North Korea successfully tested a solid-fuel engine for its new-type intermediate-range hypersonic missile, state media reported Wednesday, claiming a progress in efforts to develop a more powerful, agile missile designed to strike faraway U.S. targets in the region.

The House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has hit a crossroads, lacking the political appetite from within Republican ranks to go forward with an actual impeachment, but facing political pressure to deliver after months of work.

The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, has signaled an interest in another direction. He is stopping short of drawing up articles of impeachment against the president, but eying criminal referrals of Biden family wrongdoing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's former White House adviser and his son-in-law, praised the "very valuable" potential of Gaza's "waterfront property," suggesting that Israel should remove civilians while it "cleans up" the area.

"Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods," Kushner said in an interview dated Feb. 15, posted earlier this month on the YouTube channel of the Middle East Initiative, a program of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and reported first on Tuesday by The Guardian. "If you think about all the money that's gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done?"

Explosions and shootings shook the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital and surrounding neighborhoods as Israeli forces stormed through the facility for a second day Tuesday. The military said it had killed 50 Hamas militants in the hospital, but it could not be independently confirmed that the dead were combatants.

The raid was a new blow to the Shifa medical complex, which had only partially resumed operations after a destructive Israeli raid in November. Thousands of Palestinian patients, medical staff and displaced people were trapped inside the sprawling complex Tuesday as heavy fighting between troops and Hamas fighters raged in nearby districts.

Purim is widely depicted as the most thoroughly joyful of Jewish holidays — highlighted by celebrations that include costumes, skits, noisemakers and varying degrees of rowdiness.

It celebrates the biblical story of how a plot to exterminate Jews in Persia was thwarted, and thus is embraced as an affirmation of Jewish survival throughout history. For many Jews, it will have extra significance this year during a war in Gaza triggered by the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and took about 250 others hostage.

Turkey carried out a new round of airstrikes targeting Kurdish militants in neighboring Iraq on Tuesday, Turkey's defense ministry said, hours after a Turkish soldier was killed and four others were wounded in an attack in the region.

Turkey often launches strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq it believes to be affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a banned Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s.

Mourners held funeral prayers Wednesday morning outside a hospital in central Gaza for 28 people killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes on urban refugee camps.

Associated Press footage showed mourners praying over the bodies, which were wrapped in funeral shrouds, before the bodies were taken away in donkey carts for burial.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he remains determined to carry out a ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, despite the misgivings of U.S. President Joe Biden.

Netanyahu told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that he would wait to hear proposals from the U.S. “out of respect to the president” about ways to protect the civilian population in Rafah before ordering the operation.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant will meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin next week in Washington, a U.S. defense official confirmed Tuesday.

The official, who spoke under condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public, said Austin and Gallant plan to discuss securing the release of Hamas-held hostages, humanitarian aid to Gaza and protecting those in Rafah.

Global heat records were "smashed" last year, the U.N. confirmed Tuesday, with 2023 rounding out the hottest decade on record, as heatwaves stalked oceans and key glaciers suffered record ice loss.

"The state of the climate in 2023 gave ominous new significance to the phrase 'off the charts'," the World Meteorological Organization said as it published an annual report on the global climate, confirming that last year was the hottest on record, and 2014-2023 was the hottest decade ever measured.