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Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, said early Tuesday that neighborhoods that are home to some 600,000 people were ordered to be emptied.The evacuation could drive an additional half million people to Rafah, along the southern border with Egypt, doubling the number of the displaced sheltering in the already brimming city, he wrote on the social media site X.The U.N. humanitarian office said on Monday that some of the shelters Israel had told people to flee to were “already overcrowded.” With the shelters in Rafah already well beyond capacity, the new arrivals were erecting tents and fashioning makeshift shelters in the streets or whatever empty spaces they can find around the city, according to the daily report from the United Nations’ of...

The math performance of U.S. teenagers has sharply declined since 2018, with scores lower than 20 years ago, and with American students continuing to trail global competitors, according to the results of a key international exam released on Tuesday.In the first comparable global results since the coronavirus pandemic, 15-year-olds in the United States scored below students in similar industrialized democracies like the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany, and well behind students in the highest-performing countries such as Singapore, South Korea and Estonia — continuing an underperformance in math that predated the pandemic.The bleak math results were offset by a stronger performance in reading and science, where the United States scored above average internationally.About 66 percent of ...

The presidents of three of the country’s top universities — Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. — defended themselves against accusations that they had allowed their campuses to be swept by a tide of antisemitism, in testimony before a congressional committee on Tuesday.Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. testified before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce about what they acknowledged was antisemitic, and also Islamophobic, behavior on their campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza.Dr. Gay said that the balance between allowing protests and protecting against antisemitism has been tricky.“I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression,”...

The presidents of three of the country’s top universities — Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. — defended themselves against accusations that they had allowed their campuses to be swept by a tide of antisemitism, in testimony before a congressional committee on Tuesday.Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. testified before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce about what they acknowledged was antisemitic, and also Islamophobic, behavior on their campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza.Dr. Gay said that the balance between allowing protests and protecting against antisemitism has been tricky.“I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression,”...

The Biden administration is imposing visa bans on dozens of Israeli settlers who have committed acts of violence in the West Bank, taking action against what U.S. officials call a potential trigger for wider violence as Israel wages war in Gaza.In a statement on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced a new policy “targeting individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security or stability in the West Bank, including through committing acts of violence or taking other actions that unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities.”U.S. officials are most concerned about a recent surge in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, but the new policy will also deny entry to Palestinians who have committed violent acts ag...