DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Thousands of people broke into aid warehouses in Gaza to take flour and basic hygiene products, a U.N. agency said Sunday, in a mark of growing desperation and the breakdown of public order three weeks into the war between Israel and Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.

Tanks and infantry pushed into Gaza over the weekend as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a “second stage” in the war, three weeks after Hamas launched a brutal incursion into Israel. The widening ground offensive came as Israel also pounded the territory from air, land and sea.

The bombardment — described by Gaza residents as the most intense of the war — knocked out most communications in the territory late Friday, largely cutting off the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people from the world. Communications were restored to much of Gaza early Sunday.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck over 450 militant targets over the past 24 hours, including Hamas command centers, observation posts and anti-tank missile launching positions. It said more ground forces were sent into Gaza overnight.

Thomas White, Gaza for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said the warehouse break-ins were “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza. People are scared, frustrated and desperate,” he said.

UNRWA provides basic services to hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. Its schools across the territory have been transformed into packed shelters housing Palestinians displaced by the conflict. Israel has allowed only a small trickle of aid to enter from Egypt, some of which was stored in one of the warehouses that was broken into, UNRWA said.

Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the agency, said the crowds broke into four facilities on Saturday. She said the warehouses did not contain any fuel, which has been in critically short supply since Israel cut off all shipments after the start of the war.

Residents living near Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, meanwhile said Israeli airstrikes overnight hit near the hospital complex and blocked many roads leading to it. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital, without providing much evidence.

Tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering in Shifa, which is also packed with patients wounded in the strikes.

“Reaching the hospital has become increasingly difficult,” Mahmoud al-Sawah, who is sheltering in the hospital, said over the phone. “It seems they want to cut off the area.” Another Gaza City resident, Abdallah Sayed, said the Israeli bombing over the past two days was “the most violent and intense” since the war started.

The army recently released computer-generated images showing what it said were Hamas installations in and around Shifa Hospital, as well as interrogations of captured Hamas fighters who might have been speaking under duress. Israel has made similar claims before, but has not substantiated them.

Little is known about Hamas’ tunnels and other infrastructure, and the claims could not be independently verified. Hamas’ government denied the allegations and said they were aimed at justifying future strikes on the facility.

The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said another Gaza City hospital received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate. It said airstrikes have hit as close as 50 meters (yards) from the Al-Quds Hospital, where 12,000 people are sheltering.

Israel had ordered the hospital to evacuate more than a week ago, but it and other medical facilities have refused, saying it would mean death for patients on ventilators.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on the latest evacuation order or the strikes near Shifa.

Israel says most residents have heeded its orders to flee to the southern part of the besieged territory, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north, in part because Israel has also bombarded targets in so-called safe zones.

An Israeli airstrike hit a two-story house in the southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday, killing at least 13 people, including 10 from one family. The bodies were brought to the nearby Nasser Hospital, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.

The escalation has meanwhile ratcheted up domestic pressure on Israel’s government to secure the release of some 230 hostages seized in the Oct. 7 rampage, when Hamas fighters from Gaza breached Israel’s defenses and stormed into nearby towns, gunning down civilians and soldiers in a surprise attack.

Desperate family members met with Netanyahu on Saturday and expressed support for an exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Yehia Sinwar, said Palestinian militants “are ready immediately” to release all hostages if Israel releases all of the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, dismissed the offer as “psychological terror.”

Netanyahu told the nationally televised news conference that Israel is determined to bring back all the hostages, and maintained that the expanding ground operation “will help us in this mission.” He said he couldn’t reveal everything that is being done due to the sensitivity and secrecy of the efforts.

“This is the second stage of the war, whose objectives are clear: to destroy the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and bring the hostages home,” he said in his first time taking questions from journalists since the war began.

Netanyahu also acknowledged that the Oct. 7 “debacle,” in which more than 1,400 people were killed, would need a thorough investigation, adding that “everyone will have to answer questions, including me.”

The Israeli military said it was gradually expanding its ground operations inside Gaza, while stopping short of calling it an all-out invasion. Casualties on both sides are expected to rise sharply as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle in dense residential areas.

Despite the Israeli offensive, Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel, with the constant sirens in southern Israel a reminder of the threat.

The Palestinian death toll in Gaza rose Saturday to just over 7,700 people since the war began, with 377 deaths reported since late Friday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Most of those killed have been women and minors, the ministry said.

An estimated 1,700 people remain trapped beneath the rubble, according to the Health Ministry, which has said it bases its estimates on distress calls it received.

Israel says its strikes target Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger.

More than 1.4 million people across Gaza have fled their homes, nearly half crowding into U.N. schools and shelters, following repeated warnings by the Israeli military that they would be in danger if they remained in northern Gaza.

Gaza’s sole power plant shut down shortly after the start of the war, and Israel has allowed no fuel to enter, saying Hamas would use it for military purposes.

Hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment, and the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees is also trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running to meet essential needs.

When he was young, historian and author Justin Brink would make his dad, Kevin, drive him up and down the streets of Forest Lake in the family’s 1989 Chevy Celebrity on self-directed history tours.

“I had a dime-store camera, and I would take pictures of buildings and street intersections,” Brink said. “We even stopped traffic at a main intersection once — just so I could get the right shot. I was a strange kid.”

Brink recently published his first book, “Images of America: Forest Lake.” The 128-page book is packed with photos and stories curated by Brink, the president of the Forest Lake Historical Society.

One early settler featured in the book is Swiss immigrant Gotthard Rahm, who arrived in Forest Lake around 1875 and served as the town’s election clerk, treasurer and supervisor. He and his wife, Marie, had three children, and they lived on about 150 acres that abutted the northwest corner of First Lake and included the outlet of the Sunrise River. Sadly, the family’s time in Forest Lake was marked by tragedy.

Justin Brink, president of the Forest Lake Historical Society, recently wrote his first book. “Images of America: Forest Lake,” was released by Arcadia Publishing in September 2023. (Courtesy of Justin Brink)

“In 1879, Gotthard broke through the ice and lost his team of horses,” Brink writes in the book. “Several years later, his son survived a stabbing, and two other children nearly drowned in the lake. In 1896, son Adolph drowned in the Ohio River. Overwhelmed by grief, Gotthard died the following spring by suicide, stabbing himself multiple times in the chest.”

In November 1887, a skeleton — believed to have been a farmhand who had gone missing four months earlier — was discovered in a thicket on the Rahms’ farm, according to Brink. “He was subject to fits, and it is thought died while suffering from one of his attacks,” he said.

Brink also writes about the history of the Forest Lake State Bank, which was founded by Orlando and Wayne Struble in 1903. The street outside the bank was illuminated “by kerosene lamps that were lit nightly and extinguished each morning by the night marshall,” Brink writes.

One photo included in the book, courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, shows bank customer Nellie Banta posing for a photograph before conducting business.

“At the center window is Orlando Struble, and the cashier at right is Harlan W. Swanson,” Brink writes. “A sign to the left of the window reads, ‘Honor thy Father and Mother, but not the stranger’s checks.’”

Brink shared several pages of his book on the “Old Forest Lake” Facebook page prior to publication. One post detailed the closing of Houle’s Feed Mill, a local landmark, and its subsequent purchase and restoration to become Spike’s and Houle’s Feed, Seed & Pet Supply.

Alexander Brand, fifth generation of the Houle family, and James Houle, third generation, walk to the warehouse at Houle’s Feed Mill in Forest Lake on Jan. 10, 2019. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)

“Houle’s has been a staple of the community since the early 1900s,” Brink said. “When there was talk about it being acquired and demolished for a new hotel, there was a lot of uproar about that. That turned out not to be the case, thankfully, and that’s when Spike’s acquired it. The community has been very happy about the renovation just because so much history has been lost over the years that finally we have a building that is being saved.”

Living in a historic home

Brink, 42, was born in Chisago City and raised in Forest Lake. He graduated from Forest Lake Area High School in 1999. He is a registered nurse and works as an infection/safety coordinator at Summit Orthopedics.

He and his wife, Jennifer, and their four children live in a house that is featured in the book. It was the site of Forest Lake’s first hospital.

“Dr. George Ruggles opened his first clinic office in 1932 in downtown Forest Lake,” Brink writes in the book. “Drafted into service during World War II in 1942, he set his sights on bigger things when he returned home in 1945. The following year, he purchased an old farmhouse and turned it into Forest Lake’s first hospital. It opened in 1948 and continued to serve the community until its closing in 1962.”

Prior to becoming a hospital, the house at 107 South Shore Drive “was a dairy farm owned by a wealthy family from St. Paul,” Brink writes. “It was then sold in 1911 to Charles Beard, a real estate salesman. When he died in 1945, it gave Dr. Ruggles the opportunity to purchase the property in 1946.”

“Images of America: Forest Lake” includes images collected from the Forest Lake Historical Society, the Washington County Historical Society, and the community.

“Images of America: Forest Lake” was released by Arcadia Publishing in September. (Courtesy of Justin Brink)

The book “fills a need to show off Forest Lake’s deep history,” said Brent Peterson, executive director of the Washington County Historical Society. “It is full of never-before-seen photos and stories of old Forest Lake.”

Brink’s book is the second written about the history of Forest Lake. Historian Elsie Vogel wrote “Reflections of Forest Lake,” which was published in 1993 for the town’s centennial. The Forest Lake Historical Society plans to reprint the book in 2024, Brink said.

Brink did not have space to include many photos from the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, he said, so he is already planning to write a second book. “People love the book, but there is a lot of interest in seeing photos from those decades,” he said.

Hopkins Schoolhouse

Brink, who serves on the city’s planning commission, also has been working to save the Hopkins Schoolhouse in Hugo. The one-room schoolhouse, built in 1928, sat empty for more than two decades. Brink and a group of volunteers have been working to raise money to restore the building.

Located off of 170th Street North and U.S. Highway 61, the schoolhouse served students in grades 1 through 8 until the mid-1940s and grades 1 through 6 until it closed in 1962. In 1965, Oneka Township purchased the property for $3,500 from the Forest Lake school district for use as a Town Hall. Seven years later, Oneka Township was incorporated into the Village of Hugo, and the city of Hugo was created.

The Hopkins Schoolhouse was briefly used as a youth center and a meeting place for the Hugo Boy Scouts, but has been vacant since the early 2000s.

“The roof was just completed, the chimney just repaired, and the soffit was repaired, so we are all set for the winter,” Brink said. “That was all phase 1.”

Members of the Hopkins Schoolhouse committee check out the interior of the building March 25, 2022, in Hugo. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The group will be raising money this winter to pay for the second phase, which includes new siding.

The hoped-for completion date for the Hopkins Schoolhouse and Heritage Center is 2028, the centennial of the opening of the school, Brink said.

In the future, the building will be used in a number of ways, including as a rest area for users of the Hardwood Creek Regional Trail, as a site for historical displays and programming by the Forest Lake Historical Society and Hugo Historical Commission, and as an interactive learning center for area grade-school students, Brink said.

“It also will be a new meeting place for community members to gather,” he said. “We want to honor the heritage of Hugo, Forest Lake and the surrounding area by highlighting historic examples of citizens who made a difference in the community.”

‘Images of America: Forest Lake’ book launch

A book launch for “Images of America: Forest Lake” by Forest Lake historian and author Justin Brink will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1, at the Washington County Heritage Center in Stillwater. The program is free to the public; no reservations are required. A Zoom link may be accessed at wchsmn.org/event/brink.

For more information, contact Washington County Heritage Center Site Manager Emily Krawczewski at emily.krawczewski@wchsmn.org or 651-439-2298.

To purchase a copy of the book, go to forestlakehistory.org/book.

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Rachel Brattin believed her husband was lying to her, but it wasn’t until she looked in his sock drawer that she realized how big of a secret he was keeping.

Hidden in the drawer was a document saying they were behind on their property taxes and their Mounds View home was in danger of foreclosure. Her husband at the time, Nicholas Firkus, was in charge of their finances.

Brattin knew Firkus’ previous home had been foreclosed on years earlier and then there’d been a tragedy that ended with the death of his first wife.

Now, she had questions. “I wasn’t sure how mad he would be that I knew,” she said recently of finding the paperwork about their home. “I didn’t know how desperate he would feel. I just wasn’t sure and I wasn’t willing to risk the safety of my kids to find out.”

She woke the three children she had with Firkus, buckled them into their carseats and drove away while Firkus slept.

In the years that followed, prosecutors would charge Firkus with the murder of his first wife, Heidi Firkus. Jurors convicted Firkus earlier this year.

One person who jurors didn’t hear from was Rachel Firkus, who is now remarried and goes by Rachel Brattin. Prosecutors wanted her to testify, but defense attorneys argued before the trial that “whether Nick lied to Rachel is not relevant to any issue before the court. It does not suggest in any way that Nick lied to Heidi” and a judge agreed Brattin’s testimony could unfairly sway a jury.

Still, police and prosecutors credit Brattin’s information with helping propel their decade-old case forward before they charged Firkus. They’d been investigating what Heidi Firkus knew — or didn’t know — about the foreclosure and impending eviction of her and Nicholas’ St. Paul home.

Sgt. Niki Sipes, the lead St. Paul police investigator, said when she found out Firkus had kept financial information from his second wife, it showed her that “he was capable of lying about these things and of hiding them. His assertion was that Heidi knew all of these things, but it then began to look like it was a very real possibility he had hidden it because we had seen him hide it from Rachel.”

Brattin, who was included in recent “20/20″ and “Dateline” TV news programs about the Firkus case, said she’s decided to speak out because she previously felt silenced and she wants her story to be known as one of hope.

“For people who are stuck in situations where they don’t feel like they have any hope, I understand that part, but there is hope when you can stand up for yourself,” said Brattin, 38.

From neighborhood meeting to marriage

On April 25, 2010, the day before Nicholas and Heidi Firkus were to be evicted, 25-year-old Heidi was fatally shot in their Hamline-Midway home. Nicholas Firkus, then 27, told police an unknown man broke in. He said he armed himself with his shotgun, and Firkus said he and the intruder struggled. The firearm went off and Heidi was shot in the back.

Heidi Firkus (Courtesy of Erickson family)

In the summer of 2010, Firkus was living with his brother in Hugo. Brattin was staying a few blocks away with her sister, Sarah Olson, after moving back from California.

Olson and her then-husband were in Nicholas and Heidi Firkus’ close friend group. Brattin met Heidi a few times, but didn’t know her well. She remembers her as “very sweet and very kind, very down to earth.”

Nicholas Firkus was often over at the Olson house, and Brattin and Firkus became friends. They developed a relationship and married in a small backyard ceremony in August 2012. They went on to have three children in four years.

They’d decided Brattin would be a stay-at-home mom. Firkus worked for his family’s business, home project contractors, and Brattin also did some part-time work for the business from home.

At the beginning of their marriage, they agreed Firkus would be in charge of the family’s finances. Brattin knew of his past financial problems, but she said Firkus told her “it wasn’t that bad” and she believed he’d been young and hadn’t known how to manage money. She felt reassured because they completed a course together on financial management.

“I respected the fact that he got out of debt before we were married and I know that it’s important for men to feel that they can provide for their family, so I thought, ‘He proved that he can do this and take care of it,’” Brattin said. “I wanted to give him that chance to do that.”

Firkus’ parents bought Nicholas and Rachel their home in Mounds View, and the couple paid them for it each month, Brattin said.

As time went on, Brattin’s trust in Firkus wavered. She said she’d often find food wrappers in his car and would ask him about them. He’d say he gave someone a ride and they left the wrappers behind, for example, according to Brattin.

“It may not seem like a big deal, but for us, if you’re doing that daily, the cost comes out of the grocery budget that we have for our family,” said Brattin, who said there were times they were living paycheck to paycheck.

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Brattin started getting collection calls about medical bills. She asked Firkus to take care of them and he’d tell her, “Somebody messed up” or “I tried to call, but they didn’t call back,” Brattin recalled.

Sipes, the St. Paul police investigator, later testified at Firkus’ trial about email messages in his first marriage. In March 2010, Heidi asked Nicholas to take care of an Allina Health bill and wrote, “It just scares me that I got the call. It has to be messing up our credit.”

In a response, Nicholas told her, “Hey, got off the phone with U.S. Bank. They have flagged and sent our info to their auditing department to see where the discrepancies are.” But Sipes testified that they didn’t have a U.S. Bank account at that point.

‘Ashamed and scared’

It was 2018 when Brattin found the letter from Ramsey County in Firkus’ drawer about unpaid property taxes.

“I was shocked,” she said.

Jurors in Nicholas Firkus’ 2023 murder trial weren’t allowed to hear from Rachel Brattin, but behind the scenes, police and prosecutors credit her with helping confirm a motive for the killing of his first wife, Heidi, in 2010. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

After Brattin left with the children, she and Firkus talked and they also had conversations with his parents. Brattin used the voice recorder on her cellphone to record their conversations without them knowing. She said she did it to protect herself because she worried she’d be blamed for asking him to leave their home.

A recording was played in court during a pretrial hearing, when a judge was deciding if Brattin could testify. Jurors ultimately didn’t hear any of the audio.

In one conversation, Firkus told his parents that, when they gave him money twice in 2016 to pay their property taxes, he put the checks in their bank account instead of paying the taxes. At the time, “we were struggling really hard and I didn’t have the guts to talk to Rach about it and I didn’t have the guts to talk to anybody about it and I ignored it,” Firkus said. He said he had paid the taxes in 2017 and had just paid their past-due 2016 taxes.

He also said he’d been dishonest with Brattin — “some of it is financial,” he said in the recording. He told his parents that, when he talked to them the night before, “I was too ashamed and scared to ask for any help.”

When Firkus’ trial started in January, prosecutors Elizabeth Lamin and Rachel Kraker aimed to show that Heidi Firkus was unaware of the foreclosure and eviction. “Nick was desperate, ashamed and had run out of time, and reality was going to come crashing down on him,” Lamin said during opening arguments.

She no longer knew what to believe about homicide

In another conversation that Brattin recorded in 2018, she told Firkus and his parents that she no longer knew what to believe about what happened the day Heidi died.

“If Heidi did know all this was happening (with the impending eviction), why was there nothing packed in their house?,” Brattin asked them. “… That makes zero logical sense to me as a woman. … Neither parents knew … and they were going to tell their friends say one o’clock-ish to help them pack their whole entire house? That makes zero logical sense to me.”

Firkus responded soon after: “Heidi and I decided together that we would figure this out” because they thought they could and because “we were embarrassed and stuck.” There were things “crated up and easily ready to go,” Firkus added about packing the house.

Steven Firkus said his son’s attorney and investigator had determined in their own information-gathering process in 2010 that there was “proven documentation of Heidi having to sign documents saying she knows the foreclosure steps and the dates, and it was posted on the door with a date.” At Nicholas Firkus’ trial, his attorneys did not show foreclosure documents that had Heidi’s signature on them.

In a separate conversation between Nicholas Firkus and Brattin from around the same time, as she expressed increasing doubt about what happened to Heidi, Brattin told him, “I do not want to think these things, I don’t, but your actions have caused me to just distrust you completely. And the fact that your lying was so easy for you to do in front of me over and over and over makes me think …”

“That I could murder my wife?” Firkus asked.

“That you could lie about something,” Brattin answered.

“That I could murder my wife?” Firkus asked again.

“Yes,” Brattin said.

After Brattin spoke more, and Firkus cried and was silent, he told her, “Intellectually, I understand what you are saying. I don’t know where to go from here today.”

Police approached her

The couple separated. Brattin filed for divorce in 2019.

Sipes, the homicide investigator, heard rumblings about a separation and saw in public court records that the divorce was finalized in 2019. In 2020, she contacted Brattin.

Brattin said she didn’t know that police were still investigating Heidi Firkus’ homicide and she wasn’t sure at first if she would talk to Sipes because she didn’t think she had information that would be helpful.

“I gave it a few days, I prayed on it real hard,” Brattin said. “I could tell that she wanted to find the truth” and she agreed to meet with Sipes. She told her about the financial information she discovered Firkus had kept from her.

Sipes said she considers Brattin “a very brave woman who took a large risk in assisting us with the investigation.”

Prosecutors wanted Brattin to testify. Lamin argued at a pretrial hearing that it showed a pattern of Nicholas Firkus controlling finances, mismanaging them and lying about it.

But Firkus’ attorney, Robert Richman, said they “argued whatever happened in the relationship with Nick and Rachel, years after Heidi was murdered, it had no relevance to answering the question of who murdered Heidi. It was a different relationship, a different person” and Nicholas and Heidi Firkus’ financial circumstances were “very, very different. Whether or not Rachel knew (about her finances with Nicholas) tells us nothing about what Heidi knew.”

Conviction being appealed

Firkus, now 40, was sentenced in April to life in prison without the possibility of parole for premediated murder. Because of the sentence, the case will automatically be appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Nicholas Firkus (Courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Corrections)

Richman said he’ll argue that the case was based on circumstantial evidence and Minnesota law says in such cases “the circumstances proved have to be sufficient to be not only consistent with guilt, but inconsistent beyond a reasonable doubt with any reasonable hypothesis other than guilt. Our position is that it was a reasonable hypothesis that it happened exactly the way Nick said that it happened, namely that there was an intruder.”

Nicholas Firkus had told police that after Heidi was accidentally shot during the struggle, he and the unknown man continued to struggle and the gun went off a second time, shooting him in the upper thigh.

“A next-door neighbor heard the gunshot and heard a male voice yell, ‘You shot her,’” Richman wrote in a brief court document about the appeal. “In addition, there were tool marks in the door frame consistent with someone trying to jimmy the lock. The state’s case was entirely circumstantial.”

‘Hope is what I have chosen’

For Brattin, rebuilding her life was difficult. She spent years as a single mother. She’s now been happily married for a year to a man she’s known for more than 20 years. Her children are 6, 8 and 10.

A friend of Brattin’s started a GoFundMe to help with legal expenses that continue in family court and for ongoing therapy for her children.

Brattin has met Heidi’s parents, John and Linda Erickson, and they now count each other as friends.

“Because of knowing them, I know more of Heidi,” Brattin said.

The Ericksons said they’re grateful that Brattin “had the courage and willingness to come forward and talk about her own experience.”

Before Brattin knew Firkus, she was a licensed makeup artist. She previously started a makeup company, be Lovely, that she used to shed light on sex trafficking and to support organizations fighting against it. She recently made T-shirts with the word that means so much to her — Hope — that she’s selling through be Lovely’s website.

“I’m in a painful season of my life now,” she wrote on her website. “These products don’t come from a peaceful place when the storm has passed. They come from the deepest parts of my grief, fear, and injustice. Irrational hope is what I have chosen; the kind of hope that makes absolutely no sense based on my circumstances. I’m a firm believer that sometimes you have to speak out loud what is hard to believe in the moment.”

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