Israeli military spokesperson alleged on X that Hezbollah fighters were using ambulances and the medical facility for military purposes. To disguise a military vehicle as an ambulance would amount to medical perfidy, a war crime under international law. Hezbollah (not unlike Hamas) does provide various kinds of social welfare and health services to the local population, and the Islamic Health Association is indeed part of that social-welfare network. But under international law these are civilian sites, and the spokesperson offered no evidence that ambulances or medical infrastructure were being misused. Nor have Israeli strikes been limited to IHA facilities: the Guardian relates that they have also hit “the state civil defense service, the Amal movement’s Islamic Scouts Association health service, a local healthcare charity, and the Lebanese Red Cross.”

Indeed, as Drop Site has noted, for the time being the party implicated in medical perfidy during the current war is in fact Israel. A week earlier, Israeli paratroopers had entered the cemetery of Nabi Chit, a town in Lebanon’s northeastern Bekaa Valley, in an effort to retrieve remains that may have belonged to an Israeli navigator shot down and captured by the militant group Amal forty years ago. After the Israeli forces killed a Hezbollah fighter, a firefight broke out between the Israeli troops, Hezbollah fighters, and local residents. By the time the Israelis withdrew, at least forty-one people had been killed, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Interviewed by reporters from the BBC, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the London-based Arabic paper Asharq Al-Awsat, residents recounted that some of the Israeli forces had arrived in a Lebanese ambulance wearing uniforms associated with the IHA. This would not be the first time in recent memory that Israeli forces had engaged in medical perfidy: in December 2024 five Israeli soldiers used an ambulance to enter the Balata refugee camp, in the West Bank, in a raid that killed two civilians, including an eighty-year-old woman; less than a year earlier, Israeli assassins disguised as Muslim women and doctors had raided a hospital in Jenin and executed three Palestinians hors de combat.

Denying well-substantiated allegations of crimes and accusing enemies of such crimes with no serious evidence: these are preludes to the still more radical step of rejecting international law altogether. Perhaps the most shocking development in the current war is that Israel and the US have not even bothered to justify bombing civilian infrastructure. “No quarter, no mercy,” Hegseth said in a press conference on March 13, echoing President Trump’s infamous assertion, following the illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, that “I don’t need international law.” Referring to Israel’s attacks on Iran and Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu said on March 12 that the “dramatic shift in our power relative to the power of our enemies is the key to ensuring our existence. Threats come and go—but when we become a regional power, and in certain fields a global power, we have the strength to push dangers away from us and secure our future.” The terms “law” and “legal order” were not mentioned once.

These are the words of men drunk on their own power. The Gaza doctrine is a direct reflection of this intoxication, and the wholesale destruction of health facilities is just one of its manifestations, which can now be seen the world over. The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a group of more than thirty organizations working to protect health workers, services, and infrastructure, documented an average of ten attacks on medical units per day during 2024—a ninefold increase since 2016, the year the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution “strongly condemning attacks against medical facilities [and] personnel in conflict situations.” Driving this increase were not just Israel’s wars in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon but also the wars in Sudan, Ukraine, and Myanmar. As the current US–Israeli war erodes the post-World War II international order still further, we ought to ask what new tools we can develop to protect the world from men for whom only might makes right.

The New York Review of Books

  

The Cult of Cesar’: Inside the Mountain Compound Led by Cesar Chavez

 

In his remote headquarters, the United Farm Workers leader began to see himself as not just a union leader, but a visionary healer. 

  

 

By Shawn HublerSarah Hurtes and Manny Fernandez

The reporters have traveled across California and conducted dozens of interviews around the country to re-examine the legacy of Cesar Chavez and his leadership of the United Farm Workers movement.

It was 1979, and Cesar Chavez, then the head of the United Farm Workers, called a staff meeting at the union’s remote headquarters in the Tehachapi Mountains, 125 miles north of Los Angeles. As the proceedings came to an end, Mr. Chavez abruptly switched topics and instructed someone to turn the lights off.

“Who can see my aura?” he asked the room.

Larry Tramutola and his wife, an organizer and bookkeeper who had worked with the union for years, exchanged an uncomfortable glance in the dimness. They revered the charismatic U.F.W. leader. His movement had turned one of the nation’s most exploited and downtrodden populations of farmworkers and their supporters into an army to be reckoned with.

When Mr. Chavez had ordered the couple and their children to come live on the union’s nearly 200-acre compound to help him organize, they did it. When he directed that everyone critique each other in encounter groups that often became vicious, they joined in. When Mr. Tramutola’s wife fell ill, they assumed that Mr. Chavez had only the best of intentions when he once offered to heal her by laying his hands on her body.

Still, “it was bizarre,” Mr. Tramutola, now 78, recalled of that 1979 meeting. “His aura! Swear to God. Some people even said they saw it. We looked at each other and were like, yeah, time for us to get out of here.”

In the days since The New York Times revealed evidence of sexual abuse and assault by Mr. Chavez, memories like the one shared by Mr. Tramutola have ricocheted through California’s powerful organized labor circles. Revelations about Mr. Chavez, a towering figure of the civil rights movement, have shocked longtime activists who thought they knew him.

In particular, their thoughts have turned to the compound near Bakersfield that was known as La Paz, where as many as 200 followers at a time lived with Mr. Chavez and his family from 1970 until his death nearly a quarter-century later. Looking back, they said, it was there that Mr. Chavez, who seemed to have willed the farm workers into a force through sheer drive and charisma, seemed to lose his way.

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Mr. Chavez at La Paz in 1969.Credit...Steven V. Roberts/The New York Times

Biographers have documented Mr. Chavez’s years at La Paz as a chaotic mix of celebrity, pop psychology and paranoia. But in dozens of new interviews, former U.F.W. members cast light on what many said were abuses of his moral authority and power. Men and women who used to live and work at the mountain compound told The Times that the leader who had galvanized workers in the fields turned controlling and cultish after his organization moved to the mountains.

Mr. Chavez became infatuated with so-called Silva Mind Control meditation and what he believed was its power to influence events and people. Challenges to his authority, real or imagined, would prompt purges or mandates that one potential rival or another relocate. He taped meetings and dispatched union officials to root out what he called “spies” and “infiltrators.” He began managing according to the principles of Synanon, a drug-treatment program centered on verbal abuse, attack therapy and public humiliation.

Insisting that “sacrifice” was central to the movement, he fasted and marched to the point of internal injury and back pain, and demanded that residents perform extra half-days of manual labor on the compound on weekends. He claimed that his touch had the power to heal.

Clara Solis, an 18-year-old volunteer in 1978, said she would hyperventilate as union members hurled insults at one another during Synanon sessions, “trying to prove that they were the most loyal.” At one point when she fell ill, she said, Mr. Chavez came to her room at La Paz and hovered his hands over her abdomen.

“I closed my eyes because I was embarrassed,” recalled Ms. Solis, 66, adding, “I felt warm where his hands were. It was just kind of strange.”

By the end of 1979, most of the union’s lawyers were gone, forced out by Mr. Chavez, and top leaders and advisers had left or begun to question his judgment. La Paz felt “like a cult,” Ms. Solis said.

Mr. Tramutola and several others who used to live there agreed. The place wasn’t an issue, but its leader had become one. “It was the cult of Cesar,” he said.

La Paz, once the site of a hospital for tuberculosis patients, was ringed by fences and patrolled by guard dogs. Union members shared meals, celebrated together and organized campaigns while living on meager stipends that mirrored the poverty of the workers they represented.

At first, for the families living there in weathered dormitories and repurposed hospital wings, the isolation felt necessary. It protected them from the death threats and harassment Mr. Chavez faced as a result of his challenge to powerful agricultural interests and the political establishment. There was a deep sense of community, of a shared purpose that they called, simply, La Causa — Spanish for The Cause. Idealistic young volunteers came and went, forging bonds that would shape their careers for a lifetime. There was hardscrabble joy, and birthday parties and weddings. In the spring, the hills would come alive with wildflowers and birdsong.

And yet, the remoteness of La Paz, along with his celebrity and his position as the head of the union, gave Mr. Chavez a level of authority there, far from public view, that was almost unquestioned. He was at once the de facto mayor, police chief and pastor of this mini-city and the many men, women and children who lived and worked there. Many were related to him, or had known him for decades.

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The U.F.W. co-founder Dolores Huerta in San Francisco in 1972. She said Mr. Chavez sexually pressured and later raped her in the 1960s.Credit...Clem Albers/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press

Even with his wife and children living there, the setting allowed him, the Times investigation found, to manipulate and groom. In interviews, two women, both daughters of union organizers, told The Times that they were molested and sexually assaulted by Mr. Chavez as adolescents during the 1970s. They said his sexual contact with them began at La Paz when they were 12 and 13, and he was in his mid-40s.

A third woman — the U.F.W.’s co-founder, Dolores Huerta — said he sexually pressured and later raped her in the 1960s, encounters that produced two children that she gave to others to raise and kept secret for years.

By the 1980s, Mr. Chavez struggled to adjust to a changing landscape. Legislative victories he had reaped for workers had also imposed new rules for organizers and threatened to weaken his personal control over the union. The spectacle of marches and boycotts that had put farm workers on the map was less effective under the new order. Membership, which stood at about 60,000 during the union’s peak years, dropped to about 22,000 by the 1990s. It has stood at around 5,500 in recent years.

“You can draw a straight line from La Paz,” said Miriam Pawel, a California historian and author who wrote a 2014 biography of Mr. Chavez. “It was this little world in and of itself that was created to be more separate, that became more and more of a problem as the union became a real union. There’s this dissonance that builds and builds.”

In more recent years, La Paz was transformed into a memorial of Mr. Chavez’s life and work. As president in 2012, Barack Obama turned La Paz, where Mr. Chavez is buried alongside his wife, Helen, into a federal monument that has become a tourist attraction.

In the wake of the Times investigation, members of Congress have introduced a bill to abolish and defund the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument. “Not one dime of taxpayer money should be spent on a monument that glorifies a monster like Cesar Chavez,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, an author of the bill, said in a statement. “Especially when that monument stands quite literally at the scene of some of his alleged crimes.”

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Members of Congress have introduced a bill to abolish and defund the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument.Credit...Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

Most of those who worked with Mr. Chavez said they were stunned by the sexual-abuse accusations, and viewed the decision to move to La Paz as reasonable for a famous civil rights leader following the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Consumed with the movement, union supporters worked punishing hours. Most of those interviewed said they thought little of the teenage girls Mr. Chavez summoned to his office and often kept close by his side during public events.

“You have to understand the ’70s to know the context,” said Sandy Nathan, 81, a former U.F.W. lawyer. “It was the civil rights movement. The antiwar movement. The environmental movement. The women’s liberation movement. The mentality then was so different. There was the sense that we were in a war in those days. And in a way, we were.”

La Paz arose from a conversation Mr. Chavez had in 1968 with a Hollywood producer who had come to see him: Ed Lewis, whose films had included “Spartacus” and “Seven Days in May,” had helped end the Hollywood blacklist. By then, Mr. Chavez was a celebrity, his embrace of nonviolent protest inviting comparisons with Dr. King and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led India’s move for independence. Mr. Chavez was conducting a hunger strike when he and Mr. Lewis met.

Mr. Chavez told the wealthy producer that he had big ideas about social justice and hoped someday to create an education center. Mr. Lewis replied that if Mr. Chavez found an appropriate site, he would help finance it.

When the grounds came up for auction, Mr. Lewis purchased the land from Kern County for the farm workers union. Mr. Chavez named the retreat Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz — Our Lady, Queen of Peace. Everyone called it La Paz for short.

Mr. Chavez by then had achieved national status with a history-making grape boycott. Growers who for generations had exploited cheap migrant workers, most of them from Mexico, were forced to sign their first significant union contracts; now the union was beset with administrative responsibilities to enforce them. Pulled in every direction, Mr. Chavez told one of his top aides to pack up his wife and children and get the compound ready to become a retreat for the union staff and leadership.

The aide, Lupe Murguia, and his wife worked to renovate the old hospital, learn to operate the heating, sewage and irrigation systems, and make repairs. In the nearby community of Keene, some residents bristled at the newcomers. At one point, according to essays later written by the Murguias, La Paz residents were warned that ranchers had gathered at a nearby store to run them off the property with shotguns. The sheriff’s department responded and explained that the property had been transferred to an arm of the union, and the union added security, according to accounts by the Murguias in union archives.

Mr. Chavez proposed making La Paz the union’s headquarters. His associates balked. La Paz, they said, was too remote from farmworkers and the cities where the union conducted its business. But Mr. Chavez framed it as a neutral hub to serve many far-flung workplaces, and a retreat where farmworkers could receive short courses in union philosophy and practical skills such as contract negotiation. Also, it was easier to secure from threats. The union’s executive board, stacked with Mr. Chavez’s allies and relatives, voted yes.

By 1972, Mr. Chavez and his family had moved to the compound. Anxious to maintain momentum, he sent troops to organize farmworkers outside of California. Stretched thin, the union was charging seasonal workers year-round dues and assessing extra fees to underwrite a strike fund, and workers were questioning their membership as the union’s first contracts neared expiration. Growers and competing unions were on the attack, and Mr. Chavez fought back with more strikes, boycotts and fasts.

He worked almost around the clock, former residents said, surrounded by acolytes, volunteers, college students, relatives — and bodyguards. It was around this time, in 1972, according to Mr. Chavez’s accusers and others, that he began to molest two girls in his office. One was Ana Murguia, the daughter of Mr. Murguia, who was the first to move his family to La Paz, and the other was Debra Rojas, the daughter of two early and prominent organizers, Al and Elena Rojas.

Each new contract and labor action ratcheted up the growing political pressure outside. In 1973 during a strike, violence claimed the lives of two union members. By 1974, rival unions were elbowing in, the U.F.W. was in financial trouble, and the press was speculating that Mr. Chavez had been defeated.

At a union convention, Mr. Chavez told journalists that those he had mentored would oust him if he did not vanquish them first, and he maneuvered new power for himself in the union constitution. By now, his vegetarianism was so strict that his bodyguards brought blenders to make vegetable smoothies for him when he traveled. He became fixated on the Silva Mind Control method, a fad at the time based on purported manipulation of brain waves.

The appeal of mind control, recalled Marshall Ganz, a union organizer and one of his top lieutenants, was that it gave Mr. Chavez “the feeling of domination.”

“I’ve come to think of Cesar as tragic — not pathetic but tragic,” Mr. Ganz said. “His strengths were incredible, but then it all went into the dark side.”

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Mr. Chavez’s office at La Paz.Credit...Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

As the union’s needs shifted, Mr. Chavez would not delegate, despite advice from a parade of consultants. In 1977, he summoned the union’s executive board to a training at Synanon, the drug rehab program. Its leader was renowned for his hold over Synanon’s members, who at his behest were swapping wives, getting vasectomies and shaving their heads.

Synanon’s hallmark was called “The Game,” sessions when a group of people ganged up on one person at a time, hurling profanity and accusations, until the person experienced a supposed emotional breakthrough. Mr. Chavez made it a requirement. A community gathering became a platform for public purging of critics, according to archived tapes and former members. During one Game session, Mr. Chavez’s board castigated him for letting the union decline while he played guru.

Nell Campbell, who served as a photographer for the union in 1976 and 1977, said she had seen Mr. Chavez insult union members he perceived as disloyal and was herself accused by him of bringing an uninvited guest to a party celebrating his 50th birthday.

Days after the party, Ms. Campbell said, after watching Mr. Chavez and other union leaders mount verbal attacks on people and have one of them physically removed from the room, she reached her breaking point. She said she told them she quit, “and walked out.”

She retreated to the darkroom, and a guard was sent to monitor her while she packed up her equipment.

In hindsight, she said, Mr. Chavez may have had the power to inspire millions, but he wasn’t prepared to lead a bureaucracy.

“He wanted to make a movement,” she said, “and he lost interest in making a union.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

Quem é Amanda Ungaro, a ex-modelo brasileira que acusa Trump e Melania no escândalo do caso Epstein?

 

 

 

O nome da ex-modelo brasileira Amanda Ungaro, de 41 anos, voltou a movimentar as redes sociais neste sábado, quando foi ao X para fazer uma série de desabafos (e ameaças). Em resposta a um vídeo de Melania Trump em que ela negava ter relação com o criminoso sexual Jeffrey Epstein, Amanda afirma que esteve “ao redor” do casal Trump por 20 anos e que vai tomar medidas legais contra Melania e “seu marido pedófilo”, o presidente dos Estados Unidos Donald Trump. Mas quem é Amanda Ungaro

 ?

Deportada pelo ICE

Amanda chegou ao Brasil em outubro de 2025 deportada pela polícia de imigração americana, o ICE, depois de 23 anos nos EUA. Uma medida que, em entrevista exclusiva ao GLOBO em fevereiro, ela creditou à influência do ex-companheiro, o empresário italiano Paolo Zampolli, nos bastidores do poder em Washington.

Uma reportagem do New York Times confirmou a afirmação da brasileira, apontando que Zampolli de fato procurou um alto funcionário da imigração para que Amanda fosse levada a um centro de detenção do ICE antes que ela fosse libertada da prisão sob fiança. De acordo com a publicação, Zampolli tinha como objetivo recuperar a guarda do filho, Giovanni, de 15 anos, que ele e Amanda disputam na Justiça.
 

O ex-marido e a proximidade com Trump 

 

Nascido em Milão, Zampolli chegou a Nova York em meados dos anos 1990, mesma época em que conheceu Donald Trump. Os dois começaram a trabalhar oficialmente juntos em 2004, mas foi nas eleições presidenciais de 2016 que a camaradagem virou lealdade. Diante de sua defesa de políticas migratórias mais duras, Trump viu a imprensa questionar se sua esposa, Melania, trabalhara como modelo nos EUA com um visto inadequado antes de conhecê-lo. Zampolli então se apresentou como o responsável pela documentação da atual primeira-dama, afirmando ter usado sua posição como agente de modelos na época para garantir o visto de trabalho dela. Em 1996, ano da emissão do documento, Zampolli atuava junto à americana Metropolitan Models. No ano seguinte, ele fundou sua própria agência de modelos, a ID Models.

Amanda descreve Zampolli como a persona ostentatória que agrada a Trump: almoços diários no restaurante Cipriani, em Nova York, festas de aniversário extravagantes com direito a filhotes de tigre entre as atrações e um círculo social composto por modelos, champanhe e a atenção dos tabloides. Nos 19 anos em que estiveram juntos, ela conta que Zampolli a levou a noitadas comandadas pelo rapper e produtor americano Sean “Diddy” Combs, atualmente cumprindo pena de quatro anos por transportar mulheres para prostituição, e a festas em iates em que a lista de convidados incluía celebridades e integrantes da realeza europeia. Nesses eventos, diz ela, Zampolli costumava levar o próprio garçom para ter certeza de que ninguém colocaria drogas em sua bebida.

No avião de Jeffrey Epstein

Documento indica que o nome de Amanda Ungaro aparece na lista de passageiros do Lolita Express. A imagem mostra dezenas de nomes no voo de 27 de junho de 2002, entre Paris e Nova York, incluindo o do próprio Jeffrey Epstein ("JE"), de Ghislaine Maxwell ("GM") e de Brunel — Foto: Departamento de Justiça dos EUA

O círculo social de Zampolli e Trump envolvia ainda um terceiro personagem: Jeffrey Epstein, financista morto em 2019 enquanto aguardava julgamento por tráfico sexual. A ID Models, agência de Zampolli, era frequentemente visitada por Epstein em Nova York, e os dois tentaram, juntos, comprar em 2004 a Elite Models, uma das maiores agências de modelos do mundo. Zampolli aparece dezenas de vezes nos arquivos do caso Epstein liberados pelo Departamento de Justiça dos EUA.

A ex-modelo Amanda Ungaro acusa o ex-companheiro, Paolo Zampolli, de abuso sexual e violência doméstica — Foto: Márcia Foletto

Amanda já foi convidada, mas ainda não intimada, a depor perante o Comitê de Supervisão do Congresso americano que investiga o caso. A brasileira esteve uma vez com Epstein, em 2002, quando embarcou no Lolita Express, um dos aviões do financista, de Paris para Nova York, onde participaria de um casting. Ela viajou acompanhada de seu agente na época, o francês Jean-Luc Brunel, conhecido como o olheiro de Epstein no Brasil. No mesmo ano, em 2002, Amanda encontraria com Zampolli também em Nova York.

— Tinha mais ou menos umas 30 meninas no avião. Achei aquilo muito estranho. Elas eram mais parecidas com estudantes do que com modelos. Bonitas e bem novinhas, mas não tinham perfil de modelo — conta Amanda. 

Ameaças à Melania

 “Eu te conheço há 20 anos. Você sabia que eu estava detida no ICE. Você esteve presente na minha vida — todos os anos no aniversário do meu filho, inclusive enviando o Serviço Secreto e sendo a primeira a parabenizá-lo, lá em 2016. Algo claramente estava errado, mas eu não faço parte de nenhuma missão maligna envolvendo crianças. Então o que você fez, Melania? Você tentou me envolver, mas falhou — porque eu tenho caráter”, acusou Amanda, no X.

Em outro comentário, a ex-modelo disse que vai “expor tudo” o que sabe sobre o casal e que pretende tomar medidas legais contra Melania e o presidente americano, quem chamou de “pedófilo”.

“Eu vou derrubar o seu sistema corrupto, mesmo que seja a última coisa que eu faça na minha vida. Eu vou até o fim — não tenho medo. Talvez você devesse ter medo do que eu sei… de quem você é e de quem é o seu marido (...) Eu não tenho mais nada a perder na minha vida. Eu vou derrubar todo o sistema — tome cuidado comigo, sua idiota”, acrescentou.  

 

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Nascido em Milão, Zampolli chegou a Nova York em meados dos anos 1990, mesma época em que conheceu Donald Trump. Os dois começaram a trabalhar oficialmente juntos em 2004, mas foi nas eleições presidenciais de 2016 que a camaradagem virou lealdade. Diante de sua defesa de políticas migratórias mais duras, Trump viu a imprensa questionar se sua esposa, Melania, trabalhara como modelo nos EUA com um visto inadequado antes de conhecê-lo. Zampolli então se apresentou como o responsável pela documentação da atual primeira-dama, afirmando ter usado sua posição como agente de modelos na época para garantir o visto de trabalho dela. Em 1996, ano da emissão do documento, Zampolli atuava junto à americana Metropolitan Models. No ano seguinte, ele fundou sua própria agência de modelos, a ID Models.

Amanda descreve Zampolli como a persona ostentatória que agrada a Trump: almoços diários no restaurante Cipriani, em Nova York, festas de aniversário extravagantes com direito a filhotes de tigre entre as atrações e um círculo social composto por modelos, champanhe e a atenção dos tabloides. Nos 19 anos em que estiveram juntos, ela conta que Zampolli a levou a noitadas comandadas pelo rapper e produtor americano Sean “Diddy” Combs, atualmente cumprindo pena de quatro anos por transportar mulheres para prostituição, e a festas em iates em que a lista de convidados incluía celebridades e integrantes da realeza europeia. Nesses eventos, diz ela, Zampolli costumava levar o próprio garçom para ter certeza de que ninguém colocaria drogas em sua bebida.

No avião de Jeffrey Epstein

Documento indica que o nome de Amanda Ungaro aparece na lista de passageiros do Lolita Express. A imagem mostra dezenas de nomes no voo de 27 de junho de 2002, entre Paris e Nova York, incluindo o do próprio Jeffrey Epstein ("JE"), de Ghislaine Maxwell ("GM") e de Brunel — Foto: Departamento de Justiça dos EUA

O círculo social de Zampolli e Trump envolvia ainda um terceiro personagem: Jeffrey Epstein, financista morto em 2019 enquanto aguardava julgamento por tráfico sexual. A ID Models, agência de Zampolli, era frequentemente visitada por Epstein em Nova York, e os dois tentaram, juntos, comprar em 2004 a Elite Models, uma das maiores agências de modelos do mundo. Zampolli aparece dezenas de vezes nos arquivos do caso Epstein liberados pelo Departamento de Justiça dos EUA.

A ex-modelo Amanda Ungaro acusa o ex-companheiro, Paolo Zampolli, de abuso sexual e violência doméstica — Foto: Márcia Foletto

Amanda já foi convidada, mas ainda não intimada, a depor perante o Comitê de Supervisão do Congresso americano que investiga o caso. A brasileira esteve uma vez com Epstein, em 2002, quando embarcou no Lolita Express, um dos aviões do financista, de Paris para Nova York, onde participaria de um casting. Ela viajou acompanhada de seu agente na época, o francês Jean-Luc Brunel, conhecido como o olheiro de Epstein no Brasil. No mesmo ano, em 2002, Amanda encontraria com Zampolli também em Nova York.

— Tinha mais ou menos umas 30 meninas no avião. Achei aquilo muito estranho. Elas eram mais parecidas com estudantes do que com modelos. Bonitas e bem novinhas, mas não tinham perfil de modelo — conta Amanda.

Ameaças à Melania

 

“Eu te conheço há 20 anos. Você sabia que eu estava detida no ICE. Você esteve presente na minha vida — todos os anos no aniversário do meu filho, inclusive enviando o Serviço Secreto e sendo a primeira a parabenizá-lo, lá em 2016. Algo claramente estava errado, mas eu não faço parte de nenhuma missão maligna envolvendo crianças. Então o que você fez, Melania? Você tentou me envolver, mas falhou — porque eu tenho caráter”, acusou Amanda, no X.

Em outro comentário, a ex-modelo disse que vai “expor tudo” o que sabe sobre o casal e que pretende tomar medidas legais contra Melania e o presidente americano, quem chamou de “pedófilo”.

“Eu vou derrubar o seu sistema corrupto, mesmo que seja a última coisa que eu faça na minha vida. Eu vou até o fim — não tenho medo. Talvez você devesse ter medo do que eu sei… de quem você é e de quem é o seu marido (...) Eu não tenho mais nada a perder na minha vida. Eu vou derrubar todo o sistema — tome cuidado comigo, sua idiota”, acrescentou.

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