By WAFAA SHURAFA, FATMA KHALED and NATALIE MELZER, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — At least 38 Palestinians were killed overnight and into Wednesday in the Gaza Strip while seeking aid from United Nations convoys and sites run by an Israeli-backed American contractor, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said it had fired warning shots when crowds approached its forces.

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Another 25 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes, according to local hospitals in Gaza. There was no comment from the Israeli military on the strikes.

The latest deaths came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to announced further military action — and possibly plans for Israel to fully reoccupy Gaza. Experts say Israel’s ongoing military offensive and blockade are already pushing the territory of some 2 million Palestinians into famine.

Another escalation of the nearly 22-month war could put the lives of countless Palestinians and around 20 living Israeli hostages at risk, and would draw fierce opposition both internationally and within Israel. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies have long called for the war to be expanded, and for Israel to eventually take over Gaza, relocate much of its population and rebuild Jewish settlements there.

U.S. President Donald Trump, asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he supported the reoccupation of Gaza, said he wasn’t aware of the “suggestion” but that “it’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”

More Palestinians killed in scramble for food

Of the 38 Palestinians killed while seeking aid, at least 28 died in the Morag Corridor, an Israeli military zone in southern Gaza where U.N. convoys have been repeatedly overwhelmed by looters and desperate crowds in recent days, and where witnesses say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire.

The Israeli military said troops fired warning shots as Palestinians advanced toward them, and that it was not aware of any casualties.

Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies, said another four people were killed in the Teina area, on a route leading to a site in southern Gaza run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American contractor. The Al-Awda Hospital said it received the bodies of six people killed near a GHF site in central Gaza. GHF said there were no violent incidents at or near its sites.

Two of the Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza City, in the north of the territory, killing 13 people there, including six children and five women, according to the Al-Ahli Hospital, which received the bodies.

The Israeli military says it only targets combatants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because its fighters are entrenched in heavily populated areas. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

UN experts say Israeli-backed aid group should be dismantled

Israel facilitated the establishment of four GHF sites in May after blocking the entry of all food, medicine and other goods for 2 1/2 months. Israeli and U.S. officials said a new system was needed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off humanitarian aid.

The United Nations, which has delivered aid to hundreds of distribution points across Gaza throughout the war when conditions allow, has rejected the new system, saying it forces Palestinians to travel long distances and risk their lives for food, and that it allows Israel to control who gets aid, potentially using it to advance plans for further mass displacement.

The U.N. human rights office said last week that some 1,400 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid since May, mostly near GHF sites but also along U.N. convoy routes where trucks have been overwhelmed by crowds. It says nearly all were killed by Israeli fire.

This week, a group of U.N. special rapporteurs and independent human rights experts called for the GHF to be disbanded, saying it is “an utterly disturbing example of how humanitarian relief can be exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas in serious breach of international law.”

The experts work with the U.N. but do not represent the world body.

The GHF did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots when crowds threatened its forces, and GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray and fired into the air on some occasions to prevent deadly crowding at its sites.

Israel’s blockade and military offensive have made it nearly impossible for anyone to safely deliver aid, and aid groups say recent Israeli measures to facilitate more assistance are far from sufficient.

Hospitals recorded four more malnutrition-related deaths over the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 193 people, including 96 children, since the war began in October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Jordan says aid convoy attacked by Israeli settlers

Jordan said Israeli settlers blocked roads and hurled stones at a convoy of four trucks carrying aid bound for Gaza after they drove across the border into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Israeli far-right activists have repeatedly sought to halt aid from entering Gaza.

Jordanian government spokesperson Mohammed al-Momani condemned the attack, which he said had shattered the windshields of the trucks, according to the Jordanian state-run Petra News Agency.

The Israeli military said security forces went to the scene to disperse the gathering and accompanied the trucks to their destination.

Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack and abducted another 251. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals. Of the 50 still held in Gaza, around 20 are believed to be alive.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but says around half were women and children. It is part of the now largely defunct Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and independent experts consider it the most reliable source for the number of war casualties.

Khaled reported from Cairo and Melzer from Tel Aviv. Israel. Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut contributed to this report.

By SARAH EL DEEB

At Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip, nothing is sterilized, so Dr. Jamal Salha and other surgeons wash their instruments in soap. Infections are rampant. The stench of medical waste is overwhelming. And flies are everywhere.

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Without painkillers, patients moan while lying on metal beds lining the corridors. There’s no electricity and no ventilation amid searing heat, leaving anxious visitors to fan bedridden relatives with pieces of cardboard.

Shifa, once the largest hospital in Gaza and the cornerstone of its health care system, is a shell of its former self after 22 months of war. The hospital complex the size of seven soccer fields has been devastated by frequent bombings, two Israeli raids and blockades on food, medicine and equipment. Its exhausted staff works around the clock to save lives.

“It is so bad, no one can imagine,” said Salha, a 27-year-old neurosurgeon who, like countless doctors in Gaza, trained at Shifa after medical school and hopes to end his career there.

But the future is hard to think about when the present is all-consuming. Salha and other doctors are overwhelmed by a wartime caseload that shows no sign of easing. It has gotten more challenging in recent weeks as patients’ bodies wither from rampant malnutrition.

Shifa was initially part of a British military post when it opened in 1946. It developed over the years to boast Gaza’s largest specialized surgery department, with over 21 operating rooms. Now, there are only three, and they barely function.

Because Shifa’s operating rooms are always full, surgeries are also performed in the emergency room, and some of the wounded must be turned away. Bombed-out buildings loom over a courtyard filled with patients and surrounded by mounds of rubble.

Salha fled northern Gaza at the start of the war — and only returned to Shifa at the beginning of this year. While working at another extremely busy hospital in central Gaza, he kept tabs on Shifa’s worsening condition.

“I had seen pictures,” he said. “But when I first got back, I didn’t want to enter.”

A young doctor and a war

After graduating from medical school in 2022, Salha spent a year training at Shifa. That is when he and a friend, Bilal, decided to specialize in neurosurgery.

But everything changed on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel’s retaliatory campaign began.

For the first few weeks of the war, Salha was an intern at Shifa. Because Israel had cut off Gaza’s internet service, one of Salha’s jobs was to bring scans to doctors around the complex. He had to navigate through thousands of displaced people sheltering there and run up and down stairwells when elevators stopped working.

Once Israeli troops moved into northern Gaza, he and has family left. Bilal, who stayed in Gaza City, was killed a few months later, Salha said.

Not long after Salha left, Israeli forces raided Shifa for the first time in November 2023.

Israel said the hospital served as a major Hamas command and control center. But it provided little evidence beyond a single tunnel with two small rooms under the facility.

It made similar arguments when raiding and striking medical facilities across Gaza even as casualties from the war mounted. Israel says it makes every effort to deliver medical supplies and avoid harming civilians.

Under international law, hospitals lose their protected status if they are used for military purposes. Hamas has denied using hospitals for military purposes, though its security personnel can often be seen inside them and they have placed parts of hospitals off limits to the public.

Israeli forces returned to Shifa in March 2024, igniting two weeks of fighting in which the military said it killed some 200 combatants who had regrouped there.

The hospital was left in ruins. The World Health Organization said three hospital buildings were extensively damaged and that its oxygen plant and most equipment were destroyed, including 14 baby incubators.

Ambulances are parked next to the main buildings of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Friday, July 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

While all this was going on, Salha worked at a hospital in central Gaza, where he performed over 200 surgeries and procedures, including dozens of operations on fractured skulls. Some surgeons spend a lifetime without ever seeing one.

When he returned to Shifa as a neurosurgeon resident, the buildings he used to run between — some had been rehabilitated — felt haunted.

“They destroyed all our memories,” he said.

A shrunken hospital is stretched to its limits

Shifa once had 700 beds. Today there are roughly 200, and nearly as many patients end up on mattresses on the floor, the hospital manager said. Some beds are set up in storage rooms, or in tents. An extra 100 beds, and an additional three surgery rooms, are rented out from a nearby facility.

An injured boy lies on a blanket on the floor as he waits for treatment at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, July 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

The hospital once employed 1,600 doctors and nurses. Now there about half as many, according to Shifa’s administrative manager, Rami Mohana. With Gaza beset by extreme food insecurity, the hospital can no longer feed its staff, and many workers fled to help their families survive. Those who remain are rarely paid.

On a recent morning, in a storage room-turned-patient ward, Salha checked up on Mosab al-Dibs, a 14-year-old boy suffering from a severe head injury and malnutrition.

“Look how bad things have gotten?” Salha said, pulling at al-Dibs’ frail arm.

Al-Dibs’ mother, Shahinez, was despondent. “We’ve known Shifa since we were kids, whoever goes to it will be cured,” she said. “Now anyone who goes to it is lost. There’s no medicine, no serums. It’s a hospital in name only.”

There are shortages of basic supplies, like gauze, so patients’ bandages are changed infrequently. Gel foams that stop bleeding are rationed.

Shifa’s three CT scan machines were destroyed during Israeli raids, Mohana said, so patients are sent to another nearby hospital if they need one. Israel has not approved replacing the CT scanners, he said.

Patients wait for hours — and sometimes days — as surgeons prioritize their caseload or as they arrange scans. Some patients have died while waiting, Salha said.

FILE – A poorly ventilated and unsanitary warehouse built in the yard of Shifa Hospital is crowded with patients, July 6, 2025, in Gaza City. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

After months without a pneumatic surgical drill to cut through bones, Shifa finally got one. But the blades were missing, and spare parts were not available, Salha said.

″So instead of 10 minutes, it could take over an hour just to cut the skull bones,” he said. “It leaves us exhausted and endangers the life of the patient.”

When asked by The Associated Press about equipment shortages at Shifa, the Israeli military agency in charge of aid coordination, COGAT, did not address the question. It said the military ’’consistently and continuously enables the continued functioning of medical services through aid organizations and the international community.″

Unforgettable moments

From his time at the hospital in central Gaza, Salha can’t shake the memory of the woman in her 20s who arrived with a curable brain hemorrhage. The hospital wouldn’t admit her because there were no beds available in the intensive care unit.

He had wanted to take her in an ambulance to another hospital, but because of the danger of coming under Israeli attack, no technician would go with him to operate her ventilator.

Dr. Jamal Salha tends to a young patient at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, July 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

“I had to tell her family that we will have to leave her to die,” he said.

Other stories have happier endings.

When a girl bleeding from her head arrived at Shifa, Salha’s colleague stopped it with his hand until a gel foam was secured. The girl, who had temporarily lost her vision, greeted Salha after her successful recovery.

“Her vision was better than mine,” the bespectacled Salha said, breaking a smile.

“Sometimes it seems we are living in a stupor. We deal with patients in our sleep and after a while, we wake up and ask: what just happened?”

Gophers redshirt freshman running back Johann Cardenas has left the football program, a source confirmed to the Pioneer Press on Wednesday.

The Katy, Texas, native joined Minnesota via the NCAA transfer portal after his freshman season at Vanderbilt, where new running backs coach Jayden Everett was an assistant for the 2023 season.

Cardenas didn’t stay at the U for more than a week of fall training camp. He was not spotted during Tuesday’s open-to-reporters practice at Huntington Bank Stadium.

The Gophers’ running back room has a clear-cut starter in junior Darius Taylor and two veteran transfers in A.J. Turner (Marshall) and Cam Davis (Washington), along with one intriguing freshman, Fame Ijeboi of Folcroft, Pa.

On Tuesday, Taylor and Turner were named preseason candidates for the Doak Walker Award that goes to the nation’s most outstanding running back.

Last fall, Taylor totaled 1,336 all-purpose yards (986 rushing and 350 receiving), with 12 touchdowns in 12 games. He added a 10-yard touchdown pass.

At Marshall last year, Turner had 127 rushes for 984 yards and six TDs on the ground, along with 13 grabs for 94 yards and three TDs.

At Washington last year, Davis had 44 carries for 190 yards, with 14 receptions for 156 yards. He has 1,093 yards across his career, primarily coming in 2021-22.

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By KIM CHANDLER

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Facing a sea of state troopers, Charles Mauldin was near the front line of voting rights marchers who strode across the now-infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.

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The violence that awaited them shocked the nation and galvanized support for the passage of the U.S. Voting Rights Act a few months later.

Wednesday marks the 60th anniversary of the landmark legislation becoming law. Those at the epicenter of the fight for voting rights for Black Americans recalled their memories of the struggle, and expressed fear that those hard-won rights are being eroded.

Bloody Sunday in Alabama, 1965

Mauldin was 17 when he joined the ill-fated “Bloody Sunday” march. John Lewis, who became a longtime Georgia congressman, and Hosea Williams were the first pair of marchers. Mauldin was in the third pair.

FILE – Selma Civil Rights foot soldier Charles Mauldin prepares to march during the 60th anniversary of the march to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote, March 9, 2025, in Selma, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)

“We had gotten past being afraid at that point. What was happening in Selma and to us was so unjust that we were determined to fight it regardless of the consequences,” Mauldin, now 77, said.

The head of the state troopers told them that they were in an illegal gathering and had two minutes to disperse. Williams asked for a moment to pray, Mauldin recalled.

Immediately, state troopers in gas masks and helmets, as well as deputies and men on horseback, attacked the marchers — men, women, children. They lashed out with billy clubs and tear gas, with stomping horse hooves and cattle prods.

A cause worth dying for

Richard Smiley, then 16, was also among the marchers. He stashed candy in his pockets so he would have something to eat in case they went to jail.

As they approached the bridge, he saw about 100 white men on horseback.

“The only qualification they needed was to hate Blacks,” Smiley said.

“Our knees were knocking. We didn’t know whether we were going to get killed. We were afraid but we weren’t going to let fear stop us,” Smiley, 76, recalled. “At that point we would’ve gave up our life for the right to vote. That’s just how important it was.”

Selma in 1965 was a “very poor city and a racist city,” he said. He said there were some “white people in the town that supported our cause, but they couldn’t stand up” because of what would happen to them.

Echoes of the past

The Voting Rights Act led to sweeping change across the American South as discriminatory voting practices were dismantled and Black voter turnout surged. Democratic President Lyndon Johnson called the act “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory won on any battlefield,” when he signed it on Aug. 6, 1965.

FILE – President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony in the President’s Room near the Senate chambers in Washington, Aug. 6, 1965. Surrounding the president from left directly above his right hand, Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Speaker John McCormack; Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y.; Luci Johnson; and Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. Behind Humphrey is House Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma; and behind Celler is Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz. (AP Photo, File)

However, both Mauldin and Smiley see echoes of the past in the current political climate. While not as extreme as the policies of the Jim Crow South, Mauldin said there are attacks on the rights of Black and brown voters.

“The same struggle we had 61 years ago is the same struggle we had today,” Mauldin said.

Some states have enacted laws that make it harder not easier to vote, with voter ID requirements, limits to mail voting and other changes. President Donald Trump and Republican-led states have pushed sweeping rollbacks of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives with Trump declaring he “ended the tyranny” of such programs.

The Justice Department, once focused on protecting access to voting, is taking steps to investigate alleged voter fraud and noncitizen voting. The department is joining Alabama in opposing a request to require the state to get future congressional maps precleared for use, calling it “a dramatic intrusion on principles of federalism.”

A long, unfinished struggle

The fight for voting rights was a long struggle, as is the struggle to maintain those rights, said Hank Sanders, a former state senator who helped organize the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration in Selma.

FILE – The foot soldiers are helped across the Edmund Pettus bridge during the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 9, 2025, in Selma, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)

Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, the Rev. Martin Luther King led marchers out on the walk to Montgomery, Alabama, to continue the fight for voting rights. Sanders was among the thousands who completed the last legs of the march and listened as King’s famous words “How long, not long” thundered down over the crowd.

“That was a very powerful moment because I left there convinced that it wouldn’t be long before people would have the full voting rights,” Sanders, 82, recalled. He said the reality it would be a longer fight set in the next year when a slate of Black candidates lost in an overwhelmingly Black county

The Voting Rights Act for decades required that states with a history of discrimination — including many in the South — get federal approval before changing the way they hold elections. The requirement of preclearance effectively went away in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a case arising from Alabama, that the provision determining which states are covered was outdated and unconstitutional.

That led to a flood of legislation in states impacting voting, Sanders said. “It’s no longer a shower, t’s a storm,” Sanders said.

“I never thought that 50 years later, we’d still be fighting,” Sanders said, “not just to expand voting right but to be able to maintain some of the rights that we had already obtained.”