In the Gaza Strip, at least 40 Palestinians were killed and scores more injured this morning as an Israeli strike ripped through a tent encampment housing displaced Palestinians near Khan Younis. Israel had designated the area as a so-called safe zone. Witnesses say at least four missiles fell onto the crowded camp as people slept, engulfing tents in flames and scattering body parts. The United Nations says its efforts to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children against polio were further delayed after members of a U.N. convoy were detained by Israel’s military at gunpoint for more than eight hours Monday in northern Gaza. This is U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.

Volker Türk: “Ending the war and averting a full-blown regional conflict is an absolute and urgent priority. Equally, the wider situation of illegality across the Occupied Palestinian Territory deriving from Israel’s policies and practices, as so clearly spelled out by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion in July, must be comprehensively addressed.”

Monday marked the traditional first day of school in Gaza, but for a second year in a row classes are canceled for all of Gaza’s schoolchildren. ActionAid Palestine said in a statement, “Going to school is not a luxury, it’s a fundamental right, and yet hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are being denied an education for the second academic year in a row. A whole generation is being denied the opportunity to learn and build a better future for themselves.”

In the occupied West Bank, mourners held a funeral procession Monday for Turkish American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was fatally shot in the head by Israeli forces Friday while she joined a protest against illegal Israeli settlements in the town of Beita. Witnesses say she was killed by an Israeli sniper after the demonstration had already dispersed. This is Lulu, another U.S. activist in the West Bank.

Lulu: “We’re all very saddened by this. My heart and my thoughts are with her family. And we, as volunteers here, we feel her loss, but we are not scared off by the Israelis. We are not scared off by this attack. We will continue to stay here in solidarity with the Palestinians for as long as we live, no matter what happens.”

Ayşenur’s family is calling on the Biden administration to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a U.S. citizen and to ensure full accountability. On Monday, the State Department appeared to rule out a U.S.-led probe, saying it would wait for the results of an Israeli investigation.

Vedant Patel: “I think most important is to let this process play out, for the facts to be gathered and for those to come to light. And I will just leave it at that.”

Click here to see our coverage of Ayşenur Eygi’s killing and growing calls for justice around her death.

Russia’s military says it shot down 144 drones launched from Ukraine at targets inside Russia in an overnight wave of attacks that killed a 46-year-old woman in her Moscow home. Three others were injured as the blast tore through a high-rise apartment building early this morning, setting other residential buildings on fire. Witnesses described a chaotic scene.

Alexander Li: “We were asleep. I got up to go to work. I looked through the window and saw a ball of fire. I had just a second to cover my spouse with a blanket. The window got smashed out by a shock wave. … 

Rada Li: “Everything is messed up there.”

Alexander Li: “We were in shock. I grabbed whatever was nearby — children, the dog, everything — and ran away, because we thought that our home would collapse, as well.”

Ukrainian officials have yet to comment on their latest drone attacks on Russia.

On Monday, NATO warned Moscow over violations of Latvian and Romanian airspace by Russian drones, calling them “irresponsible and potentially dangerous.” Latvian officials said they recovered wreckage of an Iranian-designed Shahed drone that crashed 60 miles from Latvia’s border with Belarus on Saturday. Meanwhile, Sweden’s government says it’s preparing to transfer Saab fighter jets to Ukraine as part of an increase in Swedish arms shipments.

Texas is suing the Biden administration over federal privacy rules that bar investigators from viewing medical records of patients who travel out of state to have an abortion. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says the rule creates a “backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’s laws,” which ban nearly all abortions.

In Missouri, an amendment that could undo the state’s near-total abortion ban is at risk of being removed from the ballot after a Missouri judge ruled Friday the campaign to get the ballot measure did not sufficiently explain the amendment in the signature-gathering phase. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group behind the ballot measure, is arguing its case today before the state Supreme Court, which will need to make an immediate decision since today is also the deadline for any ballot changes before they are printed for mail-in voters.

Meanwhile, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in lawsuits against two separate abortion ballot measures. Nebraska currently has a 12-week abortion ban.

And in more related news, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “election police” unit has been investigating voters who signed ballot petitions for Amendment 4, Florida’s abortion rights measure which would toss out the state’s six-week abortion ban. Since it was formed in 2022, DeSantis’s election police has been deployed to intimidate voters, in particular likely Democratic voters.

The Justice Department has charged two leaders of a white supremacist group, alleging they plotted to assassinate at least one U.S. senator and a district court judge. Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison of Boise, Idaho, each face 15 counts of soliciting hate crimes and providing material support to terrorism. Kristen Clarke is head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Kristen Clarke: “The defendants’ goal, the indictment charges, was to ignite a race war, accelerate the collapse of what they viewed as an irreparably corrupt government and bring about a white ethnostate.”

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance is escalating his racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric, this time targeting the Haitian community in his home state of Ohio. On Monday, Vance wrote on the social media site X, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” The Trump campaign piled on to the bizarre right-wing misinformation campaign, writing, “President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets.”

The first and currently only scheduled debate between Trump and Kamala Harris is happening tonight on ABC News. Watch the debate at democracynow.org and tune in tomorrow for a recap and analysis of the debate.

In Georgia, students at most Barrow County schools are returning to classrooms today, nearly a week after a 14-year-old with an assault rifle shot and killed two teachers and two students, while injuring nine others. Classes at Apalachee High School, where the shooting took place, remain canceled. The Washington Post reports the mother of the suspected shooter contacted the school on the morning of the shooting and warned a counselor about an “extreme emergency” involving her son, about a half-hour before the first shots were fired. The warning reportedly came after her son texted her the message, “I’m sorry, mom.” Separate text messages also revealed the family was in contact with school officials about the boy’s mental health a week before the massacre.

Authorities in California and Nevada have issued mandatory evacuation orders for tens of thousands of people as an intense heat wave grips large swaths of the Southwest. Fast-moving wildfires are burning south of Reno in Nevada and in California’s San Bernardino County, Orange County, at the foothills of L.A.'s Angeles National Forest, as well as in Northern California's Lake County. UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said “extreme fire behavior” has also been observed in Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming.

In tech news, Google and Apple are facing billions of dollars in fines after losing their respective appeals against the European Union. The European Court of Justice ruled Apple must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland in a legal case that spanned 10 years as it went through the appeals process.

Separately, Google must pay a 2.4 billion euro fine for favoring its own price-comparison shopping service over its rivals. This comes as Google’s second major antitrust suit brought by President Biden’s Justice Department kicked off Monday. At issue is Google’s monopoly over the digital advertising industry. Last month, a federal judge ruled Google operated an illegal monopoly in the online search industry.

In Florida, the Miami-Dade Police Department has released footage showing how officers stopped and handcuffed Miami Dolphins star Tyreek Hill as he drove to Sunday’s game. The video reveals officers rapidly escalated the situation from a simple traffic stop to a violent detention, twice pressing Hill facedown into the pavement.

Police officer 1: “Get out of the car right now. We’re not playing this game. Get out.”

Police officer 2: “Get out. Get out!”

Tyreek Hill: “I’m getting out. I’m getting out.”

Police officer 2: “Get out. Get out!”

Tyreek Hill: “Damn.”

Police officer 2: “What part of 'get out' do you not understand?”

In a statement, the Miami Dolphins wrote, “It is both maddening and heartbreaking to watch the very people we trust to protect our community use such unnecessary force and hostility towards these players, yet it is also a reminder that not every situation like this ends in peace, as we are grateful this one did. 'What if I wasn't Tyreek Hill?’ is a question that will carry with resounding impact.” Another Dolphins player, Calais Campbell, who came to deescalate the situation, was also handcuffed.

Legendary actor James Earl Jones has died at the age of 93. He took on iconic blockbuster roles like Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in “The Lion King” and is also remembered for films like “The Great White Hope” and “Matewan,” about the 1920 coal miners’ strike in West Virginia. Though he became well known for his commanding, booming voice, James Earl Jones overcame a stutter that he said was so debilitating as a child, he sometimes pretended to be nonverbal. In 2003, Jones read the Frederick Douglass speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” during a performance of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” which was co-edited by Howard Zinn.

James Earl Jones: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim.”

Click here to see more of this performance of a People’s History of the United States.