At least eight more Palestinians starved to death in Gaza over the past 24 hours, including seven children, raising the hunger-related death toll to 188. Palestinian officials say Israel is allowing just 86 trucks carrying desperately needed food, medicine and other supplies into Gaza per day — far short of the 600 trucks that aid organizations say are needed to meet the basic needs of Gaza’s more than 2 million people.

On Monday, scores of Palestinians stood in long lines outside a makeshift soup kitchen in Khan Younis hoping for a meal.

Hassan Abu Zayed: “This aid does not reach us. We do not see it. People like us do not get aid. Most of the people do not get the aid. We hear about it in the news, but we do not see it. We do not see it on the ground. I hope that the crossings open and that the food enters and the flour and the aid enters for people and that this big crisis that we are living ends.”

Israeli attacks across Gaza over the past day have killed at least 87 Palestinians, including 52 aid seekers. Another 644 people were injured, bringing the official toll of the wounded to over 150,000 since October 2023.

Meanwhile, there are reports of heavy airstrikes and artillery fire as Israel steps up its assault on Gaza. Israeli media is reporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to announce plans to fully occupy the entire Gaza Strip, including areas where it’s believed Hamas is holding Israeli hostages.

Israeli forces have arrested at least 15 Palestinians after another night of raids across the occupied West Bank, even as Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian homes north of Jericho and used bulldozers to level Palestinian farmers’ crops south of Nablus. The settler violence came as the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, visited an Israeli settlement in the West Bank after an unannounced visit to Israel with other Republican lawmakers. Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, but Johnson used his visit to declare, “The mountains of Judea and Samaria are the rightful property of the Jewish people.”

Meanwhile, family members of a U.S. citizen who was killed in a settler attack in the West Bank last week are demanding the Trump administration open an investigation into his killing. Forty-year-old Khamis Ayyad asphyxiated to death after settlers set fire to cars outside his home last Thursday. He died trying to put out the flames, after Israeli soldiers arrived and fired tear gas in his direction. Ayyad is a former Chicago resident. He leaves behind five children. He’s at least the second U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since July.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government voted unanimously to remove the attorney general, who is prosecuting Netanyahu for corruption. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has repeatedly clashed with Netanyahu’s coalition about overhauling the judiciary. Netanyahu is facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases.

Here in New York, police arrested more than 40 people Monday evening as they held a nonviolent protest outside the Trump International Hotel demanding an end to Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza and a halt to U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. The protests were led by the Jewish American group IfNotNow. Democracy Now! spoke to Ari Lev Fornari, a rabbi from Philadelphia, as he was being arrested for blocking traffic.

Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari: “The only way that Palestinians and Israelis can be safe, including the hostages who are held in Gaza, is if the people of Palestine are free. We just saw that Evyatar David, one of the remaining living Israeli hostages, is starving. He’s starving because everyone in Gaza is starving. Food aid to Gaza will save the remaining hostages, and it will save the children and the people of Gaza, who deserve to live. We’re here to say, 'Let Gaza live,' to risk everything to say, 'Never again.'”

A coalition of direct action groups has announced the largest attempt yet by civilians to break the siege on Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla aims to launch dozens of boats carrying humanitarian aid from Spain, Tunisia and elsewhere in early September, with delegates from at least 44 countries on board. Later in the broadcast, we’ll speak with U.S. labor leader Chris Smalls, who’s just returned to the United States after he was abducted by Israeli forces from the Handala aid vessel as it sailed toward Gaza. Smalls says he was beaten by his Israeli guards.

Sudan’s military rulers say they repelled an attack by Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries on the city of El Fasher, the army’s last holdout in Sudan’s Darfur region. Hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped by the fighting are rapidly running out of food and under constant artillery and drone fire. Those who are able to flee the violence face squalid camps where cholera and other diseases are rampant and many face starvation. This is Enaam Abdallah Mohammed, a 19-year-old who fled violence in Sudan’s Zamzam camp before she was attacked by RSF forces in a village near El Fasher.

Enaam Abdallah Mohammed: “If they find a person with a mobile phone, they would take it from him. If you have money, they take it. If you have a good, strong donkey or something like that, they will take it from you. They kill the people. They killed people in front of us. They took girls in front of us and raped them.”

The World Food Programme warns a protracted famine is taking hold in parts of Sudan, with nearly 25 million people facing acute hunger.

The United Nations warns over 1.5 million Afghans have been forcefully repatriated — most of them from Iran — where they face poverty, hunger and serious human rights violations. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reports many of those returning face torture, mistreatment, arbitrary arrest and detention, after the Taliban violated its promise to provide amnesty to people affiliated with the former, U.S.-backed government that collapsed in 2021. The World Food Programme warns nearly 10 million people — or about a quarter of Afghanistan’s population — face acute food insecurity, with its “sharpest surge” ever of child malnutrition, coming after the Trump administration terminated $1.7 billion in contracts for U.S. aid to Afghanistan.

Texas’s House of Representatives voted on Monday to track down and arrest more than 50 Democratic legislators who left the state to block the GOP’s new congressional map. The House speaker said he would sign civil warrants, which would allow the sergeant-at-arms and state troopers to arrest the state legislators and bring them to the Texas state Capitol. The warrants would only apply within the state of Texas, since the legislators have fled to Illinois, New York and Massachusetts.

On Monday, Democratic Congressmember Greg Casar joined protesters in a march outside the Texas Governor’s Mansion.

Rep. Greg Casar: “Governor Greg Abbott is a coward for saying that our law enforcement should go out and arrest our local elected officials. This is America. This is a place where you’re not supposed to be sending law enforcement to go handcuff elected officials that you disagree with.”

After headlines, we’ll go to Chicago to speak with Texas state Representative Cassandra Garcia Hernandez.

In New York, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the state would abandon independent, nonpartisan redistricting after Texas Republicans pushed a new congressional map that would give the GOP five extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Governor Hochul was joined by Texas Democratic legislators who fled the state to block the GOP’s redistricting effort.

Gov. Kathy Hochul: “This is a war. We are at war. And that’s why the gloves are off. And I say, 'Bring it on.'”

A Scarsdale High School graduate was released Monday night from ICE detention. Twenty-year-old Yeonsoo Go, a Purdue University student, was arrested and taken into ICE custody after a routine visa hearing last week.

In Los Angeles, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against federal immigration arrests described horrible conditions at ICE detention facilities.

Pedro Vasquez Perdomo: “They chained us and put me in a small room with 52 other people, no bathroom, no hygiene, just filth and fear. I’m diabetic. I need proper foods and fluids to survive. But what they gave us to eat was inhumane, nothing a person should ever have to eat. My sugar levels were out of control. I developed an eye infection while detained and begged for help, but no medical attention ever came.”

In more news from New York, a former prison guard has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for the fatal beating of 43-year-old Robert Brooks, who was incarcerated at the Marcy Correctional Facility. Body-camera footage of the December killing shows the group of guards repeatedly punching and kicking Brooks in the face, chest and groin. Four of the officers involved were wearing body cameras but did not activate them. Brooks was Black; all of the officers who took turns beating him appear to be white. Six guards were charged with murder.

Two survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have filed emotional letters to a court in New York, lashing out at the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files. One of the survivors writes, “Dear United States, I wish you would have handled and would handle the whole 'Epstein Files' with more respect towards and for the victims. I am not some pawn in your political warfare. What you have done and continue to do is eating at me day after day as you help to perpetuate this story indefinitely.”

Another survivor writes, “[I] feel like the DOJ’s and FBI’s priority is protecting the 'third-party', the wealthy men by focusing on scrubbing their names off the files of which the victims, 'know who they are.'”

The FBI had reportedly redacted the names of Donald Trump and other prominent individuals from the agency’s files, citing privacy reasons. Bloomberg News reported that the FBI instructed its agents to flag any mention of Trump during a March review of hundreds of thousands of pages of records.

In California, a fast-growing wildfire has scorched more than 65,000 acres in the Los Padres National Forest, with the flames fanned by dry, gusty winds. In Arizona, a wildfire on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park has become the largest active wildfire in the U.S. The Dragon Bravo Fire has consumed about 125,000 acres since it erupted on the Fourth of July. Meanwhile, vast swaths of Canada and the United States are experiencing unhealthy air quality due to wildfires raging across five Canadian provinces. Smoke from the fires has triggered air quality alerts for tens of millions of people in cities stretching from Minneapolis to Boston.

A new study in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that global plastic pollution is responsible for health-related economic losses exceeding $1.5 trillion annually. Researchers found the principal driver of the growing public health crisis is a huge increase in global plastic production, from 2 million tons in 1950 to a projected 1.2 billion tons by 2060. The report’s authors write, “Plastics are a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health.”

The findings come as a conference of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for the Global Plastics Treaty opens in Geneva today. Greenpeace activists rallied ahead of the talks.

Graham Forbes: “Our demands are for a treaty that takes a full life cycle approach, cuts plastic production, bans toxic chemicals and provides the financing that’s going to be required to make this transition.”