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*Israel Says 24 Soldiers Are Killed as Pressure Grows on Netanyahu*
The Israeli military says 21 soldiers were killed in a single explosion.
The Israeli military suffered its deadliest day of the Gaza ground invasion on Monday, announcing that 24 soldiers had been killed, 21 of them in a single explosion inside the territory near the Israeli border.
Most of the soldiers were inside two two-story buildings that collapsed in a blast apparently involving explosives placed by Israel’s military to level the buildings, according to Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military, which announced the deaths on Tuesday.
He said that a missile had been fired at a nearby tank at the same time as the explosion, appearing to suggest the missile might have triggered the blast.
Admiral Hagari said the 21 soldiers, who were reservists, had been working to remove buildings and other infrastructure near the border between Israel and Gaza so that people could safely return to their homes in southern Israel.
The deaths come as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggles with domestic divisions over how to proceed in the war with Hamas, on top of international pressure over the enormous number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza and concerns about a broader regional war.
As Israeli politicians from the right and left expressed heartbreak over the losses, leading members of the government declared that the war should continue until Hamas is defeated.
Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel had “experienced one of the most difficult days since the start of the war” and that the army was examining the incident.
“We need to learn the necessary lessons and do everything to preserve our soldiers’ lives,” he said in a statement on Tuesday, adding: “We will not stop fighting until complete victory.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s stated goals of the war are eliminating Hamas and securing the release of the hostages taken during a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, although some Israeli military leaders have said the two goals are incompatible in the short term. He faces mounting pressure to make a deal for the hostages’ release, even if that comes at the expense of eradicating the militant group.
President Isaac Herzog of Israel mourned the soldiers in a post on social media, saying news of the deaths had brought “an unbearably difficult morning.”
The military released the names early Tuesday of 10 soldiers, ranging in age from 22 to 37, who died in the explosion. Nine of them were from the same brigade. Earlier, it named three paratroopers who were also killed Monday in Gaza.
Soldiers’ deaths can carry even heavier weight in Israel, a small country where military service is largely mandatory and a rite of passage.
Internationally, Mr. Netanyahu faces criticism over the widespread destruction in Gaza, where health officials say the death toll has surpassed 25,000 — by far the largest loss of life in a regional war with Israel in the past 40 years. Almost the entire population of 2.2 million has been displaced but remains sealed in Gaza, and international aid groups say that disease is rampant and that widespread hunger is nearing starvation levels.
Since Oct. 7, when officials say 1,200 people were killed in Israel, previous days of high death tolls for the Israeli military have included Dec. 9, when nine soldiers were killed, and Dec. 13, when 10 died. From Oct. 31 to Nov. 1, 15 soldiers were killed in northern Gaza, according to the military.
*Israel Says Its Military Has Encircled Khan Younis in Gaza*
The fighting in the southern city has involved heavy exchanges of gunfire and a surge of tanks and troops into areas around hospitals.
Israel’s military said on Tuesday that it had encircled the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, part of a push that has resulted in intense fighting and bombardments in an area packed with civilians who have fled their homes in other parts of the territory.
The Israeli military described the area as a “significant stronghold” of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade and said that it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters over the previous 24 hours. The military’s claims could not be independently verified.
Israeli forces “targeted terrorist cells carrying R.P.G.s near the troops, those launching anti-tank missiles, and terror operatives who had rigged compounds with explosives,” the military said in a statement, referring to rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Ready-to-launch rockets, military compounds, shafts, and numerous weapons were located during the activity,” the military added.
The fighting has involved heavy exchanges of gunfire and a surge of Israeli tanks and troops into areas around the city’s hospitals. Displaced civilians in the area say they have no safe place to go.
Eman Jawad, who is sheltering in an industrial zone in Khan Younis, said that Israeli forces surrounded her shelter on Sunday night and heavy clashes broke out with Hamas fighters. She said the fighting was so close that several tents housing displaced people went up in flames.
“We are trapped,” Ms. Jawad said in a voice message on Monday. “There are snipers on the streets and we are not allowed to leave the industrial zone.”
Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 23, 2024, 8:31 a.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
More than half a million people in Gaza face ‘catastrophic hunger,’ the United Nations says.
Israeli forces have encircled the city of Khan Younis, the military says.
The Israeli military says 21 soldiers were killed in a single explosion.
Rasha Ahmad, 31, said she was not able to find a safe route to evacuate from Khan Younis to Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost district, on Monday because “Israeli tanks were everywhere.” But despite the risk, she and many others decided they had no choice but to make the nearly four-hour journey on foot because Khan Younis was no longer safe, Ms. Ahmad said.
“Five men were shot by a sniper in front of my eyes,” she said in one of a series of frazzled voice messages on Monday. “I’m sure they are dead — they were left to bleed on the ground.”
A spokeswoman for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Monday that Israeli forces had essentially besieged the entire Khan Younis district. The organization said that the presence of Israeli troops near Al-Amal Hospital, which it operates, meant that ambulances could not reach the injured in Khan Younis and that anyone moving in the area was being fired upon.
The Israeli military said on Monday that it was aware of sensitive sites in the Khan Younis area, including several hospitals, but that Hamas “exploits the civilian population” and has used medical facilities in its operations, including an attack launched last week from Nasser Hospital. It said areas occupied by civilians had been marked and the soldiers involved would use their experience to “mitigate harm to uninvolved individuals.”
The health authorities in Gaza have said in recent days that more than 25,000 people there have been killed since Israel began its campaign to defeat Hamas, adding that more than 63,000 others had been injured. The authorities do not distinguish between civilians and fighters.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel began the campaign after Hamas attacked the country on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 people and taking around 240 people hostage, according to the Israeli authorities. More than 100 of those hostages remain in captivity.
Israeli forces, using thousands of airstrikes and a ground invasion, largely secured military control of northern Gaza before pushing south. The United Nations said this month that more than 60 percent of homes in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed during the campaign, while almost all of the strip’s 2.2 million people have been displaced from their homes.
*China’s Travel Economy Is Slowly Coming Back. Here’s Where It Stands.*
Over a year after China opened its borders following the pandemic, international trips are still lagging, although domestic travel is more popular.
Since China reopened its borders in 2023 after three years of Covid isolation, domestic travel has thrived and high-speed rail has grown increasingly popular. But international trips in and out of the country are lagging, and flight capacity is still just a third of prepandemic levels.
The economic stakes are high. Before the pandemic, Chinese travelers were the world’s biggest spenders, accounting for 20 percent of global tourism spending, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
In the past year, the Chinese authorities have tried to spur more inbound travel. Among the changes: China has waived travel visas or agreed to extend the length of visa-free travel for visitors from eight countries, including Germany and France.
The main factor holding back international travel by Chinese will continue to be China’s economy. Growth has bounced back from the pandemic, but the weight of a severe real estate downturn has dampened consumer spending and confidence inside China. And global geopolitical tensions remain a wild card. China is engaged in trade disputes with the United States and Europe, home to many major multinational companies. As they think twice about their business in China, travel suffers.
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Here’s what to know about the state of China’s travel economy.
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People gathered around a platform, with a river behind them and the Shanghai skyline in the distance.
Visitors walking along the Bund with a view of the financial district in Shanghai last week.Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times
Travel to China ground nearly to a halt in the pandemic. It won’t fully recover until 2025.
Throughout the pandemic, China enforced some of the strictest travel rules in the world. Overseas travelers who managed to enter the country sometimes had to quarantine at their own expense for as long as two months.
As of December, international flight capacity — essentially the number of available seats on flights coming from and going to China — was only 62 percent of what it was in December 2019, according to OAG, a flight data analytics firm. But domestic travel has picked up: Over the 3-day weekend at the end of last month, the number of those fliers exceeded prepandemic levels by nearly 10 percent.
At the start of last year, there were only about 500 international flights every week in China, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the aviation regulator. Now there are about 4,600, and that number is expected to increase to 6,000 by the end of the year — about 80 percent of prepandemic levels.
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A big test will come next month during the spring festival around the Lunar New Year, typically a heavy travel period when millions of workers travel to their hometowns. Chinese airlines will schedule 2,500 additional international flights to accommodate spring festival visits, China’s aviation regulator said last week.
China’s transport officials said they expected 480 million rail trips to be made during a 40-day travel surge around the spring festival in the weeks before and after the Lunar New Year, a nearly 40 percent increase from last year.
High-speed rail has become a more popular way to travel within the country. China State Railway Group, the national rail operator, said rail trips exceeded 20 million at the start of the Golden Week holiday in October, a high, and the average daily number of passenger trips throughout the year exceeded 10 million.
Most analysts said they believed that the full recovery of international travel wouldn’t happen until 2025.
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In a January research note, economists at Nomura, a Japanese bank, said the pace of the sector’s recovery would largely be determined by how much Chinese travelers were willing to spend. Pandemic-era problems like delays in issuing visas and passports that lasted through 2023 have been addressed.
“While supply-side constraints eased, the demand-side drag is now starting to kick in, and sizable headwinds remain for China’s outbound tourism recovery in 2024 and possibly 2025,” the Nomura economists wrote.
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Planes landing at an airport on the tarmac.
The first Boeing plane delivered to a Chinese airline since 2019 landed in Shanghai in December.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Applying for a visa and visiting China are a bit less complicated.
In December, China started allowing visitors from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands to travel for 15 days without visas, a change it said would last through November 2024. China’s National Immigration Administration said 147,000 visas had been granted in the first six and a half weeks of the program. China also reached agreements to make visa-free travel more accessible for tourists from Thailand and Singapore.
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For Americans, visa applicants will no longer need to submit documents such as hotel booking records, an itinerary or an invitation letter. The authorities have also cut all visa application fees by 25 percent until the end of the year.
It has also gotten easier for foreigners to pay for things when visiting China. Last July, the main payment platforms, WeChat Pay and AliPay, said they would support foreign credit cards and allow visitors to pay like locals. China has moved away from paper money and coins, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.
Flights between China and the United States have been only slowly restored. Before the pandemic, there were more than 300 flights every week between the two countries. That number was 36 a week in September and has gradually increased. In November, the countries agreed to increase flights to 70 a week.
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A crowd of people waiting inside a train station.
In early October, passengers waited for trains at Shenyang North Railway Station on the last day of national holidays.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Geopolitical tensions and reluctant Chinese travelers could derail the sector’s recovery.
The fraught Chinese-U.S. relationship will continue to lurk in the background of international travel to China.
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The U.S. State Department maintains a “Level 3” travel alert on China, warning Americans to “reconsider travel” to the country because of “the risk of wrongful detentions,” among other reasons.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has its own travel notice, warning that travelers to the United States have been “harassed and interrogated” at the border with “various excuses,” and that Chinese citizens have been arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.
The changing tastes and expendable income of Chinese travelers could shape how the travel economy’s recovery plays out.
“As Chinese households become more price-sensitive and rational, domestic tourism is more preferred, given that it usually takes less time and money,” said Ying Zhang of the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research business.
*Things Fall Apart: How the Middle Ground on Immigration Collapsed*
Why have Republicans and Democrats moved so far apart on immigration? That’s the question that drives the Opinion video above.
We are publishing this as President Biden comes under extraordinary pressure to curb surging illegal immigration at the southwestern border. Republicans have held up further military aid to Ukraine, demanding more border security in exchange. And this month House Republicans opened impeachment hearings against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, accusing him of intentionally failing to enforce immigration laws.
A group of senators from both parties has been trying to negotiate a deal that would address the Republican demands for a border crackdown. But while the measures under discussion might go some way toward lowering illegal immigration — and even that is a matter of fierce debate — they don’t pretend to address all the wide-ranging, chronic problems with the country’s immigration system.
Bipartisan deals on immigration policy have been elusive for decades. The last big immigration reform bill passed in 1986, during the Reagan administration, and a smaller bill was signed into law four years later by George H.W. Bush.
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Since then, Democrats and Republicans, on the subject of immigration, have seemed to sprint in opposite directions.
So what happened?
Hint: It’s not all Donald Trump’s fault.
*The Point Conversations and insights about the moment.*
It’s Primary Day! Let’s get out there and vote, New Hampshire!
I realize this Republican race hasn’t been high on suspense. And tooling around the Granite State the past couple of days, I’ve gotten the clear sense, even from many Nikki Haley fans, that most folks are resigned to watching Donald Trump cruise to victory today.
But New Hampshire being New Hampshire, there are still plenty of people dreaming of a voting-day shocker. They point me toward Bill Clinton’s second-place comeback in 1992. Or John McCain’s upset victory here in 2000.
At a Monday night rally in Salem, in a hotel ballroom packed to overflowing, die-hard Nikki supporters spun far-fetched scenarios for me about how she could still save the day.
“She needs to stay in there right up to the convention and force a floor vote,” said Lance, one of four youngish guys seated in the back row of the event. The men seemed undaunted by the recent polling showing Trump pulling further ahead of Haley. “It’s going to be much closer tomorrow,” predicted Andy.
Some people weren’t asking for an outright Haley win. They just want her to do well enough to keep going — to save America from another Biden-Trump face-off. “Otherwise, I don’t know what the country does,” sighed a worried-looking Gen X-er named Tonya.
(Interestingly, the people I spoke with at the event only felt comfortable giving their first names. “I don’t want to get doxxed,” said Lance.)
Going a shade darker, some voters believe Haley needs to stay in the game in case something unforeseen happens to Trump — and they seemed pretty pumped about the idea. “He could have a heart attack! Be convicted! Be sentenced to prison!” said a young mom named Lee.
Voting is fundamentally an act of hope. In this election, that hope is being forced into some pretty wild shapes.
*Here Is One Way to Steal the Presidential Election*
What happens when you stress-test America’s system for electing a president? How well does it hold up?
After the assault on the nation’s Capitol three years ago, we worked through every strategy we could imagine for subverting the popular will by manipulating the law. What we found surprised us. We determined that the most commonly discussed strategies — such as a state legislature picking a new slate of electors to the Electoral College — wouldn’t work because of impediments built into the Constitution. We also concluded that the most blatantly extreme strategies, such as a state canceling its election and selecting its electors directly, are politically unlikely.
The scenario we see as the most alarming was made possible by the Supreme Court itself. In a 2020 decision, the court held, in our reading, that state legislatures have the power to direct electors on how to cast their electoral votes. And this opens the door to what we think is the most dangerous strategy: that a legislature would pass a law that directs electors to vote for the candidate the legislature picks.
The question now is whether there is any way to close that loophole before a stolen election slides through.
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The cases that led to the decision involved electors in 2016 who had voted contrary to their pledge. Recognizing that Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote, would not be elected president, these electors worked to rally enough Republican and Democratic electors to vote for a Republican candidate other than Donald Trump, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives.
Three electors from the state of Washington cast their votes for Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, rather than for Mrs. Clinton, who won the popular vote there. Mrs. Clinton also won the popular vote in Colorado, where one elector attempted to vote for John Kasich, the former Ohio governor who had run for the Republican presidential nomination that year. Those electors were punished by their states with fines and removal as electors. They challenged that punishment in the Supreme Court. (One of us, Mr. Lessig, represented the Washington and Colorado electors.)
The court ruled in favor of the states. The electors, the Supreme Court decided, had no constitutional right to resist the laws in a state that directed how they must vote. The court held that the states could thus enforce those laws.
The danger now is that this decision has created an obvious strategy for a state legislature seeking to ensure the election of its preferred candidate, regardless of how the people voted. The state legislature would pass a law that requires electors to vote as the legislature directs. The default would be that electors vote as the people voted. But the law would reserve to the legislature the power to direct electors to vote differently if it so chooses.
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Now imagine the election results in a state are close. Charges of fraud cloud a recount. Leaders in the state legislature challenge the presumptive result. In response to those challenges, the legislature votes to direct its electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who presumptively lost but whom the legislature prefers. Any elector voting contrary to the legislature’s rule would be removed and replaced with an elector who complied.
This is a critical innovation in the science of stealing a presidential election. There are plenty of mechanisms to ensure that the election selects the right slate of electors — recounts, contest proceedings and so on. But there are no protections against a state legislature simply ordering whichever electors are appointed to vote for the candidate that the legislature, and not the people of the state, choose.
The Supreme Court surely did not intend this result. Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion for the court ends with the promise that “here, we the people rule.” But the mechanism the court upheld means that it is actually the state legislatures that rule.
There’s little that can be done to eliminate this risk before the November election. Conceivably, a legislature could pass a law today openly asserting its power to direct how electors may vote, regardless of how the people vote. The justices then could act quickly to strike down that law, though the Supreme Court rarely acts to avoid such risks in advance. Absent that turn of events, in the rush between an election and the day when electors actually cast their votes, there may well be no time for the court to close the loophole that its opinion opened.
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The more effective strategy to avoid this result would be for political leaders to reaffirm the principle that should guide every policy adopted by the states: that the electoral results in a state should track with the will of the people, not the partisans who command a majority in the legislature.
If partisans on both sides embrace that principle in good faith, we will have confidence in the results of the next election. But if they reject it, then this is just the most potent of a handful of strategies that might be deployed to flip the result.
Congress and legislatures should act now to intervene. Congress could amend the federal law governing electoral votes by declaring that any post-election change of the results by a state legislature would not count as votes “regularly given.” States could cement the requirement that electors are to follow the people’s will. Neither path is assured, but we are certain of this: It is a rocky road ahead.
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