In the occupied West Bank, at least five Palestinians were killed today in an Israeli airstrike on a car in the city of Tubas. A sixth Palestinian, 16-year-old Majed Fida Abu Zeina, was shot dead by Israeli forces in the Faraa refugee camp near Tubas. The Wafa news agency reports Israeli forces barred ambulances from reaching the boy and dragged his body out of the camp using a military bulldozer.

On Wednesday, mourners held a funeral procession near Jenin for a Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli sniper. This is the girl Lujain’s father, Osama Musleh.

Osama Musleh: “The soldiers are surrounding the town. I tried to save her. I tried to do something, but I couldn’t. The army is surrounding our area. I called for ambulance. They arrived late because a snipper shot toward them. … She is 16 years old. The only thing she did is she looked from the window, and the soldier saw her and shot her, one bullet that targeted her forehead.”

At least 19 people have been killed in Jenin since last week, when Israel launched its largest West Bank offensive in two decades. Jenin’s Governor Kamal Abu al-Rub said Israeli armored bulldozers have razed 70% of Jenin’s streets, destroying more than a dozen miles of water and sewage pipes along with electrical and communication cables. Jenin’s main public hospital has been locked down, and 4,000 residents of Jenin have been forced from their homes at gunpoint.

Gov. Kamal Abu al-Rub: “The situation in the areas which are under siege is bad. The Israeli army is preventing food, water, ambulances and journalists from reaching these besieged areas, so we don’t know what is happening in the areas which they consider to be military closed areas. We are getting lots of calls for help. … This invasion is the worst, largest and most painful to Palestinian people because the Israeli army is destroying the infrastructure, which means a blow to the local economy in Jenin.”

In the Gaza Strip, Israeli attacks have killed at least 18 Palestinians since Wednesday. One assault on a tent encampment for displaced Palestinians killed four people near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. The strike destroyed dozens of tents and wounded many others, including children. In southern Gaza, medical workers have begun vaccinating tens of thousands of Palestinian children in the city of Khan Younis against polio — the second stage of a U.N.-led polio eradication effort.

Meanwhile, Hamas has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of deliberately undermining efforts to forge a ceasefire and hostage release deal by refusing to withdraw Israeli troops from the Philadelphi Corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt. This comes as newly published documents show how Netanyahu and Israeli negotiators purposefully prolonged Israel’s assault on Gaza by making new demands during ceasefire talks. The documents published by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth also reveal that three of the six hostages found dead in Gaza last weekend were due for release under a ceasefire agreement drafted in May.

President Biden said Monday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal. On Tuesday, a group of more than two dozen rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Refugees International, sent the Biden-Harris administration a letter highlighting, “International and U.S. law, as well as your administration’s policies … require suspending weapons transfers to the Israeli government.”

The Portland City Council in Maine unanimously voted to divest all funds from companies complicit in Israeli human rights violations and war crimes against Palestinians. Organizers say Portland is the fourth U.S. city, and the first on the East Coast, to adopt such a divestment resolution, which comes after intense campaigning from rights groups including Maine Coalition for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace Maine.

Meta has ruled the phrase “from the river to the sea” is not hate speech. Pro-Israel groups have accused people who use the long-standing rallying cry for Palestinian liberation of being antisemitic, and attempted to shut down speech promoting Palestinian rights on social media. But Meta’s Oversight Board ruled “from the river to the sea” is “often used as a political call for solidarity, equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, and to end the war in Gaza.”

In Georgia, a 14-year-old shot and killed two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in the city of Winder on Wednesday morning in the deadliest U.S. school shooting this year. At least nine others were injured. Authorities said Colt Gray, who used an “AR-platform-style weapon” in Wednesday’s rampage, will stand murder charges as an adult. This is 15-year-old student Itzel Navarrete, who survived the shooting.

Itzel Navarrete: “All of us, including me, I was crying. I was shaking. I was — I just didn’t know where my mind was. I was just so scared. But yeah, a lot of us were just crying. All you hear is crying. All you hear is like the sirens from outside, so it made us even more scared, because we were like, 'Oh, it's real. It’s real.’ We didn’t know how to react.”

The teenage suspect was on the FBI’s radar as far back as May 2023 and was interviewed when he was 13, along with his father, about anonymous online threats. His father said he kept hunting guns in the family home. Apalachee High School reportedly received a threat by phone ahead of the shooting, with the caller warning five schools would be targeted, starting with Apalachee. After headlines, we’ll go to Georgia for the latest.

In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued an apology Wednesday as the results of a seven-year investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire concluded the disaster was “avoidable” and was caused by “decades of failure” by the U.K. government and “systematic dishonesty” of the companies that provided insulation and other construction materials in the London tower block. The fire killed 72 people, many of them children and most of them from low-income and immigrant families. This is Natasha Elcock, a survivor and spokesperson for the group Grenfell United.

Natasha Elcock: “We paid the price of systematic dishonesty, institutional indifference and neglect. … Today we send a message to Keir Starmer and his government. This country has been failed by governments of all political persuasions. Our expectation is your government will break old habits and implement all the recommendations made by Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report without further delay, because the time to address this is already three decades too late.”

Click here to see our interview with a Grenfell survivor.

In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD party, won an election in the eastern state of Thuringia and came in second in neighboring Saxony, sending shockwaves throughout the country and Europe. It’s unlikely the AfD will be able to form a ruling coalition as other parties refuse to work with them and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called on German lawmakers to lock the nationalist party out of any talks. Alice Weidel is co-leader of Alternative for Germany.

Alice Weidel: “Our school classes are being flooded with children and young people from foreign cultures who come from archaic backgrounds, marked by Muslim beliefs. They are uneducated, and all they speak is gibberish. Children no longer learn anything, and this is the result as to why those young people who still want to have a perspective in our country have supported the AfD as much as they have.”

This is the first time a far-right party has won a German election since the 1930s. In 1930, the Nazi Party won Thuringia state; three years later, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor.

In other news from Germany, Munich police officers shot and killed a man near the Israeli Consulate and Nazi Documentation Center earlier today, after he opened fire on police officers.

In news from France, President Emmanuel Macron has named former EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier as France’s new prime minister, after rejecting calls to appoint a progressive leader following a victory by a leftist coalition in July’s snap elections. Barnier is a longtime conservative from the Les Républicains party.

Back in the U.S., President Biden could make his current hard-line border restrictions permanent, according to administration officials. In June, Biden issued a temporary executive order sealing off the border when the number of asylum seekers exceeds a daily average of 2,500 for one week, and allowing border agents to quickly turn away migrants. The asylum ban being considered would make the executive order a permanent feature of U.S. immigration policy and further lower the threshold at which migrants are rejected. The ACLU and others have sued Biden over the policy.

In campaign news, Kamala Harris has agreed to proposed rules for her ABC News debate with Donald Trump on September 10, including having mics muted when a candidate has not been given the floor, although Harris’s team said it would disadvantage her.

And in other campaign news, Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congressmember who served in the House Republican leadership and voted to impeach Trump, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.