Aid reaches northern Gaza for 1st time in weeks, officials report
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Aid convoys carrying food reached northern Gaza this week, Israeli officials said Wednesday, the first major delivery in a month to the devastated, isolated area, where the U.N. has warned of worsening starvation among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians amid Israel’s offensive.
The increasing alarm over hunger across Gaza has fueled international calls for a cease-fire as the U.S., Egypt and Qatar work to secure a deal between Israel and Hamas for a pause in fighting and the release of some of the hostages seized by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attack.
Mediators hope to reach an agreement before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan starts around March 10. But Israel and Hamas have remained far apart in public on their demands.
Increasing the pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach a deal, families of hostages Wednesday launched a four-day march from southern Israel to Jerusalem to demand their loved ones be set free. Some of the nearly 100 hostages freed during a cease-fire in late November joined the march, which is scheduled to end near Netanyahu’s official residence.
The plight of the hostages has shaken Israelis, who see in them an enduring symbol of the state’s failure to protect its citizens from Hamas’ assault. In its Oct. 7 attack, Palestinian fighters abducted roughly 250 people, according to Israeli authorities. After the November releases, some 130 hostages remain, and Israel says about a quarter of them are dead.
Israel’s assault on Gaza, which it says aims at destroying Hamas after its attack, has killed more than 29,900 Palestinians. U.N. officials warn of further mass casualties if it follows through on vows to attack the southernmost city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has taken refuge. They also say a Rafah offensive could collapse the aid operation that has already been crippled in the fighting.
Michigan protest vote: A protest “uncommitted” vote in Michigan that secured two delegates in the state’s Democratic primary Tuesday was meant as a warning to President Joe Biden’s reelection over his support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, but eight months from Election Day his campaign insists it’s nothing to panic about.
While Biden won the state with more than 618,000 votes, more than 100,000 Michigan Democratic primary voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” in the race, enough to pick up the two delegates. The vote totals raise concerns for Democrats in a state Biden won by only 154,000 votes in 2020. Biden was beaten by the “uncommitted” vote in Dearborn and Hamtramck, where Arab Americans make up close to half the population.
Some local Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, had advocated for “uncommitted” votes to convey a message to Biden. Organizers of the “uncommitted” campaign, who had purposely set expectations low with a goal of at least 10,000 votes, celebrated Tuesday’s results as a win.
Biden still won 115 delegates Tuesday and is well on his way to clinching the nomination over marginal competition.
IVF bill blocked: U.S. Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would protect access to in vitro fertilization, objecting to a vote on the issue Wednesday even after widespread backlash to a recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that threatens the practice.
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Mississippi Republican, objected to a request for a vote by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who used IVF treatments to have her two children after struggling with years of infertility. Duckworth’s bill would establish a federal right to the treatments as the Alabama ruling has upended fertility care in the state and families who had already started the process face heartbreak and uncertainty.
Several clinics in the state announced they were pausing IVF services as they sort out last week’s ruling, which said that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. The court said that three Alabama couples who lost frozen embryos during an accident at a storage facility could sue the fertility clinic and hospital for the wrongful death of a minor child.
Democrats have seized on the election-year ruling, warning that other states could follow Alabama’s lead and that other rights could be threatened as well in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade and the federal right to an abortion in 2022. Congress passed similar legislation in 2022 that would protect the federal right to same-sex and interracial marriages.
Abortion opponents have pushed laws in at least 15 states based on the idea that a fetus should have the same rights as a person.
Abortion vote in France:
The country’s Senate on Wednesday adopted a bill to enshrine a woman’s right to an abortion in the constitution, clearing a key hurdle for legislation promised by President Emmanuel Macron in response to a rollback in abortion rights in the United States.
Wednesday’s 267-50 vote came after the lower house, the National Assembly, overwhelmingly approved the proposal in January.
Macron said after the vote that his government is committed to “making women’s right to have an abortion irreversible by enshrining it in the constitution.”
He posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he would convene a joint session of parliament for a final vote Monday.
Navalny funeral: The funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died Feb. 16 in a remote Arctic penal colony, will take place Friday in Moscow after several locations declined to host the service, his spokesperson said.
His funeral will be held at a church in Moscow’s southeast Maryino district, Kira Yarmysh said Wednesday. The burial is to be at a nearby cemetery.
Navalny died in mid-February in one of Russia’s harshest penal facilities. Russian authorities haven’t announced the cause of his death at age 47, but many Western leaders have already blamed it on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Idaho execution called off:
Idaho halted the execution of serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech on Wednesday after medical team members repeatedly failed to find a vein where they could establish an intravenous line to carry out the lethal injection.
Creech, 73, has been in prison half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He was already serving a life term when he beat a fellow inmate, David Dale Jensen, 22, to death in 1981 — the crime for which he was to be executed.
Three medical team members tried eight times to establish an IV, Corrections Director Josh Tewalt said afterward.