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    Israel and Hezbollah Trade Fire, With Deaths Reported on Both Sides

    The exchange came as a U.N. cease-fire demand appeared to be having little effect on the war in Gaza, and pressure increased on neighboring Jordan to sever ties with Israel.Hezbollah militants fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon on Wednesday, in what they said was retaliation for an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon overnight.The militants’ barrage came as pro-Palestinian protesters turned up the pressure on the government in neighboring Jordan to sever ties with Israel. It also came as the United States said a previously canceled meeting with an Israeli delegation in Washington to discuss a planned offensive into the southern Gazan city of Rafah would be rescheduled.For months, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed group based in Lebanon, has traded fire with Israeli forces across the border, and on Wednesday, the Israeli military said its forces had targeted a “significant terrorist operative” near the town of al-Habbariyeh in southern Lebanon.Lebanon’s Ministry of Health, which said the Israeli strike had hit an emergency medical center and killed seven paramedics, denounced it as “unacceptable.”Hezbollah’s response was swift: An Israeli government spokesman said 30 rockets were launched into Israel. The strikes included a direct hit on a building in the city of Kiryat Shmona that killed a 25-year-old person, according to the Israeli authorities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Biden’s Challenges in Reaching Young Voters on TikTok Include Anger Over Gaza

    For his campaign, navigating the platform has meant encountering over and over some of the thorniest issues plaguing Mr. Biden’s re-election bid.President Biden’s campaign is working to reach across the generation gap to the tens of millions of predominantly younger voters on TikTok, where the challenges are daunting and the rewards difficult to track.The obstacles range from anger over the war in Gaza to what social media experts describe as the unavoidably uncool nature of supporting the administration in power.Mr. Biden, 81, joined the app owned by a Chinese company last month, in what was widely seen as an effort to communicate with voters under 30, among whom he has polled poorly for months. In interviews and surveys, those voters indicated an unawareness about his administration’s accomplishments, something a word of mouth campaign on TikTok could alleviate.But navigating the platform and its more than 150 million users in the U.S. has involved confronting, usually in the comments sections of his own posts, some of the thorniest issues plaguing Mr. Biden’s re-election bid: disillusioned voters averse to politics, concerns about his age, outrage over the death toll in Gaza. Former President Donald J. Trump isn’t on the app, but his supporters are active. Adding to the puzzle, Mr. Biden’s aides are trying to sell his record on a platform his administration has argued poses a national security threat.President Joe Biden sits with attendees while listening to an opening speaker, during a campaign event at the El Portal restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, on March 19, 2024.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesA bill to force TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese owner or otherwise face a ban in the U.S. is stalled in the Senate, but the president has said he’ll sign it if it passes — a position that has rankled even his staunchest young supporters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.N. Security Council Calls for Immediate Cease-Fire in Gaza as U.S. Abstains

    The U.S. decision not to vote on the resolution drew criticism from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who ordered a delegation to hold back from a planned trip to Washington.The United Nations Security Council on Monday passed a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip during the remaining weeks of Ramadan, breaking a five-month impasse during which the United States vetoed three calls for a halt to the fighting.The resolution passed with 14 votes in favor and the United States abstaining, which U.S. officials said they did in part because the resolution did not condemn Hamas. In addition to a cease-fire, the resolution also called for the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages” and the lifting of “all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel immediately criticized the United States for allowing the resolution to pass, and ordered a delegation scheduled to go to Washington to hold high-level talks with U.S. officials to remain in Israel instead. President Biden had requested those meetings to discuss alternatives to a planned Israeli offensive into Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million people have sought refuge. American officials have said such an operation would create a humanitarian disaster.Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the U.S. abstention from the vote a “clear departure from the consistent U.S. position in the Security Council since the beginning of the war,” and said it “harms both the war effort and the effort to release the hostages.”Top Israeli officials indicated that they would not implement the resolution for now. “The State of Israel will not cease firing. We will destroy Hamas and continue fighting until the every last hostage has come home,” Israel Katz, the country’s foreign minister, wrote on social media.Smoke rising during an Israeli bombardment on a building in Rafah on Sunday.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Witnesses Describe Fear and Deprivation at Besieged Hospital in Gaza

    More than a dozen patients have died as a result of the prolonged Israeli military assault against the Al-Shifa hospital complex, the Gazan authorities say.Seven days after Israel’s military began a raid on the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, a picture of the sustained assault on the complex and its surrounding neighborhood emerges in fragments.Residents nearby described a relentless daily soundtrack of gunshots, airstrikes and explosions. A surgeon spoke of doctors and patients corralled in the emergency ward while Israeli forces took control of the complex outside. A Palestinian teenager who spent four days sheltering in the hospital described the bodies she saw piled up outside the entrance.“They had put the bodies on the side and thrown blankets over them,” said Alaa Abu Al-Kaaf, 18, who said she and her family were at Al-Shifa for days before leaving on Thursday. It was not immediately clear when or how the bodies were brought there.Interviews with other witnesses in the hospital, residents in or near the facility and the Gazan authorities in recent days, as well as with others who have left the complex over the past week, described a situation of fear and deprivation, interrogations and detentions of Palestinian men by Israeli forces, and a persistent lack of food and water.The assault on Al-Shifa, one of Israel’s longest hospital raids of the war in Gaza, began on Monday with tanks, bulldozers and airstrikes. The military said it was aimed at senior officials of Hamas, the armed group that led an attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israel began a war on Gaza in response to that assault, with intense aerial bombardments and a ground offensive.A woman in the Gaza Strip on Thursday after fleeing the Al-Shifa medical complex.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.N. Chief Calls Conditions in Gaza a ‘Moral Outrage’

    In a visit to the Rafah border crossing, Secretary General António Guterres called for an immediate cease-fire and expressed solidarity with Palestinians in the territory.António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, reiterated his call on Saturday for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza, using a visit to a border crossing in Egypt to slam the “nonstop nightmare” Palestinians faced in the territory.“I want Palestinians in Gaza to know: You are not alone,” Mr. Guterres said. “People around the world are outraged about the horrors we are all witnessing in real time. I carry the voices of the vast majority of the world: We have seen enough. We have heard enough.”Mr. Guterres spoke to reporters from the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, one of the two main ground corridors being used to transport desperately needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. More than five months into Israel’s war against Hamas, Palestinians in Gaza are facing widespread hunger and deprivation despite a huge international relief effort.For months, aid organizations have struggled to transport and distribute sufficient food and other supplies in Gaza, which faces a blockade that is jointly enforced by Egypt and Israel.U.N. officials have said the obstacles include lengthy Israeli security inspections, attacks on aid convoys by desperate Palestinians and organized gangs, and roads badly damaged by months of airstrikes and fighting. Israel has blamed the delays on U.N. staffing and logistics and says it does not impose limits on the amount of aid that can enter Gaza.The worsening conditions this week led the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global authority that has classified food security crises for decades, to project that famine was “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza. Aid groups and U.N. officials have argued that it would be better for Israel to ease entry restrictions for trucks at established crossing points into the enclave and to do more to speed the delivery of goods inside Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ocasio-Cortez, in House Speech, Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide’

    Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had called for a permanent cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas, but had resisted labeling the conflict a genocide.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on Friday that Israel’s blockade of Gaza had put the territory on the brink of severe famine, saying publicly for the first time that the nation’s wartime actions amounted to an “unfolding genocide.”In a speech on the House floor, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, forcefully called on President Biden to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel unless and until it begins to allow the free flow of humanitarian assistance into the Gaza Strip.“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she said. “It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”The comments were a sharp rhetorical escalation by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party’s left wing, and they illustrated the intense pressure buffeting party officials as they grapple with how to respond to Israel’s war tactics and the deepening humanitarian crisis.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, defying party leaders, has been a proponent of a permanent cease-fire since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and has called for putting conditions on American military aid to Israel. But she had resisted describing the ensuing war, which has killed 30,000 Gazans and left the territory in ruins, as a genocide.Israel has firmly denied that the term applies, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez indicated in January that she was waiting for the International Court of Justice to render an opinion on a legal designation. Privately, she has expressed concerns to some allies that the highly contentious term would alienate potential supporters of a cease-fire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Look at Previous U.S. Vetoes of Gaza Cease-Fire Resolutions in the U.N.

    Before the United States presented a resolution at the United Nations Security Council on Friday calling for an “immediate and sustained cease-fire” in Gaza, it had vetoed three previous ones demanding a halt to the fighting. The United States has long used its veto power as a permanent Security Council member to block measures that Israel, its close ally, opposes. But the Biden administration has become increasingly vocal in criticizing Israel’s approach to the war against Hamas, and the resolution offered on Friday reflected that, using the strongest language the United States has supported at the U.N. in an effort to pause the war. (The resolution failed after Russia and China vetoed it.)Here is a look at the three previous resolutions and how the U.S. position has changed:OctoberLess than two weeks after the war began in response to the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, Brazil put forward a resolution that condemned the attacks while calling for humanitarian access and protection of civilians in Gaza and the immediate release of hostages captured in the incursion. The United States was the only no vote; Russia and Britain abstained, and the two other permanent members of the Council, France and China, joined with the remaining 10 members in voting for passage.Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said the United States couldn’t support the resolution without a mention of Israel’s right to self-defense. DecemberThe United States cast the lone dissenting vote against a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, one that the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, and some U.S. allies including France supported. The vote was 13 to 1, with Britain abstaining. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Doctors, Back From Gaza Hospitals, Tell Congress of Horrors Amid Cease-Fire Push

    The memories are unforgettable. A flood of screaming families carrying their bloodied loved ones through the doors of an already inundated hospital. A small boy trying to resuscitate a child who looked not much older than himself. A 12-year-old with shrapnel wounds to his head and abdomen being intubated on the ground.That January day at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza — the aftermath of a missile strike on an aid distribution site — has haunted Dr. Zaher Sahloul, an American critical care specialist with years of experience treating patients in war zones, including in Syria and Ukraine.He and other volunteer doctors who have returned from besieged hospitals in Gaza took their firsthand accounts of the carnage to Washington this week, hoping to convey to the Biden administration and senior government officials that an immediate cease-fire was needed to provide lifesaving medical care.Among the evidence Dr. Sahloul took to show the American officials — including members of Congress and officials from the White House, State Department, Defense Department and the United States Agency for International Development — was a photo of the 12-year-old boy and his death certificate. The child never woke up from surgery after being intubated, the doctor said, and the hospital could not reach his family amid a near-total communications blackout.In the aftermath of a missile strike in Khan Younis, Gaza, in January, a stream of victims was brought to the Nasser Hospital.Courtesy of Zaher SahloulTwo other doctors in the delegation — Amber Alayyan, a Paris-based deputy program manager for Doctors Without Borders, and Nick Maynard, a British surgeon — said that robust medical advancements achieved by local doctors in Gaza had been wiped out by Israel’s war against Hamas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More