Author: Reporter

On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read together from a book. Scattered elsewhere, students sat at laptop computers and got reading help from online tutors. For the third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was an ordinary school day. But educators were racing to get students learning more, faster, and to overcome setbacks that have persisted since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago. America’s schools have started to make progress toward getting students back on track. But improvement has been...

Thousands of ultranationalist Israelis marched through a sensitive Palestinian area of Jerusalem on June 5 in an annual procession, chanting racist slogans as the country’s far-right national security minister boasted that Jews had prayed freely at a key holy site in the city in violation of decades-old understandings. The comments by Itamar Ben-Gvir and the march in Jerusalem, the emotional heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, threatened to stoke already high tensions that have gripped the region since the start of the war in Gaza. The annual march, seen by Palestinians as provocative, helped set off an 11-day war in...

An Israeli army raid in April set off a near three-day gunbattle with Palestinian militants. By the time it was over, homes had been blasted to rubble and many residents had fled. The raid was not in Gaza, where Israel is at war with Hamas, but more than 60 miles away in the Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank — a territory that has been under Israeli military rule for over a half-century. The persistence of Palestinian militancy in the West Bank, and its surge since the war in Gaza began, shows the limits of Israel’s military...

An independent group of experts warned on June 4 that it was possible that famine is underway in northern Gaza but that the war between Israel and Hamas and restrictions on humanitarian access have impeded the data collection to prove it. “It is possible, if not likely,” the group known as the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS NET, said about famine in Gaza. Concerns about deadly hunger have been high in recent months and spiked after the head of the World Food Program said in April that northern Gaza had entered “full-blown famine” after nearly seven months...