INTERNACIONAL
Egypt agrees to send aid trucks through Israeli crossing to Gaza but impact is unclear
Egypt said Friday it has agreed to send U.N. humanitarian aid trucks through Israel’s main crossing into Gaza, but it remained unclear if they will be able to enter the territory as fighting raged in the southern city of Rafah amid Israel’s escalating offensive there.
Meanwhile, the bodies of three more hostages killed on Oct. 7 were recovered overnight from Gaza, Israel’s army said Friday. The CIA chief met in Paris with Israeli and Qatari officials, trying to revive negotiations for a cease-fire and a hostage release.
EGYPT STRENGTHENS ITS BORDER WITH GAZA AS ISRAEL CONTINUES ATTACKS
Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has spiraled as the U.N. and other aid agencies say the entry of food and other supplies to them has plunged dramatically since Israel’s Rafah offensive began more than two weeks ago. On Friday, the top U.N. court — the International Court of Justice — ordered Israel to halt the Rafah offensive, though Israel is unlikely to comply.
At the heart of the problem lie the two main crossings through which around 300 trucks of aid a day had been flowing into Gaza before the offensive began.
Relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza hold photos of their loved ones during a performance calling for their return in Tel Aviv, Israel, Thursday, May 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
Israeli troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has been inoperative since. The nearby Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza has remained open, and Israel says it has been sending hundreds of trucks a day into it. But while commercial trucks have successfully crossed, the U.N. says it cannot reach Kerem Shalom to pick up aid as it enters because fighting in the area makes it too dangerous.
As a result, the U.N. says it has received only 143 trucks from the crossing in the past 19 days. Hundreds of truckloads have been sitting on the Gaza side of the crossing unretrieved, according to Israeli officials, who say U.N. manpower limitations are to blame. U.N. and other aid agencies had to rely on the far smaller number of trucks entering daily from a single crossing in northern Gaza and via a U.S.-built pier bringing supplies by sea.
Humanitarian groups are scrambling to get food to Palestinians as some 900,000 people flee Rafah, scattering across central and southern Gaza. Aid workers warn Gaza is near famine. UNRWA, the main U.N agency in the humanitarian effort, had to halt food distribution in Rafah city because it had run out of supplies.
The Egyptian announcement appeared to resolve a political obstacle on one side of the border.
Israel says it has kept the Rafah crossing open and asked Egypt to coordinate with it on sending aid convoys through it. Egypt refused, fearing the Israeli hold will remain permanent, and demanded Palestinians be put back in charge of the facility. The White House has been pressing Egypt to resume the flow of trucks.
In a phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi agreed to allow trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel to go to the Kerem Shalom crossing until a solution is found for the Rafah crossing, el-Sissi’s office said in a statement.
But it remained unclear whether the U.N. will be able to access additional trucks coming from Egypt.
UNRWA did not immediately reply to requests for comment. In a post on social media outlet X on Thursday, it said, «We could resume (food distribution in Rafah) tomorrow if the crossing reopened & we were provided with safe routes.»
Mercy Corps, an aid group operating in Gaza, said in a statement Friday that the offensive had caused the «functional closure … of the two main lifelines» of aid and «has brought the humanitarian system to its knees.»
«If dramatic changes do not occur, including opening all border crossings to safely surge aid into these areas, we fear that a wave of secondary mortality will result, with people succumbing to the combination of hunger, lack of clean water and sanitation, and the spread of disease in areas where there is little medical care,» it said.
Fighting appeared to escalate in Rafah. Bombardment intensified Friday in eastern parts of the city, near Kerem Shalom, but shelling was also taking place in central, southern and western districts closer to the Rafah crossing, witnesses said.
Israeli leaders have said they must uproot Hamas fighters from Rafah to complete the destruction of the group after its Oct. 7 attack.
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducted around 250 others in the Oct. 7 attack. Around half of those hostages have since been freed, most in swaps for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel during a weeklong cease-fire in November.
Israel’s campaign of bombardment and offensives in Gaza has killed more than 35,800 Palestinians and wounded more than 80,200, the Gaza Health Ministry said Friday. Its count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military said its troops overnight found the bodies of three people killed in the Oct. 7 attack and subsequently taken into Gaza and counted among the hostages.
The bodies of Hanan Yablonka, Michel Nisenbaum, and Orion Hernandez Radoux were found in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have been fighting for the past week with Hamas militants, the military said.
The announcement comes less than a week after the army said it found in the same area the bodies of three other Israeli hostages also killed on Oct. 7.
Nisenbaum, 59, was a Brazilian-Israeli from the southern city of Sderot. He was killed in his car as he went to get his 4-year-old granddaughter from a site near Gaza that came under attack by the militants.
Oryon Hernandez Radoux, 30, and Yablonka, 42, a father of two, were both killed as they tried to escape the Nova music festival, where the attackers killed hundreds of people. Hernandez Radoux had been attending the festival with his partner, German-Israeli Shani Louk, whose body was among those found by the army earlier.
Israel says around 100 hostages are still captive in Gaza, along with the bodies of at least 39 more, while 17 bodies of hostages have been recovered.
The group representing the families of the hostages said the bodies had been returned to their families for burial. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country had a duty to do everything to return those abducted, both those killed and those who are alive.
French President Emmanuel Macron gave condolences to the family of Hernández-Radoux, a French-Mexican citizen, saying France remains committed to releasing the hostages.
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CIA Director Bill Burns was meeting in Paris on Friday with Israeli and Qatari officials in informal talks aimed at getting hostage and cease-fire negotiations back on track, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive discussions. Burns is in close contact with Egyptian officials, who like the Qataris have acted as mediators with Hamas, the U.S. official said.
Cease-fire talks ground to a halt at the beginning of the month after a major push by the U.S. and other mediators to secure a deal, in hopes of averting a planned Israeli invasion of the southern city of Rafah. The talks were stymied by a central sticking point: Hamas demands guarantees that the war will end and Israeli troops will withdraw from Gaza completely in return for a release of all the hostages, a demand Israel rejects.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has once again called on the U.S. to place nuclear weapons within its borders in a show of deterrence to Russia’s continued aggression just over the border in Ukraine.
A similar request was apparently made to the Biden administration in 2022, which was never agreed to, but Duda has not given up on the idea. This time he addressed his appeal to the Trump administration during an interview with the Financial Times that was published Thursday.
«Russia did not even hesitate when they were relocating their nuclear weapons into Belarus,» Duda told the Financial Times in reference to actions Russia took beginning in 2023, a year after it invaded Ukraine. «They didn’t ask anyone’s permission.»
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about where President Donald Trump stands when it comes to this form of deterrence.
POLISH GOVERNMENT PLANS MANDATORY MILITARY TRAINING FOR ADULT MEN
President Andrzej Duda speaks during the Polish parliament meeting in Warsaw on March 7, 2025. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The Trump administration this week took steps to try and bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, which has been raging for more than three years following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
While Ukraine has agreed to the U.S.’s initial 30-day ceasefire contingent on Russia’s acceptance of the terms, Moscow has not, and it is unlikely that the Trump administration would take steps to jeopardize those negotiations by agreeing to put U.S. nukes in Poland – which shares a border with Russia and could be viewed as a threat by the Kremlin.
But Duda’s advisor on international affairs, Wojciech Kolarski, echoed the Polish president’s plea and, in a Thursday interview with Poland’s RMF FM radio, argued that as a NATO member who shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region, as well as Ukraine and Belarus, the steps were important for Warsaw’s security.
Aerial view taken on Nov. 17, 2022 shows the site where a missile strike killed two men in the eastern Poland village of Przewodow, near the border with war-ravaged Ukraine on Nov. 15, 2022. (Wojtek Radwanski, Damien Simonart/AFP via Getty Images)
NATO NATION POLAND SCRAMBLES AIR DEFENSES AS RUSSIA STRIKES WESTERN UKRAINE
But should the U.S. again refuse Poland’s request, there is another nuclear-armed nation in the NATO alliance that may be willing to assist in «nuclear sharing.»
Amid mounting concern in the European Union that the U.S. could withdraw forces from the bloc or become an unreliable defense partner in countering Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron opened discussions on a strategy that could help extend its nuclear deterrence to other EU nations.
French President Emmanuel Macron meets with President Donald Trump. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
While the specifics of that strategy remain unclear, including whether France has proposed actually dispersing nuclear arms to other nations, Poland has reportedly been in talks with France about the issue.
Russia has already called France’s strategy to re-evaluate its extension of nuclear deterrence «extremely confrontational.»
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Despite Moscow’s objections, France’s defense concept is far from new as the U.S. deterrence umbrella during the Cold War was intended to ensure NATO allies would be protected under America’s nuclear power in case of a direct threat by another nuclear-armed nation, like Russia, China or North Korea.
While France is the EU’s only nuclear power, it has the third-largest nuclear stockpile when it comes to nuclear-armed nations in NATO, which also includes the U.S. and the U.K.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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