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      Israel’s Wartime Government Frays as Frustration with Netanyahu Grows

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      Benny Gantz, a centrist member of leadership, presented the prime minister with an ultimatum that demanded a plan for the future of Israel’s war.Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel’s war cabinet, presented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an ultimatum on Saturday, saying he would leave the government if it did not soon develop a plan for the future of the war in Gaza.While Mr. Gantz’s departure would not topple the country’s emergency wartime government, the move would further strain a fragile coalition that has provided Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government with a boost of international legitimacy, and it would make the prime minister even more reliant on his hard-line partners.“If you choose the path of zealots, dragging the country into the abyss, we will be forced to leave the government,” Mr. Gantz said in a televised news conference. “We will turn to the people and build a government that will earn the people’s trust.”Mr. Gantz, who leads the National Unity party, said he would give Mr. Netanyahu until June 8 — three weeks’ time — to develop a plan that would aim to secure the release of hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas-led militants on Oct. 7, address the future governance of the territory, return displaced Israelis to their homes and advance normalization with Saudi Arabia, among other issues.Mr. Gantz’s ultimatum was the latest sign of pressure building on Mr. Netanyahu to develop a postwar plan. The prime minister is increasingly being squeezed — externally from Israel’s closest ally, the United States, and from within his own War Cabinet — to clarify a strategy for Gaza. Just days earlier, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said the government was charting “a dangerous course” and demanded that Mr. Netanyahu immediately pledge not to establish an Israeli military government in Gaza.In a response to Mr. Gantz’s ultimatum, Mr. Netanyahu accused the former military chief of staff and a longtime political rival of calling for “Israeli defeat” by effectively allowing Hamas to remain in power.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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      Arab League Calls for U.N. Peacekeepers in Gaza and the West Bank

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      The Arab League called on Thursday for a United Nations peacekeeping force to be deployed in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank until a two-state solution can be negotiated, in a statement that also called for the U.N. Security Council to set a time limit for that political process.The notion of deploying U.N. peacekeepers into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been mentioned occasionally by diplomats. But the Arab League’s statement appeared to be the first time the group had officially made such a request in a written document, according to Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman.It’s unlikely that U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed to Gaza and the West Bank in the near future because sending U.N. peacekeepers into any conflict requires first the authorization of the Council. U.N. forces, which are typically drawn from the armed forces of multiple countries, do not enter live battle zones and do not engage in fighting. Both Israel and Hamas would also have to agree to having U.N. peacekeepers on the ground.“There first has to be peace to keep,” Mr. Haq said. “We don’t go into active combat, and parties themselves have to agree on allowing the presence of peacekeepers. We don’t go in as an enemy force or an occupying force.”The proposal came as part of a final statement issued by the league after its 22 members met on Thursday in Manama, Bahrain, a summit dominated by discussion about the war in Gaza.In addition to calling for an immediate cease-fire and accusing Israel of obstructing those efforts, the Arab League called for “the deployment of United Nations international protection and peacekeeping forces in the occupied Palestinian territory until the two-state solution is implemented.”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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      Columbia Professors Host Alternative Graduation for NYC Students

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      Approximately 550 students, professors and religious leaders gathered near the Columbia University campus in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon for what organizers called an alternative graduation ceremony, featuring speeches by pro-Palestinian activists and writers, and clergy from various faiths.The two-hour event, called “The People’s Graduation” and organized by Columbia faculty and staff, was held toward the end of a week of official graduation ceremonies, many of which the university moved to its athletic complex some 100 blocks north to avoid disruptions by protesters.“People are feeling very alienated from the college and the university and they wanted a space where they could celebrate their accomplishments and express themselves politically,” said Nara Milanich, a professor of history at Barnard College, who attended the event.Many students had expressed dismay when Columbia’s leadership canceled the university’s main commencement ceremony, and moved most events off campus. In the weeks leading up to graduation, the school’s administration had called the police twice to remove protesters from its Morningside Heights campus, where students established a pro-Palestinian encampment and occupied a building.In a letter to the New York Police Department in April, Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, requested that the police remain on campus until at least May 17 “to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished.”Administrators said they were “deeply disappointed” at having to change plans for graduation, but said the security issues were “insurmountable.”During the alternative event on Thursday, held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, college students from across New York City attended, and many wore the powder blue caps and gowns of Columbia. Some speakers grew emotional as the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah read his poem “Dedication,” which he wrote during the first three months of the war in Gaza.Toward the end of the ceremony, organizers played a video message from Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, who thanked the protesters for their actions.“We never imagined that anyone is gonna ever give us hope the way you guys did,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll see you one day soon when all of this ends.” More

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      University of California Workers Vote to Authorize Strike in Rebuke Over Protest Crackdowns

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      A union representing about 48,000 academic workers said that campus leaders mishandled pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The vote gives the union’s executive board the ability to call a strike at any time.Unions are known for fighting for higher pay and workplace conditions. But academic workers in the University of California system authorized their union on Wednesday to call for a strike over something else entirely: free speech.The union, U.A.W. 4811, represents about 48,000 graduate students and other academic workers at 10 University of California system campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its members, incensed over the university system’s handling of campus protests, pushed their union to address grievances extending beyond the bread-and-butter issues of collective bargaining to concerns over protesting and speaking out in their workplace.The strike authorization vote, which passed with 79 percent support, comes two weeks after dozens of counterprotesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, for several hours without police intervention, and without arrests. Officers in riot gear tore down the encampment the next day and arrested more than 200 people.The vote does not guarantee a strike but rather gives the executive board of the local union, which is part of the United Auto Workers, the ability to call a strike at any time. Eight of the 10 University of California campuses still have a month of instruction left before breaking for summer.The union said it had called the vote because the University of California unilaterally and unlawfully changed policies regarding free speech, discriminated against pro-Palestinian speech and created an unsafe work environment by allowing attacks on protesters, among other grievances.“People on the ground are extremely agitated because of the university’s unlawful behavior around the protests on campus,” said Rafael Jaime, the president of U.A.W. 4811. “We’re asking the university to de-escalate the situation and to do so by engaging in good faith with protesters on campus.”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 Administration Advances $1 Billion Arms Sale to Israel

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      The notification of the deal to Congress as the president holds up the delivery of other weapons shows the fine line the administration is trying to walk with its longtime ally.The Biden administration has told Congress that it intends to move forward with a plan for the United States to sell more than $1 billion in new weapons to Israel, according to three congressional aides familiar with the deal.The notification of the sale, which would include new tactical vehicles and ammunition, comes as President Biden has withheld a shipment of bombs to Israel, hoping to prevent U.S.-made weapons from being used in a potential invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Last week, Mr. Biden said he would block the delivery of weapons such as bombs and missiles that could be fired into the densely populated area where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering.The potential arms transfer illustrated the narrow path the Biden administration is walking with Israel, trying to prevent an assault on Rafah and limit civilian casualties in Gaza but continuing to supply a longtime ally that the president has said has a right to defend itself. One congressional aide said Congress had been aware of the arms deal for months, and suggested that the administration had simply waited for a foreign aid package with more aid for Israel to pass before moving forward with the required congressional notification process.When asked about the package, which was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, the State Department referred to recent comments from Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, citing a continued commitment to supply Israel with military assistance to defend itself from threats in the region.“The president was clear he would not supply certain offensive weapons for such an operation, were it to occur,” Mr. Sullivan said. “It has not yet occurred. And we are still working with Israel on a better way to ensure the defeat of Hamas everywhere in Gaza, including in Rafah.”The administration has been pushing for a cease-fire deal in which Hamas would release at least some of the hostages it took on Oct. 7, when it attacked Israel and began the war. But the prime minister of Qatar, a key player in the talks, said on Tuesday that they were at “almost a stalemate.”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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      Fighting Flares Anew in Gaza as Hamas Reconstitutes

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      The U.S. secretary of state warned that Israel’s victories over Hamas may not be “sustainable.”As the Israeli military stepped up pressure on what it calls Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza, fighting elsewhere in the Palestinian enclave on Sunday led to warnings that the militants might remain a force for a long time to come.Close-quarters ground combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of northern Gaza over the weekend, both sides said on Sunday, even as the world’s attention was largely focused on the southern city of Rafah, where Israel escalated military operations last week.It has become a familiar scenario in the Gaza Strip over the course of the seven-month war: After pitched battles, Israel declares an area clear of Hamas, only to return after the militants reconstitute their forces.On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said he was concerned that Israel’s failure to lay down a template for the governance of Gaza meant that its victories might not be “sustainable” and would be followed by “chaos, by anarchy and ultimately by Hamas again.”Mr. Blinken’s warning came as the Israeli military said its soldiers had “eliminated a number” of fighters in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun. In nearby Jabaliya, where civilians were ordered to evacuate on Saturday, troops went in overnight after fighter jets struck more than two dozen targets, the military said. The operation, it said, was “based on intelligence information regarding attempts by Hamas to reassemble.”Hamas said on Sunday that its fighters were engaged in “fierce clashes” with Israeli soldiers near Jabaliya and that the fighters had fired heavy-caliber mortar shells at Israeli forces in Zeitoun.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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      About 300,000 Gazans Have Fled Rafah, U.N. Says

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      The main United Nations agency aiding Palestinians in Gaza said early Sunday that about 300,000 people had fled over the past week from Rafah, the city in the enclave’s southernmost tip where more than a million displaced Gazans had sought shelter from Israeli bombardments elsewhere over the past seven months.The U.N. agency, known as UNRWA, made the announcement on social media hours after the Israeli government issued new evacuation orders in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, deepening fears that the Israeli military was preparing to invade the city despite international warnings.The World Food Program echoed those warnings on Sunday, expressing concern about displacement of civilians and saying that a full-scale invasion of Rafah would be “catastrophic.”“Families are once again on the move, searching for shelter, food, water — but with fewer resources,” it wrote on social media.Paltel, the Gaza Strip’s largest telecommunications company, said on Sunday that internet service was down in parts of southern Gaza because of Israeli military operations and that crews were working to restore services “as quickly as possible.”Doctors Without Borders, an aid group whose staff members have been working in Gaza during the war, also said on social media that it had started to refer the last 22 patients at one hospital, the Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital, to other facilities because it could “no longer guarantee their safety.”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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      On a Day of Graduations, Berkeley’s Protests Stand Out

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      At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.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