THE WAR ROOM: As many as 25 people were killed and 50 wounded yesterday in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced Palestinians in a coastal community of the southern Gaza Strip, near the city of Rafah. The Israeli military, as has become their custom after such reports, said “the incident is under review.”

  Israeli forces have fought further into Rafah in their mission to kill the remaining Hamas battalions. The city is heavily damaged and the border crossing station into Egypt is gutted by fire, further complicating the ability to get civilian aid into Gaza.

  Much of Rafah is reduced to rubble and bomb craters as were Gaza City and Khan Younis. When and if this is over, hundreds of thousands of people will have no homes or permanent shelter.

DOMESTIC PEACE: Just a week after legalizing a device that turns an assault rifle into a machine gun, the Supreme Court did a turnabout, upholding a Texas law that prohibits domestic abusers from owning a gun.

  Conservative Clarence Thomas was the only dissenter.

  Writing for the majority, Justice John Roberts said the Second Amendment right to have a gun can be suspended while a domestic partner is under a restraining order. He said, “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.”

  Anti-gun activists say the decision provides a foothold for legal restrictions on gun possession and ownership.

  Thomas is what’s called an “originalist” — decisions today need foundation going back 200 years. He wrote in his dissent, “The court and government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence.” 

ORANGE ALERT: While continuing to attack President Biden and Democratic leaders, the Republicans who control the House have forbidden any mention of Donald Trump’s felony conviction, citing the body’s traditional rules of “decorum” even though Trump’s criminal record is not an insult, it’s a fact.

  References to Trump, his court cases, and his conviction have been eliminated from the Congressional record. “When they censor any mention of Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, they are essentially trying to ban a fact,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told The NY Times. “I am not aware of any precedent where factual statements have been banned in our lifetime.”

  He described the ban on mentioning Trump’s criminal status as “Orwellian.”

THE SPIN RACK: As many as 450 people have died in the heat during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis zeroed out the state’s $32 million budget for grants to the arts. The arts get nothing and DeSantis did not give an explanation. — A Nevada judge threw out the state’s case against six Republicans who falsely claimed to be presidential electors and tried to declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election. The judge said that prosecutors had filed in the wrong venue. The case was filed in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, but lawyers for the defendants say the “electors” met in Carson City, the state capital, which is in a different county. — Donald Trump’s Truth Social Media company is worth half what it was the day its stock went public. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Back on June 12 a New York City Department of Transportation truck hit and decapitated an elderly pedestrian. The driver was seen kneeling on the road, wailing with grief over what had happened.

  Now, the New York Post reveals that the victim was a mobster from the Genovese crime family, 86-year-old Anthony “Tony Cakes” Conigliaro. A police source told the Post, “He spent his life looking over his shoulder but he forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.” 

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