By LINLEY SANDERS

WASHINGTON (AP) — American sympathies in the Middle East have shifted dramatically toward the Palestinians, according to new Gallup polling, after decades of overwhelming support for the Israelis.

That shift accelerated during the war in Gaza. Three years ago, 54% of Americans sympathized more with the Israelis, compared to 31% for the Palestinians.

President Trump says Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement for Hamas to release all remaining hostages and for Israel to withdraw its forces to an “agreed upon line.” CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe reports.

WASHINGTON — The man accused of fatally shooting two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington outside a Jewish museum told police after his arrest, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” federal authorities said Thursday in announcing charges in the killings they called a targeted act of terrorism.

Elias Rodriguez, 31, shouted “Free Palestine” as he was led away after his arrest, according to charging documents that provided chilling new details of the Wednesday night shootings in the nation’s capital that killed an American woman and an Israeli man who had just left an event at the museum. They were set to become engaged.

The stunning attack prompted Israeli missions to beef up their security and lower their flags to half-staff. It came as Israel pursues another major offensive in the Gaza Strip in the war with Hamas that has heightened tensions across the Middle East and internationally, and that law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned could inspire violence in the U.S.

Rodriguez faces charges of murder of foreign officials and other crimes and did not enter a plea during a perfunctory court appearance. Additional charges are likely, prosecutors said, as authorities continue to investigate the killings as both a hate crime against the Jewish community and terrorism.

“Violence against anyone based on their religion is an act of cowardice. It is not an act of a hero,” said Jeanine Pirro, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated, especially in the nation’s capital.”

The two people killed were identified as Yaron Lischinsky, an Israeli citizen, and Sarah Milgrim, an American. They were a young couple about to be engaged, according to Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Those who knew them paid tribute to the pair Thursday as warm, vibrant and curious, dedicated to promoting peace and aspiring to bridge cultural and religious divides.

“Sarah and Yaron were stolen from us,” said Ted Deutch, the chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, which organized the event. “Moments before they were murdered, they were smiling, laughing and enjoying an event with colleagues and friends. We are in shock and heartbroken as we attempt to process this immense tragedy.”

An FBI affidavit made public Thursday presents the killing as calculated and planned, with authorities alleging that Rodriguez flew to the Washington region from Chicago on Tuesday with a handgun in his checked luggage. He purchased a ticket for the event about three hours before it started, the affidavit said.

The couple were leaving the Capital Jewish Museum when the suspect, who witnesses said had been behaving suspiciously by pacing outside, approached a group of four people and opened fire. Surveillance video showed Rodriguez advancing closer to the two victims as they fell to the ground, leaning over them and firing additional shots. He even appeared to reload before jogging off, the FBI said.

After the shooting, the suspect went inside the museum and stated that he “did it.” He was no longer armed by the time he was taken into custody, according to the affidavit.

“I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed,” he spontaneously said. He also told detectives that he admired an active-duty Air Force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in February 2024, describing the man as “courageous” and a “martyr,” court documents said.

Investigators said they were still working to corroborate the authenticity of writings purported to be authored by Rodriguez, an apparent reference to a document circulating online that expressed outrage over Israel’s conduct in the war. The FBI is also contacting associates, family members and co-workers.

Rodriguez appeared in federal court in Washington in a white jail suit and listened impassively as the charges and possible punishments, which include the death penalty, were read. At a home listed in public records for Rodriguez’s mother in suburban Chicago, a sign taped on the door Thursday afternoon asked for privacy.

The shooting followed the Jewish advocacy group’s annual Young Diplomats reception at the museum, which the couple had attended.

Yoni Kalin and Katie Kalisher were inside the museum when they heard gunshots, and a man came inside looking distressed. Kalin said people came to his aid and brought him water, thinking he needed help, without realizing he was the suspect. When police arrived, he pulled out a red kaffiyeh, the Palestinian headscarf, and repeatedly yelled, “Free Palestine,’” Kalin said.

“This event was about humanitarian aid,” Kalin said. “How can we actually help both the people in Gaza and the people in Israel? How can we bring together Muslims and Jews and Christians to work together to actually help innocent people? And then here he is just murdering two people in cold blood.”

Milgrim, from Overland Park, Kansas, was “warm and compassionate, committed to peace building and passionate about sustainability and people-to-people relations,” Deutch said.

A former youth director at Congregation Beth Torah recalled her as a brilliant girl with a perpetual smile and a sense of purpose.

“She had a passion for Judaism and for Israel, and she wanted to do some good,” said Marcia Rittmaster, the former youth director. She recommended Milgrim for a Jewish leadership internship upon the young woman’s graduation from high school.

Lischinsky grew up partly in the German city of Nuremberg and moved to Israel at 16.

“He was a Christian, a true lover of Israel, served in the (Israel Defense Forces), and chose to dedicate his life to the State of Israel and the Zionist cause,” said Ron Prosor, who taught Lischinsky at Israel’s Reichman University. Lischinsky earned a master’s degree in government, diplomacy and strategy there. “He embodied the Judeo-Christian values and set an example for young people worldwide.”

A friend, David Boskey, recalled Lischinsky as someone unafraid to broach hard questions in order to interrogate his own convictions. He met Lischinsky in 2017 in Jerusalem at a Messianic Jewish congregation, where they would often end up talking together about life and faith, Boskey said.

“He was looking to see where he was going to go in life, asking questions about calling and about identity and about what he was going to study, where he was going to work,” Boskey said.

On Instagram, his bio included a yellow ribbon symbolizing the struggle to free the hostages taken by Hamas during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the war in the Gaza Strip.

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An earlier version incorrectly said that the suspect in the shooting had been charged with shoplifting in Chicago.

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Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists Maya Sweedler, Zeke Miller, Michael Biesecker, Gary Fields, Michael Balsamo, Mike Pesoli, Nathan Ellgren, Dan Huff and Sarah Brumfield in Washington; as well as Jennifer Peltz in New York; Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri; Nick Ingram in Overland Park, Kansas; Hallie Golden in Seattle; Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel, Stefanie Dazio in Berlin; and Natalie Melzer in Nahriya, Israel.

Houthi rebels in Yemen say an airstrike hit the capital Sana’a after the Iran-backed group claimed to have attacked Israel. Both sides have increased fighting in recent days. Meanwhile, a new front has opened up in the war in Gaza — a battle of the elements. Holly Williams reports.

Israeli forces have reportedly launched more airstrikes over Syria, according to the U.K.-based war monitor, the Syrian Observatory. The strikes targeted missile warehouses and other former Syrian army sites along the country’s coastline. Israel has not commented on the strikes. CBS News foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tyab has more.

When the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Harvard African and African American Resistance Organization put together an infographic for Instagram, their goal was to showcase the historic connections between the Black and Palestinian liberation movements.

They gathered old images of Black activists who had been vocal advocates of the Palestinian cause, including Angela Davis and Malcolm X.

They quoted Nelson Mandela: “Freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

And they plucked an old cartoon from the archives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — one that roiled the civil rights movement when it first appeared in 1967 and has lost none of its ability to outrage. The drawing shows a white hand, marked with a dollar sign inside a Star of David, tightening nooses around the necks of a Black man and an Arab man.

Drawn by Black artist Herman “Kofi” Bailey, it first appeared in a SNCC newsletter alongside an article fiercely critical of Zionism, leading to charges of antisemitism and furious condemnation of the SNCC from Jewish community leaders.

More than half a century later, the cartoon ignited another firestorm when it was posted on Instagram — and reposted by Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

“With Professors like these, it’s easy to see why we Jewish students don’t feel safe in class,” wrote Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, a Jewish student at Harvard Divinity School who sued the university last month, alleging it had failed to combat “severe and pervasive” antisemitism on campus.

“This should be called what it is,” Harvard Chabad posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Reprehensible. Bigoted. Hateful.”

The pro-Palestinian activists deleted the original post Monday and reposted it without the offensive cartoon. “Our mutual goals for liberation will always include the Jewish community and we regret inadvertently including an image that played upon antisemitic tropes,” the activists said.

After Harvard issued a statement condemning the post as “despicable” and warning of disciplinary action, the activists published a joint statement Tuesday saying the image “violated our internal standards and betrayed our fundamental values of justice and liberation.”

“It should never have been published,” they said. “We wholeheartedly apologize for the immense harm we caused.”

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There were no apologies when the cartoon was originally published in 1967.

Israel was celebrating its victory in the Six-Day War when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked Bailey, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Los Angeles, to illustrate a contentious article in its summer newsletter.

The Atlanta-based civil rights group was known for its sit-ins against segregation in the Deep South, but by 1967 it had shifted to a more militant Black nationalism and asked all white members to leave. In the article headlined “The Palestine Problem,” SNCC called Israel an “illegal” state.

“Do you know that Zionism, which is a world-wide nationalistic Jewish movement, organized, planned and created the ‘State of Israel’ by sending Jewish immigrants from Europe into Palestine (the heart of the Arab world) to take over land and homes belonging to the Arabs?” the SNCC wrote.

In Bailey’s cartoon, the hand marked with the Star of David holds the ropes around the necks of the American boxer Muhammad Ali and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the background, an arm holding a curved machete — labeled “third world liberation movement” — prepared to cut the rope and free the men.

The cartoon and the article plunged SNCC into a crisis, according to Michael R Fischbach, a professor of history at Randolph-Macon College and author of “Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color.”

Donations had already dropped as the SNCC purged white members. Its Atlanta headquarters would soon struggle to pay utility bills as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and a string of national Jewish groups denounced the SNCC. “Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism whether it comes from the Ku Klux Klan or from extremist Negro groups, ‘Snick’ included,” Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee, said in 1967.

But the SNCC defended the cartoon. The dollar sign and the Star of David were not a statement about Jews, SNCC claimed in a subsequent newsletter, but symbols of Zionism strangling Arabs and the United States strangling Muhammad Ali as well as Arabs.

“Both signs were placed on the hand to indicate the close relationship of the United States with ZIONISM and U.S. support of the Zionist State — Israel,” SNCC said.

In internal documents, Fischbach said, SNCC leaders described the hostile reaction to the cartoon as akin to a lynching. The idea that SNCC was antisemitic was a “big lie,” SNCC argued, propagated by a “wolf pack” of “establishment Jewish organizations” and progressive Jews who were “out to get SNCC’s blood.”

“Some would say there’s no misunderstanding: You’re targeting Jews as money grubbing,” Fischbach said. “SNCC denied that.”

Fischbach said he was “somewhat stunned” that Harvard students shared the cartoon in 2024.

“By using symbols like dollar signs and Stars of David, one can well imagine that they were going to get a hostile reaction.… It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that, whatever you meant, this is really going to rankle people.”

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The cartoon is just the latest controversy to engulf the Ivy League school.

The day after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, at kibbutzes and a music festival, many students, alumni and faculty were outraged when the Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee declared on social media that more than 30 student organizations “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Israel’s subsequent attacks have killed more than 29,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the Gaza Strip, according to the Healthy Ministry in the Hamas-run territory — inspiring more waves of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Even before the latest war between Israel and Hamas, Palestinian solidarity had become one of the most vigorous political movements on American college campuses. As dueling protests erupted, critics accused university leaders of failing to respond coherently to a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia.

In January, Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president amid mounting criticism of her performance at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing and plagiarism accusations. Harvard’s interim president soon announced the creation of two separate task forces to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.

This week, Alan M. Garber called the cartoon “flagrantly antisemitic.” In a letter to the campus community, he said, “Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us.”

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Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and chair of Israel studies at UCLA, found the reappearance of the cartoon depressing, showing how little progress has been made in getting people to avoid using antisemitic tropes. But at least, he said, Harvard activists removed the image and expressed remorse.

“When people are willing to apologize for invoking antisemitic tropes or stereotypes, we should accept that,” Waxman said.

“Often, those who are on the left think because of their anti-racist credentials and their progressive values, they aren’t going to be susceptible” to the tropes deeply embedded in society, he said. “They might be less careful because somehow they’re under the illusion they’re immune from it because of their political values.”

After the Harvard student activists updated their post and removed the cartoon, they stated that “our mutual goals for liberation will always include the Jewish community.”

In a separate apology, they vowed to “educate our membership about antisemitism in all its forms, including imagery and tropes that harm Jewish communities.”

Some critics were quick to note, however, that the Harvard activists replaced the offensive cartoon with a photo of Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, a Black nationalist and former SNCC leader who has long been accused of antisemitism. In the 1980s, Ture became infamous for stating, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”

Many students and faculty are tired of the heightened emotional rhetoric sweeping U.S. campuses — a style of arguing that one observer of higher education described this month as “the hyperbolic style in American academe” — “breathless, declaratory, at once aggressive and aggrieved.”

On Wednesday, the Harvard Crimson published an editorial titled “The Antisemitic Cartoon Is Everything Wrong With Discourse on Campus.”

It called on students and faculty to move past chanting and shouting and build a new campus discourse that could “replace this pain, anger, and unease with empathy and a willingness to learn.”

“It’s time to talk to each other; to be mindful of what we say and how we say it; to engage with the best intentions and see the best intentions in others; to seek out uncomfortable conversations with courage and humility,” the editorial board wrote.

“Imperfect, frustrating, and slippery as it is,” the board wrote, “discourse is often all we have.”