The civilian suffering in Gaza has gripped the world. But their plight shows no sign of easing. Israel has softened its initial 24-hour deadline for more than 1 million Palestinians to evacuate Gaza City and its environs for the strip’s south. But as fears of a ground invasion persist, the death toll from airstrikes is climbing, the hospitals are direly short on supplies, and Israel and Egypt’s closure of crossings into the coastal enclave have created extreme shortages of food and fuel. Here’s what you need to know this morning. • Israeli and Egyptian officials agreed to let U.S. citizens in Gaza cross into Egypt between noon and 5 p.m.today. • But Egypt and Jordan, which respectively border Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, resisted calls to create a broader escape route into the countries for Palestinian residents. • Israel did open two corridors for Palestinians to move to Gaza’s south, pledging it would not conduct airstrikes on those routes between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. local time (3 to 9 a.m. ET). • The Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israeli airstrikes killed 70 Palestinians who were trying to follow the call to move south. In total, Gaza officials have counted 2,215 Palestinians, including 724 children, killed in Gaza since the war began a week ago, and nearly 9,000 wounded. • President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both expressed concern about the toll of Israel’s actions in Gaza on its citizens. Leftist lawmakers asked Biden to lean on Israel to follow international law and work to establish a humanitarian corridor. • Five Israelis were injured, two seriously, by a rocket strike on a town near the Gaza border. • Israel’s military and Shin Bet internal security service said they had killed Ali Kachi, a Hamas commander who helped lead last Saturday’s attacks on Israel’s border towns. Kachi was among the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners Israeli released in 2011 in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been taken captive by Hamas five years earlier. • A Reuters journalist, Issam Abdallah, was killed in an airstrike on Lebanon; six other journalists were injured. The airstrike came from the direction of Israel, although Reuters could not confirm its source; the IDF said it would investigate. | 