The White House has dialled back US President Donald Trump’s claim that federal workers were already being fired amid the ongoing United States government shutdown.
The backtrack on Monday came as the government shutdown stretched into its sixth day, with Republicans and Democrats failing to reach a breakthrough to pass a budget that would fund an array of government agencies and services.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Democrats have taken a hard line in the negotiations, seeking to undo healthcare cuts in tax legislation recently passed by Republicans.
Both parties have blamed the other for the impasse, while the Trump administration has taken the atypical step of threatening to fire, not just furlough, some of the estimated 750,000 federal workers affected by the shutdown.
On Sunday, Trump appeared to suggest that those layoffs were “taking place right now”. He blamed Democrats for the firings.
But on Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump was referring to the “hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have been furloughed”, not yet fired, amid the shutdown.
Still, she added, “the Office of Management and Budget is continuing to work with agencies on who, unfortunately, is going to have to be laid off if this shutdown continues”.
House Speaker blames Democrats, halts negotiations on funding
As salaries for hundreds of thousands of public sector employees were set to be withheld starting Friday, lawmakers indicated there had been little progress.
In the US Senate, another set of long-shot votes to fund the government were scheduled for late Monday.
Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told members of his party not to come to Congress unless the Democrats give way. He told reporters on Monday they should stop asking him about negotiations, saying it was up to the opposing party to “stop the madness”.
“There’s nothing for us to negotiate. The House has done its job,” Johnson said, referring to a funding bill passed by the chamber that has proved a non-starter in the Senate.
Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, continued to portray Republicans as derelict.
“House Republicans think protecting the healthcare of everyday Americans is less important than their vacation,” he said. “We strongly disagree.”
With Republicans controlling the White House and holding slight majorities in both the House and the Senate, the funding bill is one of Democrats’ few points of leverage. In the Senate, Republicans hold 53 seats, but need 60 votes to pass the legislation.
They are using the position to push for the reversal of a tax law passed earlier this year that strips 11 million Americans of healthcare coverage, mainly through cuts to the Medicaid programme for low-income families, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Democrats have said another four million US citizens will lose healthcare next year if Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies are not extended, with another 24 million Americans seeing their premiums double.
Since the shutdown began on October 1, several services have been suspended as agency funding has run out. Others face a funding cliff. That includes the $8bn Special Supplemental Nutrition Programme for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which could run out of funding to provide vouchers to buy infant formula and other essentials to low-income families within two weeks.
Federal workers deemed “essential” have remained on the job, but face working without pay until a resolution is reached. Military personnel could begin missing their paycheques after mid-October, advocacy groups have warned.
The agencies hit hardest by furloughs include the Environmental Protection Agency, the space agency NASA , and the Education, Commerce and Labor departments.
On Monday, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the government has seen “a slight tick up in sick calls” from air traffic controllers in certain areas since the shutdown began. That could lead to disruptions in air travel, he said.
“Then you’ll see delays that come from that,” he said. “If we have additional sick calls, we will reduce the flow consistent with a rate that’s safe for the American people.”
The US Transportation Department has also said that funds from a US government programme that subsidises commercial air service to rural airports were also set to expire as soon as Sunday.
On the same day Corona Centennial was playing Mater Dei in football, the sounds of baseballs coming off aluminum bats could be heard from the Centennial batting cage. Only in sunny Southern California does baseball keep going month after month. On this occasion, the Huskies are trying to keep up in the talent-laden Big VIII League that includes powerhouses Corona and Norco.
Centennial, which finished in third place last season, has three sophomores who started and performed well as freshmen: Infielder Ethan Miller (.298 batting average), infelder Ethan Lebreton (.304) and outfielder Jesse Mendoza (.314).
It was an Ethan-to-Ethan double play combination at shortstop and second base for much of the year. All that experience hitting against the likes of Seth Hernandez and facing a Corona team that had three first-round draft picks should pay off in the spring.
One baseball player absent was the starting center fielder, Jaden Walk-Green, who was busy on the football field getting two interceptions and kicking two field goals in a 43-36 upset of Mater Dei.
“I’m everything. I’m the utility player,” Walk-Green said.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].
Israeli military says city in northern Gaza is now a ‘combat zone’, suspends daily pauses in fighting there that allowed delivery of humanitarian aid.
Published On 29 Aug 202529 Aug 2025
The Israeli military says it has begun the “initial stages” of its offensive on Gaza City, as it declared the largest urban centre in the besieged territory a “combat zone” and announced the suspension of daily pauses in fighting there that allowed the entry of humanitarian aid.
“We are not waiting. We have begun preliminary operations and the initial stages of the attack on Gaza City,” Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote in a post on X on Friday.
“We are currently operating with great force on the outskirts of the city,” he said.
The announcement came as the Israeli military confirmed it suspended so-called “tactical pauses” in its attacks on the city in northern Gaza that had previously allowed limited humanitarian operations there.
“Starting today at 10:00am (07:00 GMT), the tactical-local ceasefire of military activity will not apply to the Gaza City area, which constitutes a dangerous combat zone,” the military said on X.
Israeli forces have launched a sustained bombardment on Gaza City since early August, as the military prepares for a larger assault to seize Gaza’s largest urban centre – in an operation that could forcibly displace a million Palestinians to concentration zones in southern Gaza.
The relentless bombardment from the air and land has forced residents to flee to the western parts of the city, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has told Al Jazeera.
Gaza’s Civil Defence estimates that more than 1,000 residential buildings in the Zeitoun and Sabra neighbourhoods of Gaza City have been flattened since August 6.
Residents described relentless bombardment and attacks from helicopters. “They launched a firebelt attack only 150 metres (500ft) away from us. They scorched the entire area,” said Nihad Madoukh from Sheikh Radwan in northwestern Gaza City, speaking to Al Jazeera. “It was very scary bombardment.”
Displaced resident Ahmed Moqat said he had been moving constantly to escape Israeli attacks. “Here’s the debris that fell last night next to my head,” he said. “Now I will go out in the street, only God knows where I will go.”
Dozens killed across Gaza
At least 41 Palestinians, including six aid seekers, were killed in attacks across Gaza on Friday, medical sources told Al Jazeera.
Palestinian health workers told Al Jazeera that three of the aid seekers were shot dead by Israeli forces near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza on Friday.
Medical sources said Israeli air strikes hit the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, killing at least five people and wounding dozens as they slept in tents.
“We were sleeping when the bombing happened,” said a man caring for his grandchildren, whose father was killed two months ago. “The strike hit our area … We took the wounded ourselves to Nasser Hospital before the ambulances arrived. Stop this war against us. Have mercy on the children.”
More than 62,600 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed by Israel in its nearly two-year war on Gaza, and at least 157,600 have been wounded, according to Palestinian health authorities.
The Israeli military says it has begun the “preliminary actions” of a planned ground offensive to capture and occupy all of Gaza City and already has a hold on its outskirts.
A military spokesman said troops were already operating in the Zeitoun and Jabalia areas to lay the groundwork for the offensive, which Defence Minister Israel Katz approved on Tuesday and which will be put to the security cabinet later this week.
About 60,000 reservists are being called up for the beginning of September to free up active-duty personnel for the operation.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City are expected to be ordered to evacuate and head to shelters in southern Gaza.
Many of Israel’s allies have condemned the plan, with French President Emmanuel Macron warning on Wednesday that it “can only lead to disaster for both peoples and risks plunging the entire region into a cycle of permanent war”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) meanwhile said further displacement and an intensification of hostilities “risk worsening an already catastrophic situation” for Gaza’s 2.1 million population.
Israel’s government announced its intention to conquer the entire Gaza Strip after indirect talks with Hamas on a ceasefire and hostage release deal broke down last month.
Speaking at a televised briefing on Wednesday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Brigadier General Effie Defrin said Hamas was “battered and bruised” after 22 months of war.
“We will deepen the damage to Hamas in Gaza City, a stronghold of governmental and military terror for the terrorist organisation,” he added. “We will deepen the damage to the terror infrastructure above and below the ground and sever the population’s dependence on Hamas.”
But Defrin said the IDF was “not waiting” to begin the operation.
“We have begun the preliminary actions, and already now, IDF troops are holding the outskirts of Gaza City.”
Two brigades were operating on the ground in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, where in recent days they had located an underground tunnel that contained weapons, and a third brigade was operating in the Jabalia area, he added.
In order to “minimise harm to civilians,” he said, Gaza City’s civilian population would be warned to evacuate for their safety.
A spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency, Mahmoud Bassal, told AFP news agency on Tuesday that the situation was “very dangerous and unbearable” in the city’s Zeitoun and Sabra neighbourhoods.
The agency reported that Israeli strikes and fire had killed 25 people across the territory on Wednesday. They included three children and their parents whose home in the Badr area of Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, was bombed, it said.
Defrin also said the IDF was doing everything possible to prevent harm to the 50 hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive. Their families have expressed fears that those in Gaza City could be endangered by a ground offensive.
The ICRC warned of a catastrophic situation for both Palestinian civilians and the hostages if military activity in Gaza intensified.
“After months of relentless hostilities and repeated displacement, the people in Gaza are utterly exhausted. What they need is not more pressure, but relief. Not more fear, but a chance to breathe. They must have access to the essentials to live in dignity: food, medical and hygiene supplies, clean water, and safe shelter,” a statement said.
“Any further intensification of military operations will only deepen the suffering, tear more families apart, and threaten an irreversible humanitarian crisis. The lives of hostages may also be put at risk,” it added.
It called for an immediate ceasefire and the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance across Gaza.
Mediators Qatar and Egypt are trying to secure a ceasefire deal and have presented a new proposal for a 60-day truce and the release of around half of the hostages, which Hamas said it had accepted on Monday.
Israel has not yet submitted a formal response, but Israeli officials insisted on Tuesday that they would no longer accept a partial deal and demanded a comprehensive one that would see all the hostages released.
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 62,122 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry. The ministry’s figures are quoted by the UN and others as the most reliable source of statistics available on casualties.
OCHOPEE, Fla. — Deportation flights from the remote Everglades immigration lockup known as ”Alligator Alcatraz″ have begun and are expected to increase soon, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday.
The first flights operated by the Department of Homeland Security have transferred about 100 detainees from the immigration detention center to other countries, DeSantis said during a news conference near the facility.
“You’re going to see the numbers go up dramatically,” he said.
Two or three flights have already departed, but officials didn’t say where those flights headed.
Critics have condemned the South Florida facility as cruel and inhumane. DeSantis and other Republican officials have defended it as part of the state’s aggressive push to support President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Building the facility in the Everglades and naming it after a notorious federal prison were meant as deterrents, DeSantis and other officials have said.
The White House has delighted in the area’s remoteness — about 50 miles west of Miami — and the fact that it is teeming with pythons and alligators. It hopes to send a message that repercussions will be severe if U.S. immigration laws are broken.
Trump has suggested that his administration could reopen Alcatraz, the notorious island prison in San Francisco Bay. The White House also has sent some immigrants awaiting deportation to a detention lockup in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and others to a megaprison in El Salvador.
The Everglades facility was built in a matter of days over 10 square miles. It features more than 200 security cameras and more than 5 miles of barbed wire. An adjacent runway makes it more convenient for homeland security officials to move detainees in and out of the site.
It currently holds about 2,000 people, with the potential to double the capacity, Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said Friday.
DeSantis wants the U.S. Justice Department to allow an immigration judge on site to speed up the deportation process.
“This was never intended to be something where people are just held,” he said. “The whole purpose is to be a place that can facilitate increased frequency and numbers of deportations.”
Critics have challenged federal and state officials’ contention that the detention center is just run by the state of Florida. Environmental groups suing to stop further construction and expansion demanded Thursday to see agreements or communications between state and federal officials and to visit the site.
Seewer writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mike Schneider contributed to this report.
It was only a matter of time before the major Hollywood studios started taking the fight to the artificial intelligence industry over its alleged abuse of intellectual property.
Last week, Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accusing the popular image generator of blatantly copying and profiting from copyrighted images of characters from franchises such as “Star Wars,” “Minions,” “Cars,” Marvel, “The Simpsons” and “Shrek.”
The complaint cited numerous examples, illustrated with dozens of striking photos, of San Francisco-based Midjourney’s technology being used to generate virtually indistinguishable copies of Darth Vader, Iron Man, Bart, Woody and Elsa, sometimes in frames quite similar to scenes from the actual movies and TV shows.
The lawsuit says Midjourney employed such images to promote its subscription service and encourage the use of its image generator. The companies are seeking unspecified monetary compensation, as well as a court order to stop Midjourney from further infringement, including by using studio-owned material to train its upcoming video tool.
“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” Disney and Universal’s lawyers wrote in the 110-page complaint. “Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing.”
The stakes of this battle are high, according to the studios. The AI company’s misuse of Disney and Universal’s intellectual property “threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts,” the court document said.
Midjourney has not responded to requests for comment.
AI companies have typically argued that they are protected by “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.
Midjourney founder David Holz in 2022 told Forbes that the company did not seek permission from copyright holders, saying “there isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from.”
This battle is a long time coming.
Artists — including screenwriters, animators, illustrators and other entertainment industry workers — have been raising the alarm for years about the threat of AI, not just to their actual jobs but to the work they create. AI models are trained on anything and everything that’s publicly available on the internet, which includes copyrighted material owned by studios or the artists themselves, they argue.
The Writers Guild of America last year called on the big entertainment companies to take legal action against tech giants and startups in order to put a stop to such “theft.” But this is the first time any of the major film studios have gone after an AI company for copyright infringement. They may not be the last.
The studios are following the lead of the New York Times and other publishers, who sued OpenAI and its backer Microsoft over alleged plagiarism. The major music labels have also taken AI firms to court over the use of copyrighted music. Studios are in an awkward position because they’re weighing the possibility of licensing their content to AI firms or using the technology for their own purposes.
Reid Southen, a Michigan-based film concept artist whose research on AI was cited at length in the lawsuit, said he hopes Disney and Universal’s complaint encourages others to take a similar stance.
“Hopefully, I think other studios are looking at what’s going on with Disney and Universal now, and considering, ‘Hey, what about our properties?’” said Southen, who has worked on studio films including “The Matrix Resurrections,” “The Hunger Games” and “Blue Beetle.” “If Universal and Disney think they have a strong enough case to pursue this, I would hope other studios would take note of that and maybe pursue it as well.”
Southen became part of the story in December 2023, after the release of Midjourney v6 started making waves online. He saw someone use the tech to generate an image of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, and he started messing around with it himself to see what kinds of copyrighted material he could prompt it to rip off. He posted the results on social media, which led AI researcher Gary Marcus to reach out.
Marcus and Southen published an in-depth article for IEEE Spectrum in January 2024, making the case that Midjourney and other well-funded AI firms were training their models on copyrighted work without their permission or compensation and spitting out images nearly identical to the studios’ own material.
That article illustrated how simple prompts could produce nearly exact replicas of famous film and TV characters.
The prompts didn’t necessarily need to ask for a particular character by name.
The researchers were able to coax uncanny images from AI with prompts as basic as “animated toys” (resulting in pictures of “Toy Story” characters) and “videogame plumber” (which turned up versions of Mario from “Super Mario”). According to Marcus and Southen, all it took was the phrase “popular movie screencap” to evoke a picture similar to an actual frame from “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” or “The Dark Knight.”
“It shows that they are very clearly trained on hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and YouTube videos and screen caps and all this stuff, because I was able to find matching screen caps and images, not just from trailers, but from deep in movies themselves,” Southen said.
The Midjourney examples were the most egregious, Southen said, but the company was not the only offender. For instance, OpenAI’s image generation technology DALL-E was also capable of producing “plagiaristic” images of copyrighted characters without prompting them specifically by name, Southen said, echoing the findings of his and Marcus’ IEEE Spectrum article.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The Disney and Universal lawsuit did not name OpenAI, which is also responsible for the video generator Sora that is trying to take the film business by storm.
Many chatbots and text-to-image tools have guardrails around intellectual property, but they clearly have limitations. Ask ChatGPT to create an image of Kermit the Frog, and it will flatly reject the request. However, for example, I was recently able to request a picture of a Muppet-like female pig character, and the result was not unlike Miss Piggy, though I wouldn’t quite say it was a one-for-one copy.
Southen argues that this is a sign of a serious flaw in large language model training — the fact that they’ve already been fed on so much publicly available data. “Sometimes it’s not giving you something that’s spot-on, but it’s giving you enough that you know that it knows what it’s doing,” he said. “Like, you know where it’s pulling from.”
In public comments, studio executives have made it clear that they’re not against AI as a whole. “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and compliance officer, in a statement on the lawsuit.
As media industry expert Peter Csathy put it in a recent newsletter, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do AI.
But even doing it the right way will be disruptive. Use of AI for storyboarding and pre-visualization could save millions of dollars, which translates to more job losses in the entertainment industry. Lionsgate and AMC Networks have announced deals to use AI to streamline operations and processes.
For artists like Southen, that’s a troubling reality. He said he has seen his annual income shrink in half since generative AI technology came on the scene.
“You can point at things like the strikes and other stuff going on, but the story is the same for most of the people that I know — that their income since all this stuff came has been dramatically impacted,” he said. “Work that was otherwise very steady for me for a long time is just nowhere to be found anymore.”
Newsletter
You’re reading the Wide Shot
Ryan Faughnder delivers the latest news, analysis and insights on everything from streaming wars to production — and what it all means for the future.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Stuff we wrote
Number of the week
Streaming just notched a significant milestone.
The technology’s share of total television usage overtook the combined viewership of broadcast and cable for the first time, according to Nielsen.
Streaming represented 44.8% of TV viewership in May 2025, the data firm said, marking a record, while broadcast clocked in at 20.1% and cable garnered 24.1% for a combined 44.2% going to linear viewing.
Nielsen cautioned that rankings may fluctuate because broadcast networks still command a tremendous share of eyeballs, particularly when NFL football airs.
Finally …
I caught some stellar acts at the Hollywood’s Bowl’s Blue Note Jazz Festival on Saturday. Shout-out to saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and bassist Derrick Hodge. Here’s Benjamin’s Tiny Desk Concert performance for NPR.
A Palestinian man was pictured with a GHF-branded food parcel in the southern city of Rafah on Tuesday
A controversial new aid distribution group backed by the US and Israel has begun working in Gaza.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said lorry loads of food had been delivered to secure sites on Monday and that distribution had begun. Hundreds of Palestinians collected food parcels from a site in southern city of Rafah on Tuesday.
The GHF, which uses armed American security contractors, aims to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid to the 2.1 million people in Gaza, where experts have warned of a looming famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade that was recently eased.
A UN spokesman said the operation was a “distraction from what is actually needed” and urged Israel to reopen all crossings.
The UN and many aid groups have refused to co-operate with GHF’s plans, which they say contradict humanitarian principles and appear to “weaponise aid”.
They have warned that the system will practically exclude those with mobility issues, force further displacement, expose thousands of people to harm, make aid conditional on political and military aims, and set an unacceptable precedent for aid delivery around the world.
Israel says an alternative to the current aid system is needed to stop Hamas stealing aid, which the group denies doing.
In a statement sent to journalists on Monday night, GHF announced that it had “commenced operations in Gaza” and delivered “truck loads of food to its Secure Distribution Sites, where distribution to the Gazan people began”.
“More trucks with aid will be delivered [on Tuesday], with the flow of aid increasing each day,” it added.
Handout photos showed three lorries laden with pallets of supplies at an unspecified location and just over a dozen men carrying away boxes.
The BBC has asked the GHF how many lorry loads of aid got in and how many people were able to pick up aid, but it has not yet received a response.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military said in a statement that two distribution sites located in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood of Rafah and the Morag Corridor, which separates the city from the rest of Gaza, had begun operating and distributing food to thousands of families.
Hundreds of Palestinians were seen queueing at the site in Tal al-Sultan, where food parcels were handed out by Palestinian workers.
“We stood in a long queue. We did not deal with the Israeli army or any American staff,” one recipient told a local journalist.
A Palestinian working with one of the local companies involved in the operation told the BBC that “dozens of Palestinian workers from three Palestinian companies are overseeing the distribution process, which runs daily from 09:00 to 19:00”.
The employee, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media, added: “The distribution is co-ordinated with five American security personnel, who are present on-site, but there are no Israelis involved in the process.”
But many Palestinians stayed away from the sites.
A displaced woman from the neighbouring city of Khan Younis expressed concern about having to cross Israeli military lines to collect aid from the GHF’s sites.
“We have no idea what awaits us there – whether we will return or be lost forever. We are being forced to risk our lives just to feed our children,” she told BBC Arabic’s Middle East Daily radio programme.
A man who was still living in Khan Younis despite an Israeli evacuation order said he would “refuse to accept American aid under these terms”, and warned that it marked the beginning of a “broader strategy of displacement”.
When asked to comment on the GHF’s work by reporters in Geneva, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Jens Laerke, said: “We do not participate in this modality for the reasons that we have given.”
“It is a distraction from what is actually needed, which is the reopening of all the crossings into Gaza, a secure environment within Gaza, and faster facilitation of permissions and final approvals of all the emergency supplies that we have just outside the border,” he added.
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation/Handout via Reuters
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) says lorries delivered food to its “Secure Distribution Sites” on Monday
Under the GHF’s mechanism, Palestinians must collect boxes containing food and basic hygiene items for their families from four distribution sites in southern and central Gaza.
The sites will be secured by American contractors, with Israeli troops patrolling the perimeters. To access them, Palestinians were expected to have to undergo identity checks and screening for involvement with Hamas.
UN and other aid agencies have insisted they will not co-operate with any scheme that fails to respect fundamental humanitarian principles.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former UN humanitarian chief, has described the GHF as “militarised, privatised, politicised”.
“The people behind it are military – ex-CIA, ex-security people. There is a security firm that is going to work closely with one party to the armed conflict, the Israel Defense Forces,” he told the BBC on Monday. “They will have some hubs… where people will be screened according to the needs of one side in this conflict – Israel.”
“We cannot have a party to the conflict decide where, how and who will get the aid,” he added.
On Sunday night, Jake Wood resigned as the GHF’s executive director, saying the group’s aid distribution system could not work in a way that would be able to fulfil the principles of “humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.
The GHF’s board rejected the criticism, accusing “those who benefit from the status quo” of being more focused on “tearing this apart than on getting aid in”.
It said the system was fully consistent with humanitarian principles and would feed a million Palestinians – just under half the population – by the end of the week.
John Acree, a former senior manager at USAID – the US government agency responsible for administering foreign aid – has been named interim executive director.
Hamas has warned Palestinians not to co-operate with GHF’s system, saying it would “replace order with chaos, enforce a policy of engineered starvation of Palestinian civilians, and use food as a weapon during wartime”.
GHF’s statement alleged that Hamas had also made “death threats targeting aid groups supporting humanitarian operations at GHF’s Safe Distribution Sites, and efforts to block the Gazan people from accessing aid at the sites”.
Reuters
Israel’s prime minister says its troops will “take control of all areas” of Gaza
Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza on 2 March and resumed its military offensive two weeks later, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas.
It said the steps were meant to put pressure on the armed group to release the 58 hostages still held in Gaza, up to 23 of whom are believed to be alive.
On 19 May, the Israeli military launched an expanded offensive that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said would see troops “take control of all areas” of Gaza. The plan reportedly includes completely clearing the north of civilians and forcibly displacing them to the south.
Netanyahu also said Israel would temporarily ease the blockade and allow a “basic” amount of food into Gaza to prevent a famine, following pressure from allies in the US.
Since then, Israeli authorities say they have allowed at least 665 lorry loads of humanitarian aid, including flour, baby food and medical supplies, into Gaza.
However, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme warned on Sunday that the aid was only a “drop in the bucket” of what was needed in the territory to reverse the catastrophic levels of hunger, amid significant shortages of basic foods and skyrocketing prices.
Half a million people face starvation in the coming months, according to an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response Hamas’ cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 54,056 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 3,901 over the past 10 weeks, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
A man carries a child to the hospital following Israel’s fresh offensive in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza Strip
Israel and Hamas have engaged in a new round of talks to end the war in Gaza, after Israel’s military launched a major new offensive.
At least 300 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on the enclave since Thursday, including at least 50 people in bombardments overnight,rescuers in the territory say.
Taher al-Nounou, an adviser to the head of Hamas, told the BBC fresh negotiations were under way in Doha on Saturday that were being brokered by Qatari and US mediators.
He said there were no preconditions from either side, and all issues were on the table for discussion. Israel’s defence minister said they had started talks without agreeing to a ceasefire or lifting its blockade.
A senior Palestinian official familiar with negotiations told the BBC that talks were centred around some of the remaining hostages being released from Gaza in exchange for a period of calm.
The proposal had been put forward by US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff in recent weeks, but both sides had previously indicated obstacles to the plan.
The new round of talks comes after a week of intensifying bombardments and airstrikes. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Saturday morning declared the start of a new offensive called “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised a major military escalation that would occupy and control swathes of Gaza, force the Palestinian population to the south of the territory and “destroy” Hamas.
The IDF said on Saturday it wouldn’t stop operating “until Hamas is no longer a threat and all our hostages are home”. It said it had “struck over 150 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip” in 24 hours.
The Times of Israel newspaper reported that “Gideon’s Chariots” – a reference to a biblical warrior – would also see the IDF prevent Hamas from taking control of aid supplies.
Thousands of Israeli troops, including soldiers and reservists, could enter Gaza as the operation ramps up in the coming days. Israeli tanks have also been seen at the border, Reuters news agency reported.
The intensified offensive has been condemned by the UN and some European leaders.
UN Secretary General António Guterres expressed alarm and said: “I reject the repeated displacement of the population – along with any question of forced displacement outside of Gaza.”
UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk had also earlier said that Israel’s strikes, continued blockade of aid into Gaza and the forced relocation of people was “tantamount to ethnic cleansing.”
Following the new strikes, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani both called for a permanent ceasefire, while Germany’s Foreign Ministry said the new offensive risked “worsening the catastrophic humanitarian situation for Gaza’s population and the remaining hostages”.
The ramped-up military offensive comes as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens, prompting warnings from aid agencies about famine among the population.
Israel has blocked food and other supplies into the Strip for more than 10 weeks, following the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire in March. US President Donald Trump said on Friday that “a lot of people were starving” in Gaza.
The Israeli government has repeatedly rejected claims there is a food shortage in Gaza.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 5 May said Israel was preparing an “intense entry into Gaza” to capture and hold territory, but that it would not commence until US President Donald Trump completed his tour of the Middle East. Trump left the region on Friday.
Anadolu/Getty Images
Smoke rises after an Israeli attack on Tel al Zaatar, Gaza City on 15 May, 2025
On Friday, residents in many parts of northern and central Gaza were told to leave their homes or places of shelter – an order aid workers say is almost impossible because many have already been repeatedly made homeless during the war.
Strikes on Saturday hit towns in the north of Gaza, including Beit Lahiya and the Jabalia refugee camp, as well as in the southern city of Khan Younis, the Hamas-run health ministry and civil defence forces said.
Strikes this week have also hit near hospitals in the Strip.
Reuters
Israeli tanks have been pictured near the Gaza border in Israel.
Victoria Rose, a British reconstructive surgeon working at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that her team were “exhausted” and staff had lost a “considerable amount of weight”.
“The children are really thin,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of youngsters whose teeth have fallen out.
“A lot of them have quite significant burn injuries and with this level of malnutrition they’re so much more prone to infection and they’ve got so much less capacity to heal.”
Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Hamas still holds 58 hostages.
At least 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, including more than 3,000 people since March.
Watch: Ros Atkins on…how world leaders are responding to Israel’s blockade of Gaza
