Israeli airstrikes kill at least 35 in Rafah, according to Gaza officials | The Excerpt

On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 35 in southern Gaza. USA TODAY Reporter Karissa Waddick explains what Vietnam War activists are saying decades later, amid current college protests against Israel's war in Gaza. Tornadoes kill at least 15 in the central U.S. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise explains why orcas near Spain have been ramming and sinking boats in recent years. Check out our Deep Dive episode on orcas with Michael Weiss, research director at the Center for Whale Research. It's Memorial Day. Take a minute of silence to remember fallen soldiers.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Monday, May 27th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, dozens have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on Rafah, plus Vietnam War activists speak out amid this year's college protests. And we've got answers on why orcas keep ramming boats.

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Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 35 Palestinians in Rafah and injured dozens, according to Palestinian health and civil emergency service officials. Israel's military said its Air Force struck a Hamas compound in the southern Gaza City and that the strike was carried out with precise ammunition and on the basis of precise intelligence. Israeli officials said the strike took out Hamas's chief of staff for the West Bank, and another senior official behind deadly attacks on Israelis. The strike took place in a neighborhood where thousands were taking shelter after fleeing other parts of the city where Israeli forces began a ground offensive over two weeks ago. Officials in Gaza say women and children are among the victims.

Yesterday, Hamas launched missiles at Tel Aviv setting off sirens in Israel's financial center for the first time in four months. The Israeli military said, "Eight projectiles were identified crossing from the area of Rafah." In a statement on its Telegram channel, the Hamas al-Qassam Brigades said, "The rockets were launched in response to Zionist massacres against civilians."

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Amid the spring's protests on college campuses against Israel's war in Gaza, some former Vietnam War activists are looking back on their own strategy, decades later. I spoke with USA TODAY Congress, Campaigns and Democracy Reporter Karissa Waddick for more. Karissa, thanks for hopping on.

Karissa Waddick:

Yeah, of course. Happy to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So Karissa, you spoke with several folks who protested the Vietnam War generations ago. Tell us about one of them here at the start, Michael Ansara, and his story.

Karissa Waddick:

Ansara actually started protesting when he was 13 years old, protesting the Civil Rights Movement and then the Vietnam War. He got involved with the group, Students for a Democratic Society when he went to Harvard University, and SDS was a leftist group at the time, in the 60s. That they were at the forefront of protesting the Vietnam War. So, when he was at Harvard, he confronted the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. He led sit-ins against a recruiter for Dow Chemicals, who made the weapon napalm. And he continued in the anti-war protests for many years after he graduated college in 1968. Like a lot of students today, Ansara back then didn't vote in the 1968 presidential election because of his anger towards the way politicians, and particularly the Democratic presidential nominee at the time, Hubert Humphrey, were responding to the Vietnam War. So, that election was between, like I said, Humphrey on the Democratic side and Richard Nixon on the Republican side.

And Ansara and a lot of the people that he protested with at the time, a lot of the young people, they saw Nixon and Humphrey as two evils, and they equated them. They didn't see much difference between the two of them. He said, "One of the chance at the time was vote with your feet, vote in the street," and that's what he and a lot of other protesters did. They didn't go to the ballot box. They said that we're going to let our opinions be known with the anger that we show towards how politicians were responding to the Vietnam War.

Taylor Wilson:

There's also Mark Naison in this piece. He protested on campus at Columbia University back in the 60s. What did he say about his experience and what he's seeing in this moment, as students at his alma mater took to protesting this spring?

Karissa Waddick:

My colleague, Savannah, talked to Mark, who is now, he's a professor of history at Fordham University. And when he was at Columbia in 1968, he was part of the protest, urging the university to end its connections to military research in support of the Vietnam War, and to cease construction of a gym that they were building that the protesters believed promoted segregation. And so, as you might imagine today, he said he had deja vu watching the protest unfold across the country, but particularly at Columbia. And particularly he said, "The students taking over Hamilton Hall was very reminiscent of when Vietnam War protesters did the same thing at Hamilton Hall in '68." He says that students today aren't likely to support Biden because of his response to the Israel-Hamas War, he knows that as a professor talking to these kids. But he said that he expects people that he protested with back in the 60s to support the president this year. Kind of a difference of generations a little bit.

Taylor Wilson:

And Karissa, you spoke with Jan Berry. What did he say about seeing himself in the protesters, and how young people view the Biden administration's handling of the Israel-Hamas War?

Karissa Waddick:

He fought in the Vietnam War in the early 60s, and he joined the group Vietnam Veterans against the War. He said that if he didn't have handicaps currently, he's in his early 80s, that he'd be out there right now with the protesters. Berry has some health conditions related to exposure to Agent Orange from the Vietnam War currently, so he can't be out there. But many of the young protesters today, he doesn't agree with the way Biden is handling the war in Gaza. We've seen Democrats across the country vote uncommitted in democratic primaries to protest Biden's response to the war. And in the June 4th primary in New Jersey, Berry said that he's going to do the same thing. He's going to cast a ballot uncommitted to vote against the president. When it comes to the November election, he said that there really isn't an option. He's going to have to vote for Biden because he doesn't want to see Trump in the presidency again.

Taylor Wilson:

Karissa, really, how do young Americans feel about Biden and his handling of this war?

Karissa Waddick:

A lot of young people have said that they are disillusioned with the way Biden has handled the Israel-Hamas War. We saw it in the protest on college campuses, worried about the civilian lives in Gaza. Mark, who my colleague, Savannah, spoke with. He said that a lot of these young students are calling the president, Genocide Joe, and that they don't want to vote for him in November because of his response to the war and his support of Israel in the conflict.

Taylor Wilson:

Many of the folks you spoke with, Karissa, said they're hesitant to be too prescriptive with their advice for younger Americans in this moment. What do they say about advising the younger generation right now?

Karissa Waddick:

These old Vietnam War protesters, they're now in their 70s and 80s, but when they were younger, they were progressives and they still are. Most of them that I talked to, there's this common phrase of people get older, they become more conservative. Well, everyone I talked to said, "We're not more conservative. I'm still progressive. I'm still the leftist I was. If anything, I'm just a little bit more pragmatic." They don't want to tell young people because they know that when they were in their early 20s and late 20s, that they wouldn't have listened to older people telling them what to do, how to run their protest, whether to vote or not. They saw the government as corrupt back then, and nobody could really tell them different. So, their message is, learn from our experience.

Taylor Wilson:

Karissa Waddick covers Congress, Campaigns and Democracy for USA TODAY. Thank you, Karissa.

Karissa Waddick:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Powerful storms, including tornadoes, killed at least 15 people across the central US yesterday from Kentucky to Texas. At least a hundred others were injured in a Texas storm, and more than 200 homes were destroyed in the state, according to Governor Greg Abbott. Indianapolis motor speedway officials delayed the start of yesterday's Indianapolis 500 car race, because of impending inclement weather in Indiana, and asked the 125,000 plus fans inside the venue to exit the grandstands for several hours. You can follow along with today's weather events on usatoday.com.

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Orcas, in recent years, have been ramming and sinking boats, and scientists may now know why. I spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent, Elizabeth Weise, to learn more. Hello, Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

Hey.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks for hopping back on the excerpt. So, what exactly is going on with these orcas attacking and sinking boats? I know we've heard about this for a few years, Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

Yeah, it's been going on since 2020, and it's around the Straits of Gibraltar, Spain, France, Morocco, Tunisia. And basically what's been happening is, orcas have come up mostly to sailboats. They ram into them and sometimes so hard that they've sunk six. And nobody's been hurt yet. There was a sinking about a week ago. Now, it was the first of the season.

Taylor Wilson:

So, why is this happening? What are the orcas actually trying to do here, Beth?~

Elizabeth Weise:

Nobody really knew. And the governments of Spain and Portugal pulled together this August group of orca experts from around the world in Madrid in February, to try and figure out what's happening, why is it happening and how can we stop it? There was a lot of crazy stories out last year that it was an orca mother who had seen her child be killed by a sailboat, and now this was her revenge, and she taught all the other orcas to attack sailboats. It's not that, but it is fascinating.

So, what the experts think is happening is that this orca population in particular, eats pretty much only bluefin tuna. And bluefin tuna in that area of the world had been deeply over-fished, and so they work in danger. So, the orcas had to spend all their time looking for prey. So, the orcas were just really busy all the time. But we stopped overfishing the bluefin tuna, and that meant that suddenly this group of orcas, and there's about 40 to 50 in this population, suddenly had a lot of time on their hands. Orcas are very intelligent. They have culture, they share information, they teach each other things. And you had a bunch of basically adolescent orcas who were bored, and they think that because they had all this time, that's when they started ramming rudders.

Taylor Wilson:

It's fascinating, Beth. So I'm curious, is this specific to this area off Gibraltar, or do other orca pods around the world engage in any similar behavior?

Elizabeth Weise:

These orcas are attacking rudders, and they like to ram them with their heads, break the rudder off, and then play with the pieces of wood. While other orca pods don't engage in this behavior, they do engage in fads. There was a whole group up in Puget Sound, the area I'm from, we have two main resident orca pods up there. One of them, in 1987, suddenly had this craze for taking a dead salmon and perching it on their head and swimming around with it. A couple of the young orcas started doing that, and suddenly all the orcas in the pods were doing it. So, they were swimming around with dead salmon hats for the better part of a season, and then they got over it and they stopped. So, it's like they are prone to fads and crazes, and the scientists think that this is just a fad.

Taylor Wilson:

So, should people be concerned about this, Beth, even if it... It's not necessarily malicious as we've outlined, but how can people out on boats prepare and should they be worried at all?

Elizabeth Weise:

So, the good news coming out of this meeting is, they did come up with some guidelines that already seemed to have actually helped a lot. They basically said, "Look, we know where the orcas are, we know where they tend to be during the course of, especially in the summer, which is when all the boaters are out." During the period when the orcas and the tuna are in this place, you basically don't want to sail straight through the middle of it. It's better to sail closer into shore where it's shallower, because orcas don't like to swim in really shallow waters.

And originally two years ago, they were telling people, if a group of orcas start to coalesce around you and maybe bump into your ship, turn off the engines and just stop. But it turns out that didn't help, because that just meant that they could get to the rudder easier. So, what they're saying now is, go not as fast as you can, but at a reasonable pace, head towards land, go away from the orcas. Because after a mile or so, they give up and they find something else to play with. And hopefully they'll just forget about you and go away, because they're teenagers and they have short attention spans. And if anything does happen, you're closer to shore and it's easier to rescue you. Already mariners in that area have started to do these things, and the number of attacks appears to have diminished significantly already this year. So, we'll see. Time will tell.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thanks as always, Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

Always happy to be here.

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Taylor Wilson:

For more, be sure to check out my co-host Dana Taylor's Deep Dive episode on orcas, from a few months ago. We have a link in today's show notes. And today is Memorial Day. It's more than just a long weekend for many Americans and a chance to hit the barbecue or the beach. The holiday is meant to honor all US soldiers who have died serving their country. Originally called Decoration Day, Memorial Day's history goes back to the Civil War. It was declared a national holiday by Congress in 1971, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2000, the National Moment of Remembrance Act was created, and encourages all to pause at 3:00 PM local time for a minute of silence. Whatever you're up to on this unofficial start to summer, take a chance to remember fallen soldiers.

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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Israeli airstrikes kill at least 35 in Rafah | The Excerpt