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How Gloria Steinem’s lifechanging stay in India shaped her approach to feminism

The activist said her two years studying and travelling in country ‘made me who I am’

When Gloria Steinem’s plane touched down in Bombay in 1957, she could not have known that her stay in India would become what she later called a “pivotal, life-dividing event [that] made me who I am”.

She was 22, with a degree in government from Smith college and was travelling on a Chester Bowles fellowship.

2026-09-05 00:00:21

Death on the road to Rafah: the night the IDF targeted World Central Kitchen aid workers

The Israeli army had helped plan the delivery of food aid on 1 April 2024, but things went wrong from the beginning and ended in seven deaths

• Exclusive: why seven international aid workers were killed in Israeli airstrike

On the evening of 1 April 2024, a team of aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK) stood on Gaza’s Mediterranean shore overseeing the unloading of a barge full of desperately needed food on a makeshift jetty made of sand and rubble.

The Gaza war had been raging for six months and Israel’s closure of land crossings had left the whole territory facing the threat of famine. WCK and local Palestinian contractors had constructed the jetty out of everything they could lay their hands on, including debris from the bombed house of one of the contractors, so that the pallets of humanitarian assistance could be delivered by boat from Cyprus.

2026-09-05 00:00:21

‘Guilt by association’: why seven international aid workers were killed in Israeli airstrike

Exclusive: Guardian investigation reveals targeting of World Central Kitchen convoy was result of widely used military tactic

• Death on the road to Rafah: the night the IDF targeted World Central Kitchen aid workers

Seven aid workers killed in an airstrike in Gaza were marked as targets under an Israeli military practice of establishing guilt by association, a Guardian investigation shows.

A top Israeli military prosecutor announced last month that he would not pursue criminal proceedings for the April 2024 incident in which drones fired missiles at three clearly marked World Central Kitchen (WCK) cars soon after they had escorted a food aid delivery to Gaza. Three British humanitarian workers along with an Australian, a Palestinian, a Pole and a dual US-Canadian national were killed.

2026-09-05 00:00:20