In Gaza, Israeli attacks have killed more than 60 people since early Thursday, bringing the death toll since Israel shattered a ceasefire agreement last month to nearly 2,000. Among the recent dead are a family of five — a pregnant mother, a father and their three children — who were killed by an Israeli drone strike on their tent in the southern Gaza Strip. Another strike early Thursday collapsed a home in Gaza City, killing a Palestinian former prisoner and his entire family.

Ahmed Mourad: “Our neighbor was in prison for 13 years, and after he was released, he got married and had children. His eldest daughter is 8 years old, and his youngest son is a year-and-a-half old. He was born during the war. Ali al-Sarafiti’s entire family died and was erased from the civil registry, along with his siblings and himself. They all died.”

Israel’s military on Thursday offered a rare apology to the United Nations, after an Israeli tank shelled a guest house in Gaza last month, killing a U.N. staff member and wounding six others. Israel initially denied responsibility. Israeli attacks have killed at least 285 U.N. workers since October 2023.

President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has arrived in Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. His visit comes a day after President Trump called out Putin in a rare rebuke after a major Russian airstrike on Kyiv killed 12 people and injured dozens of others. Posting on social media, Trump wrote, “Vladimir, STOP!” — the word “stop” in all caps — adding, “Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!” But later on Thursday, Trump insisted Putin has made great progress toward establishing peace with Ukraine.

Reporter: “What concessions has Russia offered up thus far to get to the point where you’re closer to peace?”

President Donald Trump: “Stopping the war, stopping taking the whole country. Pretty big concession.”

Overnight, a Russian drone strike on an apartment building in the southeastern city of Pavlohrad killed three civilians and injured 14 others. Meanwhile, Russian media is reporting a senior Russian military officer was killed this morning in a car bomb attack outside Moscow.

The Trump administration is poised to offer Saudi Arabia a weapons deal worth well over $100 billion. That’s according to Reuters, which reports President Trump will announce the deal during a trip to Saudi Arabia next month — the first country he will visit during his second term in office. In 2017, Trump made a similar trip to Riyadh as the first overseas visit of his first term; that same year, he proposed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

Indian and Pakistani forces have exchanged cross-border fire as tensions mount between the nuclear-armed nations following Tuesday’s shooting attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 people. On Thursday, Pakistan closed its airspace to India and threatened to halt all bilateral agreements with India. A group called the Resistance Front has claimed responsibility for the massacre; Islamabad has rejected India’s claims the attack was supported by Pakistan.

On Thursday, Kashmiris took to the streets to call for an end to the violence.

Mukhra Javed: “We strongly condemn this terrible act that has been done the day before yesterday. And we just want to say that terrorism doesn’t have a particular religion, and we, as common Kashmiris, stand for peace, and we’ll always stand for peace.”

A federal judge on Thursday blocked part of Trump’s executive order requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Trump’s order was issued in an attempt to circumvent Congress; earlier this month, the Republican-led House passed the measure as part of a voter suppression bill known as the SAVE Act, but Senate Democrats vowed to block the bill through a filibuster. In a statement, the ACLU said, “This executive order is part of a broader attack on our democratic elections by promoting baseless nativist conspiracy theories. Today, the court blocked a key strategy of this attack.”

President Trump is calling for the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the online fundraising platform used by most Democratic politicians. Trump accused ActBlue of allowing fraudulent donations. ActBlue called the claims “baseless.” WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform, has also faced reports of donor-related issues, though is not named in Trump’s memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones called Trump’s probe “the next version of 'the big lie.'”

A federal judge in California has barred the Trump administration from denying or placing conditions on federal funds to sanctuary cities and counties that limit cooperation with federal immigration agencies.

A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who was among the group of over 200 transferred from the United States to El Salvador in March. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed by Trump, said his expulsion from the U.S. violated a previous court settlement that protected him from removal while his asylum case was pending. The asylum seeker, who’s been identified only as Cristian, was part of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 by a group of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied children.

Three federal judges on Thursday blocked Trump’s plans to cut federal funding from K-12 schools that have DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — programs. In one case, Judge Landya McCafferty called Trump’s move “textbook viewpoint discrimination” and said the Education Department “does not even define what a 'DEI program' is.”

President Trump signed an executive order this week targeting college accreditors — private companies that determine whether universities meet standards for federal funding. Trump accused the accreditors of supporting DEI initiatives and “allow[ing] our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs.” The order would enable the Trump administration to revoke approval from accreditors that factor DEI into their evaluations.

Students at the City College of New York rallied on campus Thursday to demand their administration divest from Israel and prioritize students’ safety, amid a mounting crackdown on rights across higher education. Students established what they called the Hilmi al-Faqaawi Liberated Zone, a tribute to the slain journalist who was killed when Israel struck a press tent in Khan Younis earlier this month. Campus security and NYPD moved in to suppress the peaceful protest, deploying pepper spray on the students.

Congolese government forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have agreed to a temporary ceasefire while they continue to negotiate a broader peace deal for the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Talks are being brokered by Qatar. The M23 has seized two major cities in eastern DRC — Goma and Bukavu — killing over 7,000 people and displacing another 1.2 million since the start of the year.

Tunisian authorities on Thursday dismantled a makeshift camp in Sfax, a major transit hub for sub-Saharan African refugees. It was the second such destruction of refugee housing this month; together, the demolished camps once housed some 7,000 people. It’s part of a larger plan to expel undocumented sub-Saharan Africans from Tunisia, without offering any alternatives or basic rights. This is one of the displaced migrants.

Aykini: “When I came, I was in the city, but there are times when I want to come here to use it as a crossing point to Europe. Each time, there’s a dismantling of camps, and we have to change camps. These are the different difficulties we face here. When they come like that, they tear down all the houses, and everything you have, you lose it in the blink of an eye. And those are the different difficulties that we face now.”

In Guatemala, authorities arrested Indigenous leader Luis Pacheco, accusing him of terrorism, in what his supporters say is retaliation for leading nationwide protests in 2023 against attempts to derail President Bernardo Arévalo’s transition to power. Pacheco is now serving as Arévalo’s deputy energy minister. He’s also the former president of the 48 Cantons, the governance authority that represents Indigenous communities in the western highlands of Totonicapán.

President Trump has signed an executive order to expedite deep sea mining permits, both in U.S. and international waters. That’s despite relatively strict regulations on deep sea mining established under the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. The U.S. is the only major coastal nation that has not ratified the treaty. Conservationists are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining to protect vulnerable ecosystems in one of Earth’s few remaining untouched habitats, which contain deposits of minerals like cobalt, zinc and gold.

The mass shooter who opened fire on a Fourth of July parade in 2022 in Highland Park, Illinois, received seven consecutive life sentences Thursday — one for each of the people he killed. Robert Crimo III pleaded guilty in March.