He will seek support for the latest draft of the ceasefire deal presented by President Joe Biden 10 days ago, which the US also hopes to put to a vote at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

However, with neither Israel nor Hamas having fully endorsed the plan, fighting continues, with air raids hitting across the Gaza Strip overnight on Sunday and Monday morning.

In Cairo, Blinken will meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi before visiting Israel for a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

As well as pressing the ceasefire proposal, the US official is set to discuss the reopening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a vital point for aid shipments into Gaza that Israel seized amid its ground invasion of the south of the enclave last month.

Categorical and permanent

Biden outlined on May 31 a three-phase proposal to achieve a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip that he said was presented by Israel. However, neither Israel nor Hamas has fully endorsed the plan, with negotiations ongoing.

A senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, urged the US on Monday to press Israel to end the war.

“We call upon the US administration to put pressure on the occupation to stop the war on Gaza and the Hamas movement is ready to deal positively with any initiative that secures an end to the war,” he said.

The proposal includes the exchange of Palestinian prisoners with Israeli captives, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, return of displaced Palestinians to their homes across the enclave, and a plan to reconstruct the territory, much of which has been destroyed since October 7.

More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war and about 84,000 injured, mostly women and children.

The trip comes as Washington has been working on multiple drafts of a resolution it aims to put to a vote at the UNSC to back up the proposal.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said that the latest version of the proposal differs in some significant ways from previous efforts.

“First of all, it explicitly states that Israel has accepted the ceasefire deal. A previous version only said that a ceasefire deal was acceptable to Israel,” he noted.

It also explicitly states that any ceasefire will continue after six weeks, and be renewed as long as negotiations continue.

“But it’s still not a categorical, permanent ceasefire. That’s what some members of the Security Council want,” Rattansi said.

Continued bombardment

Blinken’s trip comes two days after the Israeli military killed at least 274 Palestinians and wounded 698 more in Nuseirat in central Gaza as part of an operation that led to the release of four Israelis from Hamas captivity.

Hamas claimed that three more unnamed captives, including one holding US citizenship, were killed by Israeli forces during the raid, which was denied by Israel.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military continued its bombardment on sites across Gaza. Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said bodies continue to arrive at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, threatening to overwhelm the only operating hospital in the area.

Late on Sunday, Benny Gantz announced he was resigning as Israeli war cabinet minister. While the move is unlikely to threaten the Netanyahu administration immediately, it will make him even more reliant on far-right allies.

Blinken has previously met Gantz during visits to Israel, but it is unclear if a visit is scheduled on Monday.

The eighth regional tour since the start of the war by the US diplomat also comes as tensions are boiling in border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, with both sides signaling they are ready for war after eight months of border fighting.

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“I heard that they were going to do it or were about to do it,” Castillo, 35, said Wednesday as she and her son were escorted to a Border Patrol van with about two dozen others from Brazil, Ecuador and her village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, which she said she left because it was gripped by violence.

They had missed the deadline, and were now subject to the new deportation rule.

Her sense of uncertainty prevailed among many migrants after Biden invoked presidential powers to stop asylum processing when arrests for illegal crossings top 2,500 in a day. The measure took effect at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Wednesday because that threshold was met.

Two senior Homeland Security Department officials confirmed the first deportations under the new rule took place Wednesday, though they did not say how many were deported. The officials briefed reporters on condition their names not be used in keeping with regulations.

Sergio Franco, who clutched his baby girl after a nearly two-month journey from Ecuador with his family, walking through the perilous Darien jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama, said he was confident that he would prevail in his plea to find a safe haven in the United States.

“If we have evidence, there shouldn’t be a problem,” he said as he got into the van with Castillo and the others.

As the group was driven away, several migrants from India walked up to the same dusty area near a gun shop in the town of Dulzura, one of several that have popped up over the last year in the remote rural outskirts of San Diego for migrants to surrender to Border Patrol agents. There was no water or restrooms and little shade.

Several Guatemalan women arrived later. Among them was Arelis Alonzo Lopez, who said she was nearly five months pregnant and had walked for two nights. A Border Patrol agent asked how she felt.

“I can’t take any more,” she answered.

Asylum remains suspended until average daily arrests fall below 1,500 for a week straight. The last month that crossings were that low for that long was in July 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Migrants who express fear for their safety if they are deported will be screened by U.S. asylum officers but under a higher standard than what’s currently in place. If they pass, they can remain to pursue other forms of humanitarian protection, including those laid out in the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

There are serious questions about whether the new measure can stop large-scale migrant entries. Mexico has agreed to take back migrants who are not Mexican, but only limited numbers and nationalities. And the Biden administration doesn’t have the money and diplomatic support it needs to deport migrants long distances, including to Ecuador and India.

In Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, Esmeralda Castro of El Salvador worried the asylum halt will drive more people to compete for the 1,450 slots awarded daily to enter legally through U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s heavily oversubscribed online app, known as CBP One. Castro, 40, said she has tried for nine months for an appointment using the app.

“Imagine what’s going to happen with what they’ve done. The system is going to collapse again,” said Castro, speaking at a migrant camp near the banks of the Rio Grande where she has been living with about 10 others. The app has become so overwhelmed at times that users got error messages and experienced other technical failures.

Juan Daniel Medina of the Dominican Republic said he was determined to stick with CBP One, even after eight months of fruitless attempts to get an appointment.

“It’s the correct way because that way you do everything legally. They won’t have to jump the river and risk facing criminal charges,” the 30-year-old Medina said.

Two hours before the sun set Tuesday in San Diego, four busloads of migrants were dropped off by Border Patrol agents at a transit center, many of them to seek asylum in one of 68 immigration courts across the country. Asylum-seekers can generally work while their claims slowly wind through overwhelmed immigration courts.

Jesus Gomez of Medellin, Colombia, said Border Patrol agents told him he was one of the last people to be released to seek asylum and that he should tell friends and family back home that they will be deported if they attempt to enter illegally. He said he didn’t know if it was true.

“It’s a very difficult thing to navigate,” Gomez, 49, said as he waited for his wife to be released by the Border Patrol before they fly to Boston, where their daughter lives.

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Biden’s campaign proposed that the first debate between the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees be held in late June and the second in September before early voting begins. Trump responded to the letter in an interview with Fox News digital, calling the proposed dates “fully acceptable to me” and joked about providing his own transportation.

Biden, in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, sought to needle his rival, saying, “Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020, since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal.”

The Democrat suggested that the two candidates could pick some dates, taking a dig at Trump’s ongoing New York hush money trial by noting that the Republican is “free on Wednesdays,” the usual day off in the trial.

Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon on Wednesday sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates to say that Biden would not participate in its announced debates, choosing instead to participate in debates hosted by news organizations. The Biden campaign objected to the fall dates selected by the commission — which come after some Americans begin to vote — repeating a complaint also raised by the Trump campaign.

Biden’s campaign has long-held a grudge against the nonpartisan commission for failing to evenly apply its rules during the 2020 Biden-Trump matchups — most notably when it didn’t enforce its COVID-19 testing rules on Trump and his entourage — and Biden’s team has held talks with television networks and some Republicans about ways to circumvent the commission’s grip on presidential debates.

The president first indicated he would be willing to debate Trump during an interview with the radio host Howard Stern last month, telling him that “I am, somewhere. I don’t know when. But I’m happy to debate him.”

Biden indicated again last week that he was preparing to debate, telling reporters as he was leaving a White House event: “Set it up.”

Trump has repeatedly dared Biden to debate him, keeping a second podium open at rallies and claiming that his rival would not be up for the task.

Trump, too, has taken issue with the debate commission, but he and his team have maintained that they don’t care who hosts the debates as long as they happen.

The Trump campaign issued a statement on May 1 that objected to the scheduled debates by the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying that the schedule “begins AFTER early voting” and that “this is unacceptable” because voters deserve to hear from the candidates before ballots are cast.

Trump said at a Pennsylvania rally before his hush money trial began that the debates were needed.

“We have to debate because our country is going in the wrong direction so badly,” Trump said with the empty podium next to him. “We have to explain to the American people what the hell is going on.”

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Blasting the Democratic president “a total moron,” Trump before a crowd of tens of thousands repeatedly characterized the cases against him as politically motivated and timed to harm his ability to campaign.

“He’s a fool. He’s not a smart man,” Trump said of Biden. “I talk about him differently now because now the gloves are off.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, drew what his team called a “mega crowd” to a Saturday evening rally in the southern New Jersey resort town of Wildwood, 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of the New York City courthouse where he has been forced to spend most weekdays sitting silently through his felony hush money trial.

Lisa Fagan, spokesperson for the city of Wildwood, told The Associated Press that she estimated a crowd of between 80,000 and 100,000 attendees, based off her own observations on the scene Saturday, having seen “dozens” of other events in the same space.

Trump was joined on stage by several high-level endorsers including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, who is still listed as a registered sex offender after pleading guilty in New York in 2011 to misdemeanor criminal charges of sexual misconduct and patronizing an underage prostitute.

The beachfront gathering, described by Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., as the largest political gathering in state history, was designed to serve as a show of force at a critical moment for Trump, who is facing dozens of felony charges in four separate criminal cases with the election less than six months away.

Hours before he was scheduled to take the stage, thousands of Trump loyalists donning “Never Surrender” T-shirts and red “Make America Great Again” hats crowded onto the sand between the boardwalk and carnival rides to greet the former Republican president.

“The everyday American people are 100% behind him,” said Doreen O’Neill, a 62-year-old nurse from Philadelphia.

“They have to cheat and smear him and humiliate him in that courtroom every single day,” O’Neill said. “This country is going to go insane if they steal the election again.”

Trump’s extraordinary legal woes, which include three other unrelated criminal cases, have emerged as a central issue in the campaign.

Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden administration and Democratic officials in New York of using the legal system to block his return to the White House. Prosecutors allege the former president broke the law to conceal an affair with a porn actor that would have hurt his first presidential bid.

The hush money case was filed by local prosecutors in Manhattan who do not work for the Justice Department or any White House office. The Justice Department has said the White House has had no involvement in the two criminal cases against Trump brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

On Saturday, Trump posited that even those whom he accuses of politically motivated prosecutions didn’t bring every case they could have, pointing to the boosts his campaign has sustained with each wave of charges.

“I heard they were going to do a couple of other things and they said from Washington … ‘we’re indicting him into the White House,’” Trump said. “They said, ‘Don’t do it.’”

While Trump seized on his legal woes Saturday, a judge’s gag order — and the threat of jail — limit Trump’s ability to comment publicly on witnesses, jurors and some others connected to the New York trial, which is expected to consume much of the month. The judge in the case already has fined Trump $9,000 for violating the order and warned that jail could follow if he doesn’t comply.

The order doesn’t include references to Judge Juan M. Merchan, whom Trump called “highly conflicted” or District Attorney Alvin Bragg, both of whom Trump said are “doing the bidding for crooked Joe Biden.”

Trump’s responsibilities as a defendant have limited his ability to win over voters on the campaign trail.

He spent last week’s off-day from court in the general election battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan. And he was campaigning with tens of thousands of voters Saturday in New Jersey, a reliably Democratic state. Parts of New Jersey have deep-red enclaves and the southern shoreline in particular draws tourists and summer homeowners from neighboring Pennsylvania, a key swing state.

Biden, meanwhile, opened his weekend with a series of fundraising events on the West Coast.

He avoided Trump’s legal challenges — as he has done consistently — while addressing donors in Seattle. Instead, the Democratic president focused on Trump’s recent interview with Time magazine in which the Republican former president said states should be left to determine whether to prosecute women for abortions or to monitor their pregnancies.

Saturday’s visit to the New Jersey Shore resort wasn’t Trump’s first.

While president, Trump held a rally there in January 2020 to thank Van Drew, the New Jersey congressman who had just left the Democratic Party for the GOP as a rebuke for the former president’s first impeachment.

Trump drew a crowd at the time that lined the streets, filled bars and supported numerous vendors in what is usually a sleepy city in the winter. This time, the summer season is around the corner for the resort known for its wide beaches and boardwalk games and shops.

Wildwood is in New Jersey’s 2nd District, which Van Drew has represented for three terms and covers all or part of six counties in southern New Jersey. It went for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 after earlier backing Barack Obama.

Trump is set to return to the courtroom next week, when key prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer-turned-foe, is expected to take the witness stand. Last week, he was visibly angry at times as he was forced to sit through testimony from former porn actor Stormy Daniels, who described a sexual encounter with the former president in shocking detail.

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying internal Trump Organization business records. The charges stem from paperwork such as invoices and checks that were deemed legal expenses in company records. Prosecutors say those payments largely were reimbursements to Cohen, Trump’s attorney, who paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet.

The prosecution could rest its case by the end of the week. It’s unclear if Trump himself will take the stand when the defense presents its case.

Back on the Jersey Shore, 65-year-old Pat Day said she felt some urgency to see Trump in person on Saturday.

“We want to see Trump before they take him out,” said Day, who was visiting from the Florida Keys. “I’m worried. They’re going to do everything they can so he doesn’t get elected again.”

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A report from the administration of President Joe Biden has found that Israeli forces likely used United States-supplied weapons in a manner “inconsistent” with international law, but it stopped short of identifying violations that would put an end to the ongoing military aid.

In the report, released on Friday after a delay, the US State Department indicated Israel did not provide adequate information to verify whether US weapons were used in possible violations of international law during its war in Gaza.

The Biden White House had issued a national security memorandum, NSM-20, in February requiring Israel and other countries receiving military aid to provide written assurances that all US-supplied weapons were used in a manner consistent with international law.

The US would then make a decision about future military aid based on those written assurances. Friday’s report is a byproduct of that memorandum.

“It is reasonable to assess that defense articles covered under NSM-20 have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its IHL [international humanitarian law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm,” the report said.

The report nevertheless adds that the Biden administration believes Israel is taking “appropriate steps” to address such concerns.

Political backlash

The US has been a consistent ally to Israel throughout its seven-month-long military campaign in Gaza, which began on October 7.

That war, however, has spurred international outcry as humanitarian concerns mount.

Nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, many of them women and children, and the head of the United Nations World Food Programme has declared a “full-blown famine” in the northern part of the narrow enclave.

Still, Israel’s siege on Gaza continues, with access to food, water and electricity severely limited. UN experts have repeatedly warned of a “risk of genocide” in the territory.

As a result, the Biden administration has faced pressure, particularly from the progressive flank of the Democratic Party, to address the humanitarian concerns by placing conditions on military aid to Israel.

After the report’s release on Friday, progressive lawmakers expressed disappointment with its conclusions.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, for instance, stated it “fails to do the hard work of making an assessment and ducks the ultimate questions that the report was designed to determine”.

Meanwhile, Republicans blasted the report as undermining Israel in its campaign against the Palestinian group Hamas.

Senator Jim Risch, for instance, called the document “politically damaging” and said it would do long-term harm to US allies beyond Israel.

“NSM-20 is aimed squarely at Israel in the near-term, but the additional highly-politicized reporting requirements will eventually be aimed at other American allies and partners across the globe, further impeding the delivery of security assistance and undermining our ability to deter China and Russia,” he wrote in a statement.

Impediments to the report

Friday’s report acknowledges limits to the US State Department’s findings, pointing out that the information that Israel provided was not comprehensive.

“Although we have gained insight into Israel’s procedures and rules, we do not have complete information on how these processes are implemented,” the report reads.

It also said the war itself creates barriers to understanding what is happening on the ground.

“It is difficult to assess or reach conclusive findings on individual incidents” in Gaza, the report said, citing a lack of US government personnel on the ground.

It also echoed Israeli accusations that Hamas could be manipulating civilian casualties for its own gains.

Gaza, the report said, represents “as difficult a battlespace as any military has faced in modern warfare”.

Tracing the flow of aid

The report also sought to assess whether Israel was impeding the flow of aid into Gaza, another possible violation of international humanitarian law, as well as US law.

It found “numerous instances during the period of Israeli actions that delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza”.

Nevertheless, the report concluded that it could not assess that the “Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance within the meaning of section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act”.

Humanitarian groups, however, have reported for months that Israel systematically blocks large portions of aid from entering the Gaza Strip.

Overall, the report said that US intelligence agencies have “no direct indication of Israel intentionally targeting civilians”, but they assessed that “Israel could do more to avoid civilian harm”.

In addition, the State Department pledged to continue to monitor the situation in Gaza, particularly with regards to the delivery of aid.

“This is an ongoing assessment and we will continue to monitor and respond to any challenges to the delivery of aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza moving forward.”

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In a brief news conference on Thursday, Biden said both the right to free speech and the rule of law “must be upheld” but stressed that “violent protest is not protected”.

“Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation — none of this is a peaceful protest. Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not a peaceful protest,” he said.

“Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education,” Biden continued. “There’s a right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.”

Biden’s comments came shortly after police arrested at least 132 student protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), early on Thursday and cleared out an encampment.

UCLA is among the dozens of US universities where students have set up camps over the past few weeks to demand an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. Many are also calling for their schools to divest from any firms complicit in Israeli abuses.

Demonstrators are detained on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles on May 2 [Ryan Sun/AP Photo]

The protests have been met with a fierce backlash from university administrators, as well as pro-Israel lawmakers and groups.

On Thursday, students and other observers quickly slammed Biden’s statement as failing to recognise that US colleges and universities have called heavily armed police forces onto their campuses to disperse non-violent demonstrations.

The recent arrests of students and faculty at UCLA and New York’s Columbia University, among other campuses, have drawn widespread condemnation.

But in his brief address, Biden did not comment on university policies or the use of force by police. Nor did he remark on reports that pro-Israel demonstrators had attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the UCLA encampment this week.

Instead, he said there is no place on college campuses for “anti-Semitism or threats of violence against Jewish students”. Student demonstrators, however, have rejected accusations that their encampments are anti-Semitic or pose a threat.

“There’s a [sense of] disappointment, but there’s no surprise,” Kali, a student protester at George Washington University in Washington, DC, said of Biden’s remarks.

“For the Biden administration to demonise us in this way is honestly incredibly disappointing,” Kali told Al Jazeera. “It paints a target on the backs of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, anti-Zionist youth.”

Political blowback

Biden has faced months of widespread anger and mass protests over his unwavering support for Israel during the Gaza war.

More than 34,500 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since early October. The besieged enclave faces a dire humanitarian crisis, and the top United Nations court said the war has spurred a plausible risk of genocide.

The US president, who is seeking re-election in November, also faces growing disapproval among young voters.

Biden’s approval rating stands at 28 percent among voters under age 30, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last week.

A recent CNN poll also showed that a staggering 81 percent of voters younger than 35 disapprove of Biden’s handling of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Democratic president’s support for Israel, condemnation of the student protests, and silence on the mass arrests and violence against demonstrators may fuel young people’s apathy — if not antipathy — towards him, experts said.

“The Democrats can’t really afford to give people more reasons to vote against Biden, and this actually becomes one,” Omar Wasow, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, told Al Jazeera.

‘Losing an entire generation’

Experts say young voters could be key to Biden’s prospects in November, as he faces a likely rematch against his 2020 rival, Republican Donald Trump.

In a close race, as the November election is expected to be, low turnout could spell trouble for the Democratic incumbent.

Hasan Pyarali — the Muslim Caucus chairperson for College Democrats of America, the university arm of the Democratic Party — told Al Jazeera he was disappointed by Biden’s comments on Thursday.

“In our point of view, it’s not just good policy to oppose the genocide; it’s good politics. He has done neither, and we’re really disappointed to see that,” said Pyarali, a senior at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

He added that it was especially disheartening to hear Biden say he would not reconsider his Middle East policy as a result of the student protests.

“We’re here to make it known that if he doesn’t change course, there’s a real risk that we [Democrats] lose 2024,” Pyarali said.

He also said the prospect of Trump winning in November would not be enough to convince young voters to vote for Biden. “It’s not on us to make sure that Trump doesn’t come back; it’s on Biden and his campaign,” he said.

“It’s now on him to go forward. If he wants to continue down the path that is unpopular, unjust and genocidal, he certainly can — he’s the president of the United States. But it’s at the peril of essentially losing an entire generation of voters and also risking the 2024 election.”

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However, Biden, who attended Saturday’s event in Washington, DC and delivered a 10-minute speech, made no mention of the war in Gaza or the grave humanitarian crisis there.

Protests at the gala event – which is normally devoted to presidents, journalists and comedians taking outrageous pokes at political scandals and each other – took place as antiwar demonstrations also spread through US college campuses, with students pitching encampments and withstanding police sweeps in an effort to force their universities to divest from companies enabling Israel’s military campaign on Gaza.

The protests in the US capital forced Biden’s motorcade to take an alternate route from the White House to the Washington Hilton, where more than 100 protesters, some of them waving Palestinian flags, shouted “shame on you” at guests hurrying inside.

At one point, the crowds chanted, “Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide”, while some protesters sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of bloodied flak vests with “press” insignia.

The crowds also cheered when someone inside the Washington Hilton – where the dinner has been held for decades – unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began last October, the Israeli military has killed 142 media workers and arrested at least 40 Palestinian journalists, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said 2023 was the deadliest year for those in the profession in a decade, with some 75 percent of those killed worldwide being Palestinians reporting on the war in Gaza.

In his speech, Biden offered a toast for “press freedom and democracy around the world”, but failed to speak about the suffering in Gaza. He spent most of his address poking fun at his main rival in this year’s presidential race, Donald Trump, as well as the two men’s advanced age.

His speech remained focused on what he believes is at stake this election, speaking about how another Trump administration would be more harmful to the country than his first term.

“We have to take this seriously. Eight years ago we could have written it off as ‘Trump talk’, but not after January 6,” he told the audience, referring to the supporters of Trump who stormed the US Capitol after Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election.

One of the few mentions of Gaza came from Kelly O’Donnell, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), who briefly noted some 100 journalists have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza.

Biden raises a toast during the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington, DC [Tom Brenner/Reuters]

In advance of the event, more than two dozen Palestinian journalists published a letter calling for their colleagues to boycott the gala, accusing the Biden administration of being complicit in Israel’s systematic killing of media workers in Gaza.

“The toll exacted on us for merely fulfilling our journalistic duties is staggering,” the letter stated. “We are subjected to detentions, interrogations, and torture by the Israeli military, all for the ‘crime’ of journalistic integrity.”

One organiser complained that the WHCA – which represents the hundreds of journalists who cover the president – has largely been silent since the first weeks of the war about the killings of Palestinian journalists. The WHCA did not respond to a request for comment.

American-Palestinian journalist Ahmed Shihab Eldin, one of the signatories of the letter, told Al Jazeera that it is “unacceptable” for media workers to stay silent for fear of endangering job security.

“We are seeing journalists in Gaza continuing to be, not just killed, but detained, tortured, and even their families killed,” he said.

Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a US-based Palestinian advocacy group that helped organise the letter from journalists in Gaza, said, “It is shameful for the media to dine and laugh with President Biden while he enables the Israeli devastation and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.”

In addition, the Adalah Justice Project started an email campaign targeting 12 media executives at various news outlets expected to attend the dinner who previously signed onto a letter calling for the protection of journalists in Gaza.

“How can you still go when your colleagues in Gaza asked you not to,” a demonstrator asked guests heading in. “You are complicit.”

Demonstrators try to block arriving guests outside the Washington Hilton, the site of the annual White House correspondents’ dinner [Kent Nishimura/Getty via AFP]

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A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Democrats are more likely to report feeling “fearful” or “angry” about the prospects of another Trump term than Republicans are about the idea of Biden remaining in the White House.

The emotional reaction Trump inspires may work in his favor too, though, since the poll also found that Republicans are more excited about the prospect of a Trump win than Democrats are about a Biden victory.

Seven in 10 Democrats say the words “angry” or “fearful” would describe their emotions “extremely well” or “very well” upon a Trump victory. A smaller majority of Republicans – 56% – say the same about a Biden triumph. About 6 in 10 Democrats cite both emotions when contemplating a Trump victory. Again, that exceeds the roughly 4 out of 10 Republicans who said they would feel both angry and scared about Biden prevailing.

The findings are notable in an unusual campaign pitting an incumbent president against his predecessor, with both men facing doubters within their own parties and among independents. Consolidating support from Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the GOP primary could be a challenge for Trump. Biden faces disenchanted progressives to his left and concerns over whether his age, 81, is a liability in the job.

Excitement about the two candidates will be an important factor in a race where turnout from each side’s base will be key. But dislike can motivate voters as much as enthusiasm.

“If there was a third-party candidate who had a chance in hell I would vote for them,” said Austin Healey, a 26-year-old Democrat. Healey, who describes himself as “very liberal,” said his mixed reviews of Biden take a back seat to his concerns that Trump’s comeback bid “looks like a clear ploy for trying to abolish democracy.”

Though he is “not excited about it,” Healey said, that means a vote for Biden.

Derrick Johnson, a Michigan voter who identifies as a liberal independent, offered plenty of critiques against Biden, as well. But the 46-year-old caregiver and food service worker made his bottom line clear: “Donald Trump is a madman. I’m afraid he’ll have us in World War III. My message is anybody but Trump.”

Democrats’ intense feelings about Trump account for the overall differences in how Americans view the two rivals. Altogether, about 4 in 10 U.S. adults say “fearful” would describe their emotions “extremely” or “very” well if Trump is elected again, while roughly 3 in 10 would fear a second Biden term. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults said they would be angered by Trump winning in November while 28% said the same about Biden.

The poll’s findings on negative emotions could be especially important for Biden given his other weak spots, including that Republicans remain more excited about electing Trump again than Democrats are about reelecting Biden. Slightly more than half of Republicans, 54%, said “excited” describes their feelings about another Trump term “extremely well” or “very well.” For Biden, that number was just 4 in 10 among Democrats.

“We know what we’re getting with Trump,” said Republican John Novak, a 54-year-old maintenance worker who lives in swing-state Wisconsin and counted himself among those GOP loyalists who would be excited by another Trump term.

“I knew who he was when he came down that escalator in 2015, and we were never getting Boy Scout material,” Novak said. “But he put conservatives on the Supreme Court, he was firm on immigration … and he’s a conservative who handled the economy.”

The latest AP-NORC poll showed Biden with an overall approval rating of 38%. U.S. adults also expressed discontent about his handling of the economy and immigration – and not all of the disapproval is driven by partisan loyalties. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of Biden’s stewardship of the economy, roughly equal to his overall job approval rating.

On specific issues, about 3 in 10 Democrats disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy; about 4 in 10 disapprove of his approach to immigration or border security.

“The situation at the border really bothers me,” said Johnson, the Michigan liberal. “The border crossings are just getting out of control.”

The president and his campaign advisers tout the Biden administration’s legislative record, especially on infrastructure, an improving economy and new spending intended to combat climate change. But the president and his allies are also unsparing in lambasting Trump as interested only in “revenge and retribution” for his defeat in 2020 and the pending criminal prosecutions and other legal troubles that have followed.

They have seized on Trump’s praise of authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Victor Orban and recirculated the former president’s statement that he would be willing to act like a dictator for a day to close the border and expand drilling for fossil fuel.

Trump has countered with searing attacks on Biden’s mental acuity and physical fitness for the presidency and even mocked Biden’s stutter. But the latest poll results suggest Trump has not yet maximized the potential benefits of those attacks — or perhaps that they simply have a lower yield for him.

Biden sometimes turns his version of the argument into a humorous quip he used often in 2020, when he was vying to unseat Trump: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

Indeed, that is what resonates with reluctant Democrats and some independents.

“I voted for Trump (in 2016) because I wanted somebody to shake up Washington,” said Neil Murray, a 67-year-old retiree in Jonesboro, Arkansas, who identifies as an independent. “He certainly did that, but he couldn’t do anything productive with it.”

Frustrated with Trump’s negative qualities that he overlooked in 2016, Murray voted for Biden in 2020 — but not enthusiastically. He called Biden “disingenuous on some things” and too close to his left flank on economic policy.

But in November, Murray said, he will have no reservations when casting a second vote for the Democrat, because, “Donald Trump is a screaming lunatic.”

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The report from Special Counsel Robert Hur resolves a criminal investigation that had shadowed Biden’s presidency for the last year. But its bitingly critical assessment of his handling of sensitive government records and unflattering characterizations of his memory will spark fresh questions about his competency and age that cut at voters’ most deep-seated concerns about his candidacy for re-election.

In remarks at the White House Thursday evening, Biden denied that he improperly shared classified information and angrily lashed out at Hur for questioning his mental acuity, particularly his recollection of the timing of his late son Beau’s death from cancer.

The searing findings will almost certainly blunt his efforts to draw contrast with Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, over a criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and refusing to return them to the government. Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”

Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.

“I did not share classified information,” Biden insisted. “I did not share it with my ghostwriter.” He added he wasn’t aware how the boxes containing classified documents ended up in his garage.

And in response to Hur’s portrayal of him, Biden insisted to reporters that “My memory is fine,” and said he believes he remains the most qualified person to serve as president.

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden asked, about Hur’s comments regarding his son’s death, saying he didn’t believe it was any of Hur’s business.

When asked about the report earlier Thursday in a private moment with a handful of House Democrats ahead of his speech at their suburban Virginia retreat, Biden responded angrily, according to two people familiar with his comments, saying, “You think I would f—— forget the day my son died?” The people did not want to address the matter publicly and spoke of condition of anonymity.

Biden pointedly noted that he had sat for five hours of in-person interviews in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October attack on Israel, when “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”

“I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed,” Biden said.

The investigation into Biden is separate from special counsel Jack Smith’s inquiry into the handling of classified documents by Trump after Trump left the White House. Smith’s team has charged Trump with illegally retaining top secret records at his Mar-a-Lago home and then obstructing government efforts to get them back. Trump has said he did nothing wrong.

Hur, in his report, said there were “several material distinctions” between the Trump and Biden cases, noting that Trump refused to return classified documents to the government and allegedly obstructed the investigation, while Biden willfully handed them over.

Hur, a former U.S. Attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland as special counsel in January 2023 following an initial discovery by Biden staff of classified records in Washington office space. Subsequent property searches by the FBI, all coordinated voluntarily by Biden staff, that turned up additional sensitive documents from his time as vice president and senator.

Hur’s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in parts of Biden’s Delaware home and in his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were retained by “mistake.”

Biden could not have been prosecuted as a sitting president, but Hur’s report states that he would not recommend charges against Biden regardless.

“We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president,” the report said.

But investigators did find evidence of willful retention and disclosure of a subset of records found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware house, including in a garage, office and basement den. The files pertain to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration that Biden had vigorously opposed. He kept records that documented his position, including a classified letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday.

Documents found in a box in Biden’s Delaware garage have classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information Level and “other materials of great significance to him and that he appears to have personally used and accessed.” Hur, though, wrote that there was a ”shortage of evidence” to prove that Biden placed the documents in the box and knew they were there.

Some of the classified information related to Afghanistan was shared with a ghostwriter with whom he published memoirs in 2007 and 2017. As part of the probe, investigators reviewed a recording of a February 2017 conversation between Biden and his ghostwriter in which Biden can be heard saying that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

Prosecutors believe Biden’s comment, made at a time he was renting a home in Virginia, referred to the same documents FBI agents later found in his Delaware house. Though Biden sometimes skipped over presumptively classified material while reading notebook entries to his ghostwriter, the report says, at other times he read aloud classified entries “verbatim.”

The report said there was some evidence to suggest that Biden knew he could not keep classified handwritten notes at home after leaving office, citing his deep familiarity “with the measures taken to safeguard classified information and the need for those measures to prevent harm to national security.” Yet, prosecutors say, he kept notebooks containing classified information in unlocked drawers at home.

“He had strong motivations to do so and to ignore the rules for properly handing the classified information in his notebooks,” the report said. “He consulted the notebooks liberally during hours of discussions with his ghostwriter and viewed them as highly private and valued possessions with which he was unwilling to part.”

While the report removes legal jeopardy for the president, it is nonetheless an embarrassment for Biden, who placed competency and experience at the core of his rationale to voters to send him to the Oval Office. It says that Biden was known to remove and keep classified material from his briefing books for future use and that his staff struggled and sometimes failed to get those records back.

Even so, Hur took pains to note the multiple reasons why prosecutors did not believe they could prove a criminal case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Those include Biden’s “limited memory” both during his 2017 recorded conversations with the ghostwriter and in an interview with investigators last year in which, prosecutors say, he could not immediately remember the years in which he served as vice president. Hur said it was possible Biden could have found those records at his Virginia home in 2017 and then forgotten about them soon after.

“Given Mr. Biden’s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence,” the report says

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” investigators wrote.

In addition, prosecutors say, Biden could have plausibly believed that the notebooks were his personal property and belonged to him, even if they contained classified information.

In an interview with prosecutors, the report said, Biden was emphatic with investigators that the notebooks were “my property” and that “every president before me has done the exact same thing.”

Special counsels are required under Justice Department regulations to submit confidential reports to the attorney general at the conclusion of their work. Such reports are then typically made public. The dual appointments in the Biden and Trump cases were seen as a way to insulate the Justice Department from claims of bias and conflict by placing the probes in the hands of specially named prosecutors.

Garland has worked assiduously to challenge Republican claims of a politicized Justice Department. He has named special counsels to investigate not only the president but also his son, Hunter, in a separate tax-and-gun prosecution that has resulted in criminal charges.

But in this case, Biden’s personal and White House lawyers strongly objected to the characterizations of Biden in the report and to the fact that so much derogatory information was released about an uncharged subject like the president.

Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer accused the special counsel of violating “well-established’ norms and “trashing” the president.

“The special counsel could not refrain from investigative excess, perhaps unsurprising given the intense pressures of the current political environment. Whatever the impact of those pressures on the final report, it flouts department regulations and norms,” he said in a statement.

But a public outcome was basically sealed once Garland appointed a special counsel.

Regulations require special counsels to produce confidential reports to the attorney general at the conclusion of their work. Those documents are then generally made public, even if they contain unflattering assessments of people not criminally charged.

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The panel of three judges, two of whom were appointed by President Joe Biden, also questioned whether they had jurisdiction to consider the appeal at this point in the case, raising the prospect that Trump’s effort could be dismissed.

During lengthy arguments, the judges repeatedly pressed Trump’s lawyer to defend claims that Trump was shielded from criminal charges for acts that he says fell within his official duties as president. That argument was rejected last month by a lower-court judge overseeing the case against Trump, and the appeals judges suggested through their questions that they, too, were dubious that the Founding Fathers envisioned absolute immunity for presidents after they leave office.

“I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law,” said Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush.

The outcome carries enormous ramifications both for the landmark criminal case against Trump and for the broader, and legally untested, question of whether an ex-president can be prosecuted for acts committed in the White House. It will also likely set the stage for further appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, which last month declined a request to weigh in but could still get involved later.

A swift decision is crucial for special counsel Jack Smith and his team, who are eager to get the case — now paused pending the appeal — to trial before the November election. But Trump’s lawyers, in addition to seeking to get the case dismissed, are hoping to benefit from a protracted appeals process that could delay the trial well past its scheduled March 4 start date, including until potentially after the election.

Underscoring the importance to both sides, Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner, attended Tuesday’s arguments even though the Iowa caucuses are just one week away and despite the fact that there’s no requirement that defendants appear in person for such proceedings.

In his first court appearance in Washington — one of four cities where he faces criminal prosecutions — since his arraignment in August, Trump sat at the defense table, watching intently and occasionally taking notes and speaking with his lawyers.

He’s already signaling that he could use the appearance to portray himself as the victim of a politicized justice system. Though there’s no evidence Biden has had any influence on the case, Trump’s argument could resonate with Republican voters in Iowa as they prepare to launch the presidential nomination process.

On his way to court on Tuesday, he said in a fundraising email that he was going “to fight for my rights as Crooked Joe and his Special Counsel of ‘war crimes prosecutors’ are attempting to strip them from me,.”

Former presidents enjoy broad immunity from lawsuits for actions taken as part of their official White House duties. But because no former president before Trump has ever been indicted, courts have never before addressed whether that protection extends to criminal prosecution.

Trump’s lawyers insist that it does, arguing that courts have no authority to scrutinize a president’s official acts and that the prosecution of their client represents a dramatic departure from more than two centuries of American history that would open the door to future “politically motivated” cases. They filed a similar motion on Monday in another criminal case against Trump in Georgia.

“To authorize the prosecution of a president for official acts would open a Pandora’s box from which this nation may never recover,” said D. John Sauer, a lawyer for Trump, asserting that, under the government’s theory, presidents could be prosecuted for giving Congress “false information” to enter war or for authorizing drone strikes targeting U.S. citizens abroad.

He later added: “If a president has to look over his shoulder or her shoulder every time he or she has to make a controversial decision and wonder if ‘after I leave office, am I going to jail for this when my political opponents take power?’ that inevitably dampens the ability of the president.”

But the judges were skeptical about those arguments. When Sauer asserted that under the Constitution, Trump could not be prosecuted for conduct for which he had been impeached and acquitted before Congress, Judge Florence Pan suggested that that argument actually undermined his absolute immunity claim because he was conceding situations in which an ex—president could be charged.

“Once you concede that presidents can be prosecuted under some circumstances, your separation of powers argument falls away,” Pan said.

Aside from the merits of the arguments, the judges jumped right into questioning Trump’s lawyer over whether the court has jurisdiction to hear the appeal at this time. Sauer said presidential immunity is clearly a claim that is meant to be reviewed before trial. Smith’s team also said that it wants the court to decide the case now.

Smith’s team maintains that presidents are not entitled to absolute immunity and that, in any event, the acts Trump is alleged in the indictment to have taken — including scheming to enlist fake electors in battleground states won by Biden and pressing his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — fall far outside a president’s official job duties.

“The president has a unique constitutional role but he is not above the law,” prosecutor James Pearce said, adding that a case in which a former president is alleged to have sought to overturn an election “is not the place to recognize some novel form of immunity.”

When Judge Henderson asked how the court could write its opinion in a way that doesn’t open the “floodgates” of investigations against ex-presidents, Pearce said he did not anticipate “a sea change of vindictive tit-for-tat prosecutions in the future.”

It’s not clear how quickly the panel from the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from the D.C. Circuit will rule, though it has signaled that it intends to work fast.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected the immunity arguments, ruling on Dec. 1 that the office of the presidency does not confer a “‘get-out-of-jail-free pass.’” Trump’s lawyers appealed that decision, but Smith’s team, determined to keep the case on schedule, sought to leapfrog the appeals court by asking the Supreme Court to fast-track the immunity question. The justices declined to get involved.

The appeal is vital to a broader Trump strategy of trying to postpone the case until after the November election when a victory could empower him to order the Justice Department to abandon the prosecution or even to seek a pardon for himself. He faces three other criminal cases, in state and federal court, though the Washington case is scheduled for trial first.

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