DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip have killed 1,005 Palestinians since a ceasefire was reached between Israel and the militant group Hamas last October, the Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday.
The enclave has seen near-daily strikes, as well as shelling and gunfire along the boundary that divides Gaza into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled zones. The most recent deaths were recorded after a series of Israeli drone strikes in the past few days on towns and refugee camps in central Gaza and Gaza City.
Also Wednesday, an Israeli strike killed two Palestinians and wounded six others in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, health officials at Nasser Hospital said. The Israeli military acknowledged carrying out the strike and said the target was a “terrorist” but did not elaborate. Families at the hospital said the strike targeted a group of people near the beach in the sprawling tent camp of Mawasi, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians live.
Israel has said it is continuing to operate against Hamas and allied militants in Gaza and has expanded the amount of territory it controls inside the strip.
In a separate statement Wednesday, the Israeli military said that it killed two militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in strikes over the weekend.
Gaza’s Health Ministry on Sunday said the death toll from the Israel-Hamas war that started in October 2023 had surpassed 73,000 in Gaza. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. It is staffed by medical professionals and maintains detailed records viewed as generally reliable by the international community.
A man clears the rubble as writing in Hebrew on the wall reads "revenge, regards to the arrested, people, wake up," at one of the West Bank mosques that were vandalized and partly set on fire by Israeli settlers overnight, in the village of Jiljilya, north of Ramallah, Wednesday, June 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
Palestinians collect their belongings from their evacuated homes after the Israeli army issued a number of short term access permits for residents of the occupied West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarem, Wednesday, June 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
Palestinians collect their belongings from their evacuated homes after the Israeli army issued a number of short term access permits for residents of the occupied West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarem, Wednesday, June 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia is the next Southern state where Republicans are convening to redraw voting districts in ways that could diminish the political power of Black and other nonwhite voters after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Voting Rights Act provisions that helped shape existing boundaries in racially diverse states.
The General Assembly convenes Wednesday in a special session called by outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp in response to the court's Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander.
Kemp, who is in the final months of his second term, deviated from other governors who fast-tracked new congressional maps for the November midterms partly in response to President Donald Trump's pleas to shore up the party's chances at maintaining control of Congress. Kemp instead wants Georgia lawmakers to draw districts for the 2028 elections. Yet the governor moved ahead of his Southern counterparts by asking the Republican-controlled Assembly to redraw its own boundaries, as well.
That would make Georgia the first state to apply Callais to its legislature and demonstrate the cascading effect of the high court's decision across Southern states with the nation’s highest proportions of Black voters and Black lawmakers.
The issue is especially salient in Georgia, where the Capitol complex includes a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and sits blocks from where the slain civil rights icon lived, preached and led the movement that yielded the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Still, neither Kemp nor Republican legislative leaders had unveiled proposed changes as of Wednesday morning, frustrating Democrats and activists who plan daily demonstrations throughout the session.
“They have not been transparent,” said state Rep. Tanya Miller, a Black legislator from Atlanta who is the Democratic nominee for attorney general. “Something as fundamental as voters getting to choose their leaders ought not to be done in the dark, ought not happen in back rooms.”
Several Republican lawmakers said Wednesday morning they still had not seen proposed districts, and Kemp’s office had not scheduled any public remarks from the governor.
House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, a veteran of earlier redistricting efforts, said the outcome “will be a legislative prerogative” — a notion Kemp aides confirmed. But Jones said that even as a top-ranking Republican on the committee that would consider new maps, she hasn't “been in any room creating maps.”
Asked directly who is drawing new districts, she replied: “I don't know.”
Before Callais, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was understood to require maps — for Congress, state legislatures and local legislative bodies — that gave historically marginalized minorities a reasonable chance to select candidates of their choice. Nationally and in Georgia, those so-called “opportunity districts” have disproportionately elected Black and other nonwhite representatives.
For example, about a third of Georgia's 180 state representatives are Black. Latino, Asian and other minorities bring the total nonwhite share to about 40% — roughly reflecting the state's overall population. Georgia's U.S. House delegation has five districts out of 14 total where the electorate is majority or plurality nonwhite. All elected Black Democrats in 2024.
With the Callais ruling, issued earlier this spring, a conservative majority of justices concluded that jurisdictions drawn with racial makeup in mind are discriminatory and violate the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause. The justices declared that apportionment should be “race neutral.”
Their stated reasoning did not hinge on party interests, and federal courts have said partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. But in Southern states, especially, party loyalty dovetails considerably with race and ethnicity. So the decision has allowed Republicans — a party dominated by white people — to redraw maps to goose likely GOP districts by redistributing nonwhite voters who tend to support Democrats.
That, many civil rights activists and experts argue, makes it impossible for Southern legislatures to be genuinely “race neutral” when drawing boundaries.
Emory University professor Carol Anderson compared Callais and the resulting redistricting push to poll taxes and literacy tests imposed by white Southern conservatives — and blessed by the Supreme Court — during the Jim Crow era.
“They used racially neutral language for policies that were clearly racially targeted,” said Anderson, who is also a board member of Fair Fight Action, a group organizing against the Georgia redistricting.
It's not guaranteed that Georgia Republicans can get what they want from new maps.
Partisan gerrymandering involves redistributing voters — packing certain citizens into fewer districts or dividing them across more districts. Around metro Atlanta, spreading nonwhite, Democratic-leaning voters across more districts could make more seats seem to lean Republican. The risk, however, is that more battleground districts emerge because white metropolitan voters are trending less conservative, which could give Democratic candidates of any race or ethnicity more chances to win.
That's perhaps not a major factor in the Georgia state Senate, which already is considered gerrymandered for Republicans. But it could be a consideration when drawing state House and U.S. House maps.
Kemp is effectively asking Republicans, especially in metro Atlanta, to redraw their own boundaries and take on new, unfamiliar territory.
Nationally, a partisan redistricting battle started last year when Trump urged Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional boundaries to shore up the GOP's narrow House majority in Washington this November. Texas answered the call first.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento answered with their own gerrymander that voters later approved. A succession of states followed. The outcome would have been close to even had the Virginia Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives, not struck down new Democratic-drawn maps approved by the state’s voters. All told, Republicans think they could gain as many as 16 seats from their redistricting efforts while Democrats think they could gain six seats from new districts in California and Utah.
That still may not be enough for the GOP to hold a congressional majority, given Trump's lagging approval ratings. But it could mitigate Democratic gains and set Republicans up well for 2028 and beyond.
FILE - Gov. Brian Kemp speaks during the State of the State, Jan. 15, 2026, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
