The Israel-Hamas war is shifting quickly. Find the latest coverage from Vox here.

The US Department of Defense has completed a temporary pier off the Mediterranean coast of Gaza to deliver urgently needed aid — an important goal, but really only a $320 million bandage on the humanitarian crisis 2.3 million people are currently facing.

The US military announced that on Thursday at 7:40 am Gaza time the pier had been attached to land; trucks began moving supplies Friday. The World Food Program is coordinating aid delivery.

Amid the chaos of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the United Nations’s humanitarian office has altered how it reports fatalities in the conflict — sparking another round of debate over the toll of Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory in response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas. 

The overall reported death count likely remains very similar to what was previously known: around 35,000 people have been killed. But not all of those people’s identities have been confirmed — and among those that have, there has been a marked decrease in the number of women and children killed in the conflict and an increase in men as a proportion of those killed compared to previous estimated totals. Thousands more remain unidentified, meaning the numbers will change again as health authorities gather that information. 

The Israel-Palestine conflict goes back decades, but this latest war has taken an unprecedented toll in terms of the number of people killed, and represents a significant step back from any hopes of securing a two-state solution and a permanent peace. Vox podcasts are covering the conflict in depth, offering our listeners context and clarity about the history of the conflict, a deeper understanding of the players in Israel and Palestine and on the world stage, and the toll of Hamas’s attack and Israel’s retaliation on the people in the region.

Today, Explained, Vox’s daily news explainer podcast, has been covering the conflict since it began, with an episode posted right after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that took the lives of around 1,200 people and resulted in the kidnapping of an estimated 240 hostages. The show has since continued to cover many threads in this story, from where Hamas comes from to how false information about the conflict has spread on social media and how information warfare is used in the Middle East. Vox podcasts The Weeds and The Gray Area have also been covering the unfolding crisis, its stakes, and its impact.

Israel’s operation in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that houses more than a million displaced Palestinians, may have finally forced the Biden administration to do something it has been hesitant to do: withhold some military aid from Israel.

The administration has been reluctant to restrict military aid to Israel in any way despite federal law requiring that it do so when members of a foreign military to which the US is providing aid commit gross human rights violations — something international organizations and individual nations have accused Israel of.

Israel has reportedly been using AI to guide its war in Gaza — and treating its decisions almost as gospel. In fact, one of the AI systems being used is literally called “The Gospel.”

According to a major investigation published last month by the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine, Israel has been relying on AI to decide whom to target for killing, with humans playing an alarmingly small role in the decision-making, especially in the early stages of the war. The investigation, which builds on a previous exposé by the same outlet, describes three AI systems working in concert. 

Israel has begun an aerial and ground offensive in Rafah, the largest city in Gaza that has remained outside of Israel’s direct operational control.

While Israel and the US are claiming it is a limited operation, it’s nevertheless raising fears that the long-threatened, full-scale offensive into the city that houses over 1.4 million displaced Palestinians could be imminent.

A core demand at the heart of the protests over the war in Gaza currently roiling college campuses across the US and around the world: that universities divest from Israel. That means withdrawing funds their endowments have invested in companies that are linked to Israel.

Their demands have revived a long-running debate about whether universities should even consider ethics in their investment decisions and whether there is an ethical approach to divestment from Israel, or if these institutions should simply maximize returns. There is also a question of whether these divestment demands, which have been criticized by some pundits as overly broad, are feasible to meet or will even be effective.

Israel’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in the country signaled an escalation in an already hostile environment for journalists covering the war in Gaza. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously called Al Jazeera a “mouthpiece for Hamas,” accused the Qatar-based news network of threatening Israel’s national security and used powers granted under an emergency law to shutter the outlet. He has not identified what specifically about Al Jazeera’s coverage the government believed crossed that line. 

Protests over the war in Gaza erupted on Columbia University’s campus in mid-April, inspiring demonstrations at other universities across the country as well as in Canada, Australia, and France.

But as those protests — many of which center on encampments and demands that universities divest from Israel — have grown, so too have intense crackdowns involving local law enforcement.

Protests against the war in Gaza have spread to college campuses across the country in the days since students at Columbia University were arrested last week, evoking images of historical student protests that were met with similar backlash. 

Recent protests have not yet reached the scale of the major student protests of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War or the 1980s against South African apartheid. But on campus, they may be “the largest student movement so far” of the 21st century, said Robert Cohen, a professor of social studies and history at New York University who has studied student activism. In recent decades, there were mass protests against the Iraq War, as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and after the killing of George Floyd, but they were primarily happening off campus. 

Last week, the country watched one of the biggest escalations in campus unrest this year unfold, when dozens of New York City police officers clad in riot gear entered the grounds of Columbia University and, on the orders of university president Minouche Shafik, arrested more than 108 student protesters who had built a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on campus. The students are calling for the school to divest from companies and organizations with ties to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza. 

Though Shafik said at a congressional hearing she had taken the steps to make all students feel safe amid a reported rise in antisemitic rhetoric on campus, students said the administration put them in danger by authorizing a “notoriously violent” police unit to forcibly remove them, and NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell later described the arrested students as “peaceful.” 

Is Israel a “settler colonial” state? 

That charge has been the subject of fierce debate in recent months amid the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza after the October 7 attacks by Hamas. 

When Iran launched a large retaliatory drone and missile assault on Israel on Saturday night, it raised fears that the Middle East was on the precipice of a regional war. But by Sunday morning, the situation looked far less dire. 

Iran had telegraphed elements of its attack and its willingness to end the two-week period of hostilities there. And assisted by the United States and its Arab neighbors, Israel shot down 99 percent of the drones and missiles heading in its direction. Those strikes that got through did not kill anyone, doing minor damage to a military base and injuring a child.

Iran launched a retaliatory strike Saturday night on Israel for its deadly attack on Iranian officers in the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Damascus after days of signaling it would do so.

The response came in waves throughout Saturday, beginning with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seizing a vessel in the Red Sea connected to Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s company, Zodiac Maritime. By around 11 pm local time, that had graduated to multiple waves of attack drones and missiles headed toward Israeli targets.

“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech last October, days into the Israel-Hamas war. 

Netanyahu has voiced that idea repeatedly, both before and after the Hamas attack on October 7 — the idea that Israel is a bastion of Western civilization in an uncivilized, backward, and barbarous region.

An Israeli airstrike Monday killed seven aid workers who were delivering food to Palestinians on the brink of widespread famine in Gaza.

The attack — whose victims were almost all foreign citizens and were with World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit run by Spanish American chef and humanitarian José Andrés — has drawn widespread international condemnation and underscored the risks that humanitarian workers take every day in trying to deliver still-insufficient levels of aid to Gaza.

Every resident of Gaza is at risk of crisis levels of food insecurity — and half are at risk of famine.

Yes, you read that right: Nearly six months into the Israeli invasion after the October 7 attacks, every single Gaza resident is at risk of at least crisis-level food insecurity — defined as households having high levels of malnutrition or resorting to “irreversible” coping mechanisms like selling livestock or furniture to afford even an insufficient diet. 

We now have one of the most definitive sources so far in the contentious discussion about militants from Gaza’s perpetration of sexual violence on October 7.

The UN’s office on sexual violence in conflict released a report Monday finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that militants from Gaza did perpetrate sexual violence during their attack on Israel that day, including rape or gang rape in at least three locations. The report also cautioned that significant further investigation would be necessary to establish how widespread such attacks were.

Editor’s note, February 28, 6:45 am ET: President Joe Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary Tuesday night. With nearly all of the vote counted, about 13 percent went to “uncommitted.” The original story that follows was published February 27.

Arab American activists and their allies are urging voters to cast ballots as “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday in protest of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. They’re unlikely to change the result of the contest, in which Biden is the only major candidate, but they’re hoping to signal their anger — and send a warning — to Democrats in one of the most critical swing states on the 2024 map.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has unveiled his most detailed plans yet for the future of Gaza. However, there is a problem: The plans are both wildly out of step with what the US wants and would generate significant opposition within Gaza and worldwide. 

Netanyahu has been under increasing pressure to develop a long-term plan for Gaza as Israel’s military operations in the region approach their sixth month. In response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and its taking of roughly 250 hostages, the Israeli military campaign has destroyed large swaths of Gaza and has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, according to the latest figures from the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel is reportedly contemplating an escalation of hostilities with an attack on the southern city of Rafah, now home to more than 1 million internally displaced Palestinian refugees. 

For the third time since war broke out in Gaza in October, the US vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations on Tuesday — even as it unveiled its own draft resolution that goes further in criticizing Israel than it had in the past. It’s a sign that, despite increasingly critical rhetoric from American officials and President Joe Biden, the US is still trying to influence strategy by working with Israel rather than openly opposing its war efforts, which comes in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and in which more than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed.

The failed Algerian-led resolution called for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the “forced displacement of the Palestinian civilian population in violation of international law,” the unconditional release of all Israeli hostages, and “unfettered humanitarian access into and throughout Gaza.”

More than four months into the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza residents are struggling to survive winter conditions with insufficient food, drinking water, medicine, and clothing.

The majority of them have fled to Rafah, a city in the south bordering Egypt. With a prewar population of about 280,000 residents, Rafah is now housing nearly 1.5 million refugees, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (and confirmed by satellite images).

The Israel Defense Forces raided Gaza’s largest still-operating hospital on Thursday in Khan Younis, a southern city that once sheltered over 100,000 displaced Palestinians but that has been under siege for weeks. 

The IDF told Vox that it has “credible intelligence that Hamas held hostages in Nasser Hospital. Terrorists appear to be operating from within the hospital too.” IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a statement that IDF special forces are undertaking a “precise and limited mission” to find and recover bodies of Israeli hostages that it believes to be in the hospital, citing their own intelligence and testimony from released hostages. Hamas has refuted those claims, and Vox is unable to independently verify them.

The world on Sunday got its first look at how devastating an Israeli invasion of Rafah — Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than a million Palestinians have sought safety amid Israel’s military operations — might be.

At least 67 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes, and the death toll is expected to increase, according to the Gaza health ministry. The strikes coincided with a raid by the Israel Defense Forces that recovered two Israeli hostages. The hostages were the first freed since November; an estimated 132 of the original 250 taken by Hamas and its allies during their October 7 attack on Israel remain captive or are presumed dead. 

The United States and about a dozen other countries have paused additional funding for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, on the basis of Israeli allegations that some 190 employees of the organization are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad — and that 12 of them took part in the October 7 attacks against Israel.

The allegations and subsequent funding pause are potentially one of the most consequential controversies for civilians in Gaza since the October 7 attacks triggered the war in Gaza. The cuts don’t mean UNWRA will have to shut down immediately, but unless funding is restored, the agency’s long-term mission — and continued humanitarian aid for Gaza — is in doubt.