First Thing: Gaza officials say 18 dead in Israeli strike on shelter, including six UN staff

UN chief condemns ‘dramatic violations of international humanitarian law’. Plus, Republicans dismayed by Trump’s debate

Good morning.

An Israeli airstrike on a school being used as a shelter for displaced Palestinians has killed 18 people, Gaza’s civil defence agency said. The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa reported that six of its staff were among the dead.

Unrwa said the death toll for its staff was the highest in a single incident since the Gaza war began in October last year. According to the Hamas government media office, about 5,000 displaced people were sheltering at the school when it was hit on Wednesday.

Israel’s military said its air force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command-and-control centre” on the school grounds, without elaborating on the outcome or the identities of those targeted.

What did the UN say after the airstrike? “These dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now,” said the UN chief, António Guterres. Unrwa head, Philippe Lazzarini, said: “Humanitarian staff, premises and operations have been blatantly and unabatedly disregarded since the beginning of the war”.

What is the humanitarian cost of the war? About 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s 7 October assault on southern Israel. More than 41,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza, according to the health ministry in the territory.

Republicans dismayed by Trump’s ‘bad’ and ‘unprepared’ debate performance

Donald Trump’s campaign was in damage control mode on Wednesday amid widespread dismay among supporters over a presidential debate performance in which the vice-president, Kamala Harris, repeatedly goaded him into going off-message.

Even with Trump insisting to have won the debate “by a lot”,Republicans were virtually unanimous that Trump had come off worse.

“She laid traps and he chased every rabbit down every hole instead of talking about the things that he should have been talking about,” said Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. “Let’s make no mistake. Trump had a bad night,” the Fox News analyst Brit Hume said immediately after the debate.

Here are the debate’s stats: An estimated 67 million people tuned in, up 31% on June’s Trump-Biden debate. CNN flash poll of debate watchers showed 63% to 37% thought that Harris had performed better.

Biden calls IDF’s killing of American in West Bank ‘totally unacceptable’

Joe Biden has described the Israel Defense Force’s fatal shooting of the Turkish-American woman Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi as “totally unacceptable” in his first extensive comments on her death.

In a statement on Wednesday, Biden said that Israel had “acknowledged responsibility” for Eygi’s death, but he stopped short of backing the demands put out by Eygi’s family and other human rights advocates for an independent inquiry into her fatal shootingin the West Bank town of Beita last week.

Here’s what Biden’s statement said: “I am outraged and deeply saddened by the death of Aysenur Eygi. … Israel has acknowledged its responsibility for Aysenur’s death, and a preliminary investigation has indicated that it was the result of a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation.”

In other news …

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, hinted the White House was about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons inside Russia.

The coach of the young Thai footballers, who captured the world’s attention when they spent nearly three weeks trapped in a cave, has found himself in further trouble – stuck on his roof by flash floods.

A 35-year-old man collapsed and died during a run after completing a half-marathon at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, during a heatwave, only a day after expressing his concern about the searing temperatures in a video posted to TikTok on Saturday.

Stat of the day: Inflation softens to 2.5%, the lowest level since February 2021, as Fed prepares to cut interest rates

Inflation fell to 2.5% CPI last month – its lowest level since February 2021 as the Federal Reserve prepares to cut interest rates for the first time since the start of the pandemic. But many Americans are still grappling with higher prices, and the cost of living has been a key issue in the presidential campaign.

Don’t miss this: A coal plant bulldozed an Ohio town and displaced residents. Its owners include a big Trump donor

Gavin coal plant, now part-owned by Blackstone, whose chief executive backs former president Donald Trump, bought the town of Cheshire, Ohio, in 2002 to move people en masse. Two decades later, locals recall its noxious fumes. “Rather than deal with the source of pollution they thought it better to buy out and bulldoze a whole town,” said Neil Waggoner, an Ohio-based campaigner at the Sierra Club, which estimates Gavin’s pollution causes about 244 premature deaths a year.

Climate check: 13 people including firefighters injured in ‘hellish’ California wildfires

As least 13 people have been injured in three major southern California wildfires that broke out this week during a scorching heatwave. Firefighters battling the blazes, already stretched to the limits by a challenging summer, were among the injured. The Bridge fire in the Angeles national forest, located north of Glendora, exploded from about 4,000 acres on Tuesday to 34,000 acres that evening, according to the LA Times, destroying at least 33 homes.

Last Thing: Statue of Queen Elizabeth II derided as looking more like Mrs Doubtfire

Mockery and indignation began within hours of the unveiling of the bronze statue of the UK’s late Queen Elizabeth II at Antrim Castle Gardens in Northern Ireland. “Take it away. It’s blooming awful,” one person said. Another wondered if officials had commissioned the same sculptor responsible for the derided bust of soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo at Madeira airport. Comments beneath the council’s Facebook post about the unveiling appeared to have been turned off.

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