Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israel said on Thursday it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of last year’s October 7 attack which triggered the deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sinwar’s death would be a pivotal moment in the year of fighting, delivering a severe blow to the Palestinian militant group and a symbolic victory to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israel Defense Forces said Sinwar had been killed on Wednesday by soldiers from its southern command in the south of the Gaza Strip, without giving further details. Hamas did not immediately confirm Sinwar’s death.

Netanyahu hailed Sinwar’s death as a “victory of good over evil” and “the beginning of the day after Hamas” rule in Gaza, adding that those militants still holding Israeli hostages in the enclave now had an opportunity to release them and be allowed to live.

“Hamas will no longer rule Gaza . . . The return of our hostages is an opportunity to achieve all our goals and it brings the end of the war closer,” he added.

Diplomats have begun discussions with Netanyahu’s government about offering Hamas a two to three-day “pause” in Israel’s military offensive in return for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza, a western official said.

The deal would also involve a guarantee regarding the physical safety of Hamas fighters who freed hostages and a resumption of diplomatic talks in Cairo on an end to the war, the official added.

A person familiar with the situation said Israel’s hostage negotiators had been holding emergency discussions on how to “leverage” Sinwar’s killing to secure the release of Israelis held in Gaza.

Killing Sinwar was one of the goals of the devastating assault on Gaza that Israel launched in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on the Jewish state — during which militants killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

But for more than a year Sinwar, who was believed to be hiding in Hamas’s vast network of tunnels, remained elusive, even as Israel’s offensive laid waste to Gaza, killing more than 42,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, and fuelling a humanitarian catastrophe.

Sinwar took over leadership of Hamas this summer, after his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an alleged Israeli explosion in Tehran in July.

The 61-year-old, also known as Abu Ibrahim, is widely considered to have masterminded Hamas’s assault last October, together with Mohammed Deif, chief of the Qassam Brigades, the group’s military wing.

Deif, along with much of the top Hamas military leadership in Gaza, has been killed over the past year in Israeli air strikes.

Israeli officials had vowed they would get to Sinwar too, describing him as a “dead man walking”.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that Sinwar’s death was “a clear message to all of our enemies — the IDF will reach anyone who attempts to harm the citizens of Israel or our security forces, and we will bring you to justice”.

Sinwar, originally from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, had helped build the Qassam Brigades from their inception in the 1980s.

He then spent nearly two decades in Israeli prison but was released in 2011 as part of a swap deal for a seized Israeli soldier.

Once back in Gaza, he rose swiftly through the ranks of Hamas. He became the key interlocutor between the group’s political and military wings and ultimately assumed leadership over the entire territory.

Many people in the pulverised Gaza Strip believe Sinwar started the war with Israel recklessly and some were unmoved on Thursday by news of his death. 

“I thought I would feel happy if Sinwar was killed,” said 28-year-old Mohammad Nafiz, who lives in Khan Younis.

Instead, he said “it feels mixed and weird. [Sinwar] started the whole thing. If his death is not leading to an end of the war then there’s nothing to be happy for. He is just another martyr like tens of thousands.” 

Cartography by Steven Bernard

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Global Economy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

The “Japanification” of China continues to be a big theme, with a lot of eerie parallels right down to stimulus proving wanting. Here’s the latest symptom:

Yep, the 30-year government bond yields of China and Japan are on the cusp of crossing paths for the first time (ever, we think, but LSEG data for both 30-year benchmarks doesn’t go further back than 2009).

At pixel time there’s still a 10 basis point spread between the two long-term bond yields, with the Chinese 30-year yielding 2.245 and the Japanese 30s trading at 2.144 per cent. But it looks like that won’t last long. Shorting Chinese government bonds really has been the new widow-maker trade.

The fading yield curve differential is another stark manifestation of China’s growing economic and demographic malaise, and Japan’s (for now) success in finally winning a three-decade battle against deflation. The subject even got the full Martin Wolf treatment in the FT earlier this week:

Need China turn into Japan? No. Might it turn into Japan? Yes. Moreover, the longer it waits to tackle its ailments, the more likely it is to fall seriously ill, with slow growth and chronic deflationary pressure. Some outside analysts believe this is inevitable. But wanting to believe something does not make it true. China’s disease is not incurable. But it is serious.

The shift from the dominant narrative of the past 20-30 years — that China would inevitably catch up with and eventually eclipse the US as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy — couldn’t be starker.

The post-financial crisis era was particularly euphoric on China, as it kept proving the naysayers and short sellers wrong. In fact, it became by far the biggest contributor to global economic growth in the post-2008 era.

As we noted in a previous post, between the beginning of 2010 and the end of 2020, China’s gross domestic product grew by about $11.6tn in current-dollar terms. That’s roughly equivalent to adding almost four UKs or Indias, nearly three Germanys, more than two Japans, and an Indonesia every year for a decade.

Today, the narrative couldn’t be more different — it’s all about whether China can escape a Japanese-style multi-decade battle against deleveraging, deflation, adverse demographics and dismal growth rates.

Here’s what Barclays’ economists said in a big report on the topic last month:

China’s accelerated economic development was reminiscent of Japan’s postwar economic miracle. Moreover, China was in certain quarters once expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2035.

However, after decades of rapidly narrowing the gap to the US, since 2022 China has started losing ground. Surpassing the US economy now appears a distant hope; its weakening labour market, declining firm profitability, slumping housing activity, and adverse debt-deflation dynamics have raised concerns about China’s longer-term growth outlook.

. . . We think China’s deleveraging journey has only just started, and it is unlikely to be completed before 2030, which implies the structural headwinds to consumption and investment will persist.

Indeed, as Goldman Sachs noted recently, China’s overall indebtedness is actually rising again, and will probably cross the 300 per cent of GDP mark this year (if it hasn’t already).

It should be noted that there’s still a decent-sized if narrowing gap between China and Japan on the 10-year part of the curve. But on the even longer end of the curve, yields have already crossed, with the Japanese government bond maturing in March 2064 currently yielding 2.472 per cent, and China’s November 2064 bond trading at 2.275 per cent.

The parallels between Japan in the early 1990s and China today are myriad, Barclays noted in its report. And in some economic respects, China is now looking more Japanese than Japan. FT Alphaville’s emphasis below:

The economic circumstances facing China have parallels with Japan’s experience after its asset bubble burst in the early 1990s. This created the term ‘Japanification’, which is typically defined as a combination of slow growth, low inflation, and a low policy rate, accompanied by deteriorating demographic trends.

To measure this phenomena, a Japanese economist, Takatoshi Ito, introduced a Japanification Index, which measured the sum of the inflation rate, nominal policy rate, and GDP gap. To apply to China’s economy, we have adjusted this index, replacing the GDP gap with working-age population growth, as the estimation methods of GDP gaps differ across nations and working-age population is by far the most fundamental determinant for long-term growth. Our amended index shows that China’s economy has become more ‘Japanised’ than Japan’s recently, albeit marginally.

This not a surprise to us. A demographic drag, the emergence and collapse of asset bubbles, debt overhang, zombie companies, deflationary pressures from excess capacity/high debt, and high youth unemployment, to name a few, are some of the notable similarities between the economies of China and Japan post their bubbles.

And here’s that index.

Beijing is obviously not oblivious to the dangers, and is unveiling a series of measures designed to restore some economic vim. As Martin Wolf pointed out, China still has a lot of advantages over Japan in the 1990s, not least that it can learn from what its neighbour did wrong.

But so far it seems to be making some of the same mistakes. Third-quarter GDP data will be published tomorrow, and economists expect it to have slowed to 4.5 per cent. The IMF’s own forecasts will come out next week. 🍿

Natasha Miller says she was getting ready to do her job preserving donated organs for transplantation when the nurses wheeled the donor into the operating room.

She quickly realized something wasn’t right. Though the donor had been declared dead, he seemed to her very much alive.

“He was moving around — kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed,” Miller told NPR in an interview. “And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly.”

The donor’s condition alarmed everyone in the operating room at Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Ky., including the two doctors, who refused to participate in the organ retrieval, she says.

“The procuring surgeon, he was like, ‘I’m out of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it,’ ” Miller says. “It was very chaotic. Everyone was just very upset.”

Miller says she overheard the case coordinator at the hospital for her employer, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA), call her supervisor for advice.

“So the coordinator calls the supervisor at the time. And she was saying that he was telling her that she needed to ‘find another doctor to do it’ – that, ‘We were going to do this case. She needs to find someone else,’ ” Miller says. “And she’s like, ‘There is no one else.’ She’s crying — the coordinator — because she’s getting yelled at.”

“Everybody’s worst nightmare”

The organ retrieval was canceled. But some KODA workers say they later quit over the October 2021 incident, including another organ preservationist, Nyckoletta Martin.

“I’ve dedicated my entire life to organ donation and transplant. It’s very scary to me now that these things are allowed to happen and there’s not more in place to protect donors,” says Martin.

Martin was not assigned to the operating room that day, but she says she thought she might get drafted. So she started to review case notes from earlier in the day. She became alarmed when she read that the donor showed signs of life when doctors tried to examine his heart, she says.

“The donor had woken up during his procedure that morning for a cardiac catheterization. And he was thrashing around on the table,” Martin says.

Cardiac catheterization is performed on potential organ donors to evaluate whether the heart is healthy enough to go to a person in need of a new heart.

Martin says doctors sedated the patient when he woke up and plans to recover his organs proceeded.

KODA officials downplayed the incident afterwards, according to Martin. She was dismayed at that, she says.

“That’s everybody’s worst nightmare, right? Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and take your body parts out?” Martin says. “That’s horrifying.”

The patient

Donna Rhorer of Richmond, Kentucky, told NPR that her 36-year-old brother, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, was the patient involved in the case. He was rushed to the hospital because of a drug overdose, she says.

Rhorer was at the hospital that day. She says she became concerned something wasn’t right when TJ appeared to open his eyes and look around as he was being wheeled from intensive care to the operating room.

“It was like it was his way of letting us know, you know, ‘Hey, I’m still here,’ ” Rhorer told NPR in an interview.

But Rhorer says she and other family members were told what they saw was just a common reflex. TJ Hoover now lives with Rhorer, and she serves as his legal guardian.

TJ Hoover danced with his sister, Donna, on her wedding day in May 2023 — more than a year after he was mistakenly declared dead.

Hoover Rhorer family

hide caption

toggle caption

Advertisement

Hoover Rhorer family

The general outline of the incident was disclosed in September by a letter Nyckoletta Martin wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which held a hearing investigating organ procurement organizations. She later provided additional details about the case to NPR.

“Several of us that were employees needed to go to therapy. It took its toll on a lot of people, especially me,” Martin told NPR.

Investigations underway

The Kentucky state attorney general’s office wrote in a statement to NPR that investigators are “reviewing” the allegations.

The federal Health Services and Resources Administration (HRSA), which helps oversee organ procurement, said in a statement to NPR that the agency is “investigating these allegations.” And some people involved in the case told NPR they have answered questions from the Office of the Inspector General of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, though no federal official from that office has commented on the case.

Baptist Health Richmond, the Kentucky hospital where that incident allegedly occurred, told NPR in a statement:

“The safety of our patients is always our highest priority. We work closely with our patients and their families to ensure our patients’ wishes for organ donation are followed.”

“Not been accurately represented”

KODA, the organ procurement organization, confirmed that Miller was assigned to the operating room for the case. But the organization told NPR in a statement that “this case has not been accurately represented.

“No one at KODA has ever been pressured to collect organs from any living patient,” according to the statement from Julie Bergin, president and chief operating officer for Network for Hope, which was formed when KODA merged with the LifeCenter Organ Donor Network. “KODA does not recover organs from living patients. KODA has never pressured its team members to do so.”

Organ procurement system officials, transplant surgeons and others said that there are strict protocols in place to prevent unsafe organ retrieval from happening.

“Incidents like this are alarming. And we would want them to be properly reported and evaluated,” Dorrie Dils, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, told NPR in an interview. “And obviously we want to ensure that individuals are, in fact, dead when organ donation is proceeding. And we want the public to trust that that is indeed happening. The process is sacred.”

The accusations that emerged at the congressional hearing in September undermine trust in the organ donation system and have led to a drop in people signing up to be donors, according to an open letter released Oct. 3 by the organization.

“For over five years, our nation’s organ procurement organizations (OPOs) – the non-profit, community-based organizations that work with grieving families every day to save lives through transplantation – have been subject to malicious misinformation and defamatory attacks based on hearsay, creating a false narrative that donation and transplant in the U.S. is untrustworthy and broken,” the letter reads.

Others also fear such unnerving reports could undermine the organ transplant system.

“These are horrifying stories. I think they need to be followed up carefully,” says Dr. Robert Truog, a professor of medical ethics, anesthesia and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School who works as a critical care physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“But I really would not want the public to believe that this is a serious problem. I believe that these are really one-offs that hopefully we’ll be able to get to the bottom of and prevent from ever happening again,” Truog says.

103,000 people waiting for transplants

Some critics of the organ procurement system say they weren’t entirely surprised by the allegations. With more than 103,000 people on the waiting list for a transplant, organ procurement organizations are under enormous pressure to increase the number of organs obtained to save more lives. In addition, there is an ongoing debate about how patients are declared dead.

“I hope that a case like this really is extreme, but it does reveal some of those underlying issues that can arise when there are disagreements about the determination of death,” says Dr. Matthew DeCamp, an associate professor of Medicine and bioethicist at the University of Colorado.

But some wonder how rarely this happens.

“This doesn’t seem to be a one-off, a bad apple,” says Greg Segal, who runs Organize, an organ transplant system watchdog group. “I receive allegations like that with alarming regularity.”

Likewise, Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and lawyer at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul who studies organ donation, cites similar accusations reported elsewhere.

“This is not a one-off,” Pope says. “It has been alleged to happen before.”

Another near miss described

Dr. Robert Cannon, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, described a similar incident during the congressional hearing where Martin’s letter was disclosed.

“We actually were in the operating room. We had actually opened the patient and were in the process of sort of preparing their organs, at which point the ventilator triggered and so the anesthesiologist at the head of the table spoke up and said, ‘Hey, I think this patient might have just breathed,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”

Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says. He refused.

“We were kind of shocked that an OPO person would have so little knowledge about what brain death means that they would say, ‘Oh, you should just go ahead.’ And we thought, ‘No. We’re not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.’ Because that’s what it would be if that patient was alive.”

“Why me?”

Since TJ’s release from the hospital, his sister, Donna Rhorer, says her brother has problems remembering, walking and talking.

When she asks TJ about what happened, she says he says: “Why me?”

“I do feel angry,” says Rhorer.

“I feel betrayed by the fact that the people that were telling us he was brain dead and then he wakes up,” Rhorer says. “They are trying to play God. They’re almost, you know, picking and choosing — they’re going to take this person to save these people. And you kind of lose your faith in humanity a little bit.”