CBS News
U.S. raises concern with Israel as Gaza hospital strike appears to leave “displaced civilians burning alive”
At least 15 Palestinians were killed in overnight Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, the enclave’s Hamas-run health ministry said, as the Israeli military continued its fight against the Iranian-backed group there, and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, with no end in sight on either front.
The White House criticized one of the Israeli strikes carried out in Gaza on Monday after videos posted online appeared to show at least one person on the ground shaking as they were engulfed in flames.
The strike hit the grounds of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, where many displaced Palestinians have taken shelter in a makeshift tent camp. The Hamas-run health ministry said four people were killed.
Ramadan Abed/REUTERS
“The images and video of what appear to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israeli air strike are deeply disturbing and we have made our concerns clear to the Israeli government,” a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council told CBS News in a statement Monday night. “Israel has a responsibility to do more to avoid civilian casualties — and what happened here is horrifying, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.”
Israel says tents at Al-Aqsa hospital hit in “precise strike on terrorists”
A statement by IDF international spokesperson Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani called it an intelligence-based “precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center in the area of a parking lot adjacent” to the hospital.
“Shortly after the strike, a fire ignited in the hospital’s parking lot, most likely due to secondary explosions,” said Shoshani. Israel regularly attributes fires and secondary explosions after its airstrikes to weapons allegedly hidden by Hamas militants. The military has long accused the militants of keeping both weapons and fighters in or underneath civilian infrastructure, using non-combatants as human shields.
Shoshani added that the incident was under review, and said “the hospital and its functionality were not affected” by the strike.
He also reiterated the IDF’s insistence that it takes “numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence.”
2 Democratic lawmakers condemn Israel, and Biden, after Gaza strike
At least two Democratic members of the U.S. Congress issued much more pointed statements than the White House, condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“There are no words powerful enough to capture the agony of human beings being massacred & burned alive,” Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush said in a statement posted on social media, calling for a complete halt to U.S. weapons sales to Israel. “The U.S. is funding & arming the Israeli military’s extermination of the Palestinian people. It’s unconscionable. End this genocide.”
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in her own social media post that the “horrors unfolding in northern Gaza are the result of a completely unrestrained Netanyahu gov, fully armed by the Biden admin while food aid is blocked and patients are bombed in hospitals. This is a genocide of Palestinians. The US must stop enabling it. Arms embargo now.”
Israel says it listens to U.S., but “national interests” will dictate Iran strike
In addition to the pressure on Israel to limit civilian casualties in Gaza, the White House has also been pushing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to limit the extent of its expected counterattack on Iran, following the Islamic republic’s massive Oct. 1 missile assault on Israel.
The vast majority of the roughly 180 missiles launched by Iran, in response to Israel’s assassination of several senior Iranian and allied military commanders, were intercepted and nobody was killed in the strike, but Netanyahu vowed just hours after the attack that Tehran would “pay for it.”
There has been significant concern since that threat that Israel could retaliate by striking Iran’s oil infrastructure or its nuclear facilities — something President Biden has said clearly that he would not support. The fear is that such an attack could quickly escalate Israel’s multi-front war with Iran’s so-called proxy groups Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the Houthis in Yemen, into a full-scale regional war that draws in the United States as Israel’s chief ally.
An official in Netanyahu’s office, replying Tuesday to a Washington Post report that his country’s looming counterstrike would not include targeting Iranian nuclear or oil facilities, but rather military sites, told CBS News that the Israeli government does “listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interests.”
Netanyahu’s security cabinet has agreed on which targets to strike in Iran, when to hit them and how hard, according to Israeli media reports, which said a final vote of approval by the cabinet was still pending Tuesday. It was unclear when that final vote might be held, and there was no confirmed information on the suggested timetable or details of the pending retaliatory action.
On Monday, Netanyahu visited soldiers wounded over the weekend in a rare deadly Hezbollah drone strike on the Golani military base in central Israel. The IDF, in a preliminary investigation of that attack, admitted a failure of intelligence had led the military to believe the drone had been shot down. Instead, it flew for half an hour from Lebanon to reach its target, killing four Israeli soldiers and wounding dozens of other people.
He stressed that Israel would continue hitting Hezbollah in Lebanon “without mercy,” including with further strikes on the country’s capital Beirut.
Netanyahu and the IDF have said the goal of the operations in Lebanon is to enable the return of some 70,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in northern Israel, near the Lebanese border. They were forced to flee when Hezbollah started launching drones and missiles at Israel on Oct. 8, 2023 in support of Hamas — the day after the smaller group launched its terrorist attack on Israel from Gaza, sparking the ongoing war there.
The cross-border fire between Israel and Hezbollah has also forced an exodus from southern Lebanon. The United Nations said Tuesday that more than 400,000 children were among those to have fled from their homes in southern Lebanon over the last several weeks alone, since the IDF ramped up its assault on Hezbollah.
Sydney — Hundreds of mysterious black tar-like balls have washed up on two popular Sydney area beaches, prompting lifeguards to close the strands to swimmers.
“Mysterious, black, ball-shaped debris” began appearing on Coogee Beach in the Randwick area on Tuesday afternoon, the local mayor said, leaving flummoxed Australian authorities scrambling to find out what they might be and where they came from.
Hundreds of golf-to-baseball-sized spheres could be seen littering the coast, which is usually thronged with Sydneysiders and tourists.
SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty
Instead, a few seagulls wandered among the spheres, pecking and examining.
The balls were also spotted at nearby Gordon’s Bay, an aquatic reserve popular for snorkeling and fishing, which was also closed.
“At this stage, it is unknown what the material is,” Mayor Dylan Parker of Randwick city said in a social media post. “However, they may be ‘tar balls’ which are formed when oil comes in to contact with debris and water, typically the result of oil spills or seepage.”
The balls on Sydney’s picturesque shores aren’t the only unidentified objects to appear on beaches lately. Officials in Canada confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that they were investigating blobs of a white “mystery substance” that have washed up since September on beaches in the far northeast Newfoundland and Labrador province.
Canada’s environmental agency told CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar that samples of the hundreds of white blobs littering beaches had been taken, but that both the substance and its origins remained a mystery.
Legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreck lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea until March 2022.
Now, the team behind its discovery has joined forces with an Oscar-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showcasing how they located the storied vessel’s last resting place.
“Endurance” features thousands of 3D scans shot by a 4K camera deployed to a depth of nearly 10,000 feet. It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before its release in cinemas and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flare gun and man’s boot to dinnerware used by the crew and identifiable parts of the vessel.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
“We were absolutely blown away,” Mensun Bound, the 2022 discovery team’s director of exploration, told AFP. “We didn’t expect to see the ship’s wheel — the most emblematic part of the ship — just standing there, upright.”
History broadcaster Dan Snow, an executive producer on “Endurance”, called finding it in such a “stunning state” an “astonishing achievement”.
“No one’s ever found a wooden shipwreck 3,000 metres down in one of the most remote places on earth underneath the ice,” he said.
“It’s important because it is connected with this story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition, which is one of the greatest stories ever told — a story of leadership and survival like nothing else.”
The flare gun that was discovered was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship was lost to the ice, the BBC reported.
“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” expedition leader John Shears said. “And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”
Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was meant to make the first land crossing of the frozen continent.
But its three-masted timber sailing ship Endurance fell victim to the treacherous Weddell Sea, becoming ensnared in pack ice in January 1915. It was progressively crushed and sank 10 months later.
Shackleton, who died in 1922, described the site of the sinking as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world.”
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
He cemented his status as a legend of exploration by leading an epic escape for himself and his 27 companions, on foot over the ice and then in boats to the British overseas territory of South Georgia, some 870 miles east of the Falklands.
“I do believe of all the great survival stories I’ve ever heard of, this one takes the cake because it involves so many people,” said Jimmy Chin, who directed and produced the new film jointly with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
The husband-and-wife team behind Oscar-winning movie “Free Solo” saw the expedition organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust as a chance to “bring the story to a new generation.”
“The ultimate polar challenge”
The documentary alternates between accounts of the original and the 2022 missions, as the modern-day explorers conduct dozens of fruitless deep-sea dives using a state-of-the-art submersible as a deadline nears to leave before winter sets in.
A trailer for the film shows footage from the original 1914 expedition combined with video from the modern-day search.
Bound recounted the various challenges the latter-day team faced, including technology, research and climate, with one thing reminiscent of what Shackleton’s men confronted.
“Ice, ice and ice,” he said, adding that the documentary clearly highlights “the brutality” of the conditions they faced.
“This is probably the most difficult project I’ve ever been involved in… it wasn’t called the unreachable Endurance for nothing, was it?”
Shears also said there was a “real parallel” between the two endeavors and that like Shackleton he was drawn to “the ultimate polar challenge.”
“More people have been into space orbit than have ever walked on the surface sea ice where the Endurance sank,” said Shears, who previously led an unsuccessful attempt to find the wreck in 2019.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said combining the two stories was challenging but they were complementary.
“The two stories, even though they’re separated by 110 years, speak to each other,” said Vasarhelyi.
“They both chronicle this fundamental human condition of the audacity to dream big… have ambition, coupled with the diligence, determination, the grit and the ingenuity to see it through.”
To tell the original story, they opted to use AI to capture Shackleton and six crew members’ diary entries in their own voices, based on other recordings.
The filmmakers also used restored and colorized photographs and film expedition footage taken by Frank Hurley.
But audiences must wait until the closing stages of the documentary to see the new imagery of Endurance — a choice Vaserhelyi admitted felt “terrible” but necessary.
“This was a great story with a great payoff, but you have to earn it, right?” she explained.
“What’s nice is that the film really plays as this introduction… and it builds to this amazing moment.”
Delta Air Lines wants to elevate its passenger experience even before the plane leaves the ground.
The airline, which next year will celebrate it centennial anniversary, on Tuesday announced it is embarking on a “nose to tail” redesign of its interior cabins. The refresh includes new seat fabrics and materials, mood lighting throughout the plane, and memory-foam cushioning in some cabins.
The interior facelift comes as the carrier, which was badly hit by the global CrowdStrike outage in July, reported a third-quarter earnings decline of 26%.
The refresh is the result of extensive research on “customers’ changing expectations and lifestyles,” Delta said in its announcement, which emphasized the company’s dedication to “elevate the travel experience.” With passenger complaints surging in 2023, even low-cost carriers like Southwest Airlines are looking to provide consumers with a more premium flight experience.
“As we embark on our next century of flying, this refreshed cabin interior infuses utility with beauty to create an atmosphere that feels fresh, elevated and timeless while reflecting our customers’ evolving tastes and expectations,” Mauricio Parise, vice president of customer experience design at Delta, said in a statement.
Here’s a look at what Delta passengers can expect from the revamp.
Sleeker seating
Delta
Delta Comfort+ and main cabin passengers will enjoy seats made of engineered leather with updated colors and red accent stripes. On wide-body planes, Delta Comfort+ and main cabin seating will have the added luxury of memory-foam cushioning.
Delta
Premium passengers in the Delta One cabin will find seats upholstered in soft, breathable fabric seats made of a wool and nylon blend, according to the airline.
Despite differences in fabrics and materials among the different seating section, the redesign is meant to bring a premium look and feel for all cabins, making “everything consistent,” according to a promotional video, so that “no matter what, it looks brand new.”
Enhanced lighting
Delta’s new cabins will also feature what the company describes as “enhanced lighting programs” throughout the plane. “Every flight is different, so we’ve focused on creating warm, calming and atmospheric lighting options that create an environment for customers to rest and relax, or stay productive as they wish,” Parise said.
That include different lighting moods for different phases of the flight. For example, during boarding, “We’ve focused on the ‘moment of deceleration’ — warm and inviting lighting that makes the cabin appear spacious and open,” according to Delta.
Delta
At mealtimes: “We queue hues that feel like you’re at a candlelit dinner – making meals more natural and inviting.”
Sleeptime: “As the lights dim for sleep, we borrow from the sunset and slowly remove blue light while bringing in warm amber tones which are reminiscent of a sunset glow.”
Wake time: “When it’s time to wake up, the cabin slowly brightens into morning and daylight.”
Improved bathrooms
As part of the refresh, restrooms will feature bright walls and calming blue cabinets. New smooth flooring with specks of color will ensure “improved cleanliness and safe traction,” according to Delta.
Delta
The new cabin design will debut later this fall on narrow-body Boeing 757 aircraft flying domestic and short international routes, according to Delta. Renovated cabins on wide-body Airbus A35 aircraft will follow in 2025, with the rest of the airline’s fleet to follow over “the next few years.”