By ABDELRAHMAN SHAHEEN and KAREEM CHEHAYEB

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syrian government officials and leaders in the Druze religious minority announced Wednesday a renewed ceasefire after days of clashes that have threatened to unravel the country’s postwar political transition and have drawn intervention by Syria’s powerful neighbor, Israel.

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It was not immediately clear if the new agreement – which was announced by Syrian state media and in a video message by a Druze religious leader – would hold. A previous ceasefire announced the day before quickly fell apart.

The announcement came after Israel launched a series of rare airstrikes in the heart of Damascus, part of a campaign that it said is intended to defend the Druze – who also form a substantial community in Israel – and to push Islamic militants away from its border.

The escalating violence has appeared to be the most serious threat yet to the ability of Syria’s new rulers to consolidate control of the country after a rebel offensive led by Islamist insurgent groups ousted longtime despotic leader, Bashar Assad, in December, bringing an end to a nearly 14-year civil war.

As clashes have raged for days in the southern Syrian city of Sweida between government forces and Druze armed groups, Israel has launched dozens of strikes targeting government troops and convoys, and on Wednesday struck the Syrian Defense Ministry headquarters in the heart of Damascus.

That strike killed one person and injured 18, Syrian officials said. Another strike hit near the presidential palace in the hills outside of Damascus.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said after the airstrike in a post on X that the “painful blows have begun.” An Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations said the army was preparing for a “multitude of scenarios” and that a brigade, normally comprising thousands of soldiers, was being pulled out of Gaza and sent to the Golan Heights.

Syria’s Defense Ministry had earlier blamed militias in the Druze-majority area of Sweida for violating a ceasefire agreement that had been reached Tuesday, causing Syrian army soldiers to return fire. It said they were “adhering to rules of engagement to protect residents, prevent harm, and ensure the safe return of those who left the city back to their homes.”

Meanwhile, reports of attacks on civilians continued to surface, and Druze with family members in the conflict zone searched desperately for information about their fate amid communication blackouts.

The primarily Sunni Muslim leaders have faced suspicion from religious and ethnic minorities, whose fears increased after clashes between government forces and pro-Assad armed groups in March spiraled into sectarian revenge attacks. Hundreds of civilians from the Alawite religious minority, to which Assad belongs, were killed.

Druze fear for the lives of their relatives in Sweida

In Jaramana near the Syrian capital, Evelyn Azzam, 20, said she fears that her husband, Robert Kiwan, 23, is dead. The newlyweds live in the Damascus suburb, but Kiwan would commute to Sweida for work each morning and got trapped there when the clashes erupted.

Azzam said she was on the phone with Kiwan when security forces questioned him and a colleague about whether they were affiliated with Druze militias. When her husband’s colleague raised his voice, she heard a gunshot. Kiwan was then shot while trying to appeal.

“They shot my husband in the hip from what I could gather,” she said, struggling to hold back tears. “The ambulance took him to the hospital. Since then, we have no idea what has happened.”

A Syrian Druze from Sweida living in the United Arab Emirates said her mother, father, and sister were hiding in a basement in their home near the hospital, where they could hear the sound of shelling and bullets from outside. She spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear her family might be targeted.

She had struggled to get hold of them, but when she reached them, she said, “I heard them cry. I have never heard them this way before.”

Another Druze woman living in the UAE with family members in Sweida, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said a cousin told her that a house where their relatives lived had been burned down with everyone inside it.

It reminded her of when the Islamic State extremist group attacked Sweida in 2018, she said. Her uncle was among many civilians there who took arms to fight back while Assad’s forces stood aside. He was killed in the fighting.

“It’s the same right now,” she told The Associated Press. The Druze fighters, she said, are “just people who are protecting their province and their families.”

The Druze religious sect began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. More than half of the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria. Most of the other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.

Reports of killings and looting in Druze areas

The latest escalation in Syria began with tit-for-tat kidnappings and attacks between local Sunni Bedouin tribes and Druze armed factions in the southern province.

Government forces that intervened to restore order then clashed with the Druze.

Videos surfaced on social media of government-affiliated fighters forcibly shaving the mustaches of Druze sheikhs, and stepping on Druze flags and pictures of religious clerics. Other videos showed Druze fighters beating captured government forces and posing by their dead bodies. AP reporters in the area saw burned and looted houses.

No official casualty figures have been released since Monday, when the Syrian Interior Ministry said 30 people had been killed. The U.K.-based war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 250 people had been killed as of Wednesday morning, including four children, five women and 138 soldiers and security forces.

The observatory said at least 21 people were killed in “field executions.”

Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa issued a statement Wednesday condemning the violations.

“These criminal and illegal actions cannot be accepted under any circumstances, and completely contradicts the principles that the Syrian state is built on,” the statement read, vowing that perpetrators, “whether from individuals or organizations outside of the law, will be held accountable legally, and we will never allow this to happen without punishment.”

Druze in the Golan gathered along the border fence to protest the violence against Druze in Syria.

Israel threatens to scale up its intervention

In Israel, the Druze are seen as a loyal minority and often serve in the military. In Syria, the Druze have been divided over how to deal with the country’s new leaders, with some advocating for integrating into the new system while others remained suspicious and pushed for an autonomous Druze region.

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement that the Israeli army “will continue to attack regime forces until they withdraw from the area — and will also soon raise the bar of responses against the regime if the message is not understood.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Tuesday night that Israel has “a commitment to preserve the southwestern region of Syria as a demilitarized area on Israel’s border” and has “an obligation to safeguard the Druze locals.”

Israel has taken an aggressive stance toward Syria’s new leaders since Assad’s fall, saying it doesn’t want Islamist militants near its borders. Israeli forces have seized a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone on Syrian territory along the border with the Golan Heights and launched hundreds of airstrikes on military sites in Syria.

Chehayeb reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv and Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.

The U.S. House Oversight Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services held a hearing recently about diversity, equity and inclusion. Fewer than five of the 90 minutes were spent talking about health care or anything related to money. Instead, conservative lawmakers wasted time and taxpayers’ dollars advancing an anti-DEI agenda with which they have become obsessed. Anecdotes were more interesting to them than were evidence-based truths about the Americans whom discrimination most harms.

Because the GOP comprises the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, all but one of the four expert witnesses in the hearing were theirs. Like the three other times I had testified on Capitol Hill, I was the lone Democrat. The Republicans’ strategy was familiar: Ask a series of yes/no questions that would require contextualization to answer adequately, then interrupt as the witness attempts to provide a nuanced response.

One question for me from Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas): “Should people be treated differently based on their race?” As I had done in my written testimony, I tried to explain to him that Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Latino American people have long been mistreated because of their race, which has led to persistent and pervasive racial inequities that disadvantage them relative to white people. But he apparently did not want to hear any of those facts, because he kept cutting me off, repeatedly declaring that this was a yes or no question.

Gill posed another question to which he did not allow an informative answer: “Do you believe that race should be considered in employer hiring practices?” For centuries, racism and white supremacy have been powerful determinants of who works where, what they are paid, and their opportunities for advancement to leadership in workplaces across industries. Race should not influence employment outcomes, but it too often has and still does.

Because of both implicit and explicit biases, race influences hiring processes across industries. Research makes painstakingly clear, though, that it is white applicants who most often and most lucratively benefit from preferential treatment. People of color and job seekers with ethnic-sounding last names have long been and continue to be routinely discriminated against, a highly cited University of Chicago study shows.

I do not believe that the remedy for discrimination is more discrimination. Instead, strategy and intentionality are both necessary and required to right past and present wrongs in hiring processes. Because the inequities are racialized and gendered, programs and practices ought to deliberately address the mindsets, structures and systems that have routinely locked irrefutably qualified people of color and women out of well-deserved opportunities. Perhaps had I been allowed to answer fully, Gill and I would have found common ground in our opposition to unlawful workplace discrimination.

Corporations, universities and other organizations need high-quality professional learning experiences that help employees who are involved in hiring processes understand how and why white job applicants are typically presumed to be smarter and more qualified than applicants of color. Gill and other opponents of diversity programs need to learn about these particular manifestations of white supremacy too. They also could benefit from exposure to research that shows how workplace racial stratification systems cyclically route the majority of employees of color into the lowest-paid, lowest-authority jobs and lock them out of leadership positions.

Federal statistics show that 77% of managers across all industries are white. Furthermore, 84% of executive-level leaders at Fortune 100 companies are white, according to a Heidrick & Struggles report. If our positions had been reversed and I were the one posing questions, I would have asked Gill about those statistics: Is it that most white people are just that much more talented and deserving than people of color, or could it be something else? In the midst of our chaotic crosstalk, I was able to make the point that I do not believe that white candidates are the only qualified people for jobs.

“I didn’t say that, nobody said that,” Gill replied. “And you’re not going to intimidate me by slandering me as a racist.” I did not say or imply that he was. However, his mistaken presumption is revealing and unsurprising. It sometimes happens — especially among white people — when simplistic or otherwise problematic positions on race are challenged. I was able to make this clear: “And you’re not going to intimidate me by insisting that I called you a racist.” I reminded him that a hearing transcript confirming what I actually said would be made publicly available.

Gill was in search of yes/no responses to his questions. Racism and racial inequities in employment, university admissions and other processes are far more complicated than that.

But if he was indeed only interested in simple truths, there are at least two.

First, professionals of color and women are systematically passed over for job opportunities and promotions because of their race and gender considerably more often than are their white male counterparts.

Second, diversity policies and programs aim to redress such inequities accrued to employees because of their skin color, nationality, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability, weight, accent, sexual orientation and other traits.

Shaun Harper is a professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California and the author of “Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.” He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

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By JIM MUSTIAN and SARA CLINE

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Three current or former Louisiana police chiefs were arrested following a federal investigation into an alleged scheme that involved false police reports being sold to immigrants lacking permanent legal status and used to try to secure a visa, authorities said Tuesday.

The forged police reports would indicate that the immigrant was a victim of a crime, U.S. Attorney Alexander C. Van Hook said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. He said the police officials were paid $5,000 for each name they provided falsified reports for, and that there were hundreds of names.

There had been “an unusual concentration of armed robberies of people who were not from Louisiana,” Van Hook said.

“In fact, the armed robberies never took place,” he said.

Van Hook and others said at the news conference that the arrest of the current or former chiefs and two other people doesn’t mean their police departments are corrupt.

Some crime victims, and their families, may be eligible for temporary visas — and, in some cases, a path to citizenship. About 10,000 people got these “U-visas” in the 12-month period ended Sept. 30, 2022, the latest period for which the Homeland Security Department has published data.

These special visas are specifically for victims of certain crimes “who have suffered mental or physical abuse” and are “helpful to law enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity,” based on a description of the program published by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Two of the police chiefs had been arrested as of the Wednesday morning news conference, authorities said.

Lester Duhé, a spokesperson for the Louisiana attorney general’s office, said that office was assisting federal agents with “court-authorized activities” when asked about its role in the case.

The current or former police chiefs are from small central Louisiana municipalities that are near each other. They’re in a part of the state that is home to multiple immigration detention facilities. Although Louisiana doesn’t share a border with a foreign country, there are nine ICE detention facilities in the state — holding nearly 7,000 people.

Local news outlets reported seeing ICE and FBI agents entering the homes of two of the chiefs.

Additional details about the investigation, arrests and the alleged scheme were not made available.

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In 2021, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services warned that the U-visa program was susceptible to fraud after an audit from the Office of Inspector General found they had not addressed deficiencies in their process.

The audit found the agency approved a handful of suspicious law enforcement signatures that were not cross-referenced with a database of authorized signatures, according to the OIG report. They were also not closely tracking fraud case outcomes, the total number of U-visas granted per year, and were not effectively managing the backlog, which led to crime victims waiting for nearly 10 years before receiving a U-visa.

Associated Press writer Valerie Gonzalez contributed to this report from McAllen, Texas.

By MELANIE LIDMAN, WAFAA SHURAFA, and JULIA FRANKEL

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Twenty Palestinians were killed Wednesday, most of them trampled in a crowd at a food distribution site run by an Israeli-backed American organization in the Gaza Strip, the group said, the first time it has reported deaths at its operations. They came as Israeli strikes killed 41 others, including 11 children, according to hospital officials.

The Gaza Humanitarian Fund accused Hamas of fomenting unrest in the crowd leading to a “dangerous surge” though it provided no evidence to support the claim. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Witnesses said GHF guards threw stun grenades and used pepper spray on people pressing to get into the site before it opened, causing a panic in the narrow, fenced-in entrance.

It was the first time GHF has confirmed deaths at one of its food hubs.

But since the sites began operating in late May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in shootings by Israeli soldiers while on roads heading to the sites, according to witnesses and health officials. GHF’s four sites are all in military-controlled zones, and the Israeli military has said its troops have only fired warning shots to control crowds.

Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians are living through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and many are teetering on the edge of famine, according to food security experts.

This is a locator map of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. (AP Photo)

Stun grenades and pepper spray caused chaos, witnesses say

GHF said it believed that 19 of the dead died from trampling at its food distribution center between the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah and one was killed by a stabbing in the crowd.

The Gaza Health Ministry said 17 people suffocated at the site and three others were shot. It was not clear if the shootings took place during the crush or earlier on the road to the center. The witnesses did not report shots fired at the center but said Israeli troops fired on the crowds as they headed to the location.

Witnesses said that thousands of Palestinians arrived at the site early in the morning, and the Americans contractors guarding it did not open the gates. It was not clear if it was before the site’s opening time or if it was not operating at all, since schedules often change.

The crowd surged forward at the turnstiles in the fenced-in entranceway, said one survivor, Ahmed Abu Amra.

“The Americans were calling out on the loudspeakers, ‘Go back, go back.’ But no one could turn around because it was so crowded,” he said. “Everyone was on top of each other. We tried to pull out the people who were underneath, but we couldn’t. The Americans were throwing stun grenades at us.”

Other witnesses said the contractors used pepper spray as well. The Health Ministry said tear gas was used, but GHF denied that and said its contractors deployed “limited use of pepper spray.” It said they fired no shots at the crowd.

“Everyone suffocated from people crushing on top of each other,” said Omar al-Najjar, a Rafah resident, as he and other men carried an injured man on a stretcher. He said the chaos at the sites is forcing Palestinians to “march towards death.”

GHF said it believed elements in the crowd “armed and affiliated with Hamas” fomented the unrest. It said that its contractors identified men with firearms in the crowd and confiscated one.

Distribution at the GHF sites has often been chaotic. Boxes of food are left stacked on the ground inside the center and, once opened, crowds charge in to grab whatever they can, according to witnesses and videos released by GHF itself.

In videos obtained recently by The Associated Press from an American contractor working with GHF, contractors are seen using tear gas and stun grenades to keep crowds back behind metal fences or to force them to disperse. Gunshots can also be heard.

The United Nations human rights office said Tuesday that 875 Palestinians were killed while seeking food since May. Of those, 674 were killed while en route to GHF food sites. The rest were reportedly killed while waiting for aid trucks entering Gaza.

Across Gaza, strikes kill 41 as Israel opens a new military corridor

Meanwhile, Israeli strikes killed 22 people in Gaza City, including 11 children and three women, and 19 others in Khan Younis. The Israeli military said it has struck more than 120 targets in the past 24 hours across the Gaza Strip, including Hamas military infrastructure of tunnels and weapons storage facilities.

Israel blames Hamas for the civilian deaths because the group often operates in residential areas.

Also on Wednesday, the Israeli military announced the opening of a new corridor — the fourth — that bisects Khan Younis, where Israeli troops have seized land in what they said is a pressure tactic against Hamas. In the past, these narrow strips of land have been a serious hurdle during ceasefire negotiations, as Israel has said it wants to maintain military presence in them.

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Negotiations in the Qatari capital between Israel and Hamas are at a standstill, after 21 months of war, which began with the terrorists’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023. That day, terrorists killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 people, most of whom have since been released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.

Fifty hostages are still being held, less than half of them believed to be alive.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 58,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which has said women and children make up more than half of the dead. It does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its tally.

The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government but is led by medical professionals. The United Nations and other international organizations consider its figures to be the most reliable count of war casualties.

Shurafa reported from Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip, and Frankel reported from Ramallah, West Bank.