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The tentative, lawyerly answers given last week by three university presidents at a House committee hearing investigating the state of antisemitism on America’s college campuses have generated widespread revulsion across the partisan divide. When none of the presidents — representing Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania — could muster a straightforward reply to the question from Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” amounted to “bullying or harassment,” many prominent Democrats joined Republicans in denouncing the testimony.“I’m no fan” of Ms. Stefanik, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said on social media, “but I’m with her here.” When one of Donald Trump’s most arden...

Infectious diseases are ravaging the population of Gaza, health officials and aid organizations said on Monday, citing cold, wet weather; overcrowding in shelters; scarce food; dirty water; and little medicine. Adding to the crisis in the enclave after more than two months of war, those who become ill have extremely limited treatment options, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients injured in airstrikes.“We are all sick,” said Samah al-Farra, a 46-year-old mother of 10 struggling to care for her family in a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza. “All of my kids have a high fever and a stomach virus.”While the collapse of Gaza’s health system has made it challenging to track exact numbers, the World Health Organization has reported at least 369,000 cases o...

The president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned on Saturday, four days after she came under fire for her responses at a congressional hearing on Tuesday in which she was pressed, along with the presidents of Harvard and M.I.T., on whether students calling for the genocide of Jews should be disciplined.Ms. Magill seemed to evade the question and drew intense criticism from donors, students and others, some of whom were already angry that she had allowed a Palestinian writers conference to be held on campus in September. Ms. Magill is the first president of a major university to step down because of the fallout from the protests that have engulfed campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.Here is some background on her decisi...

As criticism mounted of Israel’s mass detention of Palestinian men in Gaza, the government defended the roundup, saying it needed to detain hundreds of men to determine if any of them were connected to Hamas.The detentions sparked outrage after photos and video of the detainees — tied up outdoors and stripped to their underwear — spread widely on social media on Thursday.On Friday, an Israeli government spokesman, Eylon Levy, said Israeli forces had detained men in Jabaliya and Shajaiye, areas in northern Gaza that have seen punishing airstrikes and fierce fighting in recent days. Israel has described those areas as strongholds for Hamas, which has governed Gaza since it seized power there in 2007.“We’re talking about military-age men who were discovered in areas that civilians were suppos...

Ms. Stefanik at the time called her removal “a rite of passage and badge of honor.”Bill Kristol, the prominent anti-Trump Republican whom Ms. Stefanik once worked with, said he was on multiple text chains with fellow Harvard alumni who shared a similar reaction watching clips from the hearing. The overall sentiment, he said, was, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Elise Stefanik is doing a very good job of putting Claudine Gay on the spot.”The bigger political issue at stake, Mr. Kristol said, was whether the response of university administrators to the antisemitism rearing its head on campuses would alienate centrist Republicans who voted for President Biden in 2020.“They see this and they think, ‘All my suspicions were confirmed,’” Mr. Kristol said. He said that for Americans concerne...