The US military will establish a temporary port on the Gaza coast to increase the flow of humanitarian aid to the beleaguered territory, Joe Biden is to announce.
The US president is to make the announcement in his State of the Union address in the coming hours.
The plan – which an Israeli official has reportedly said Israel “fully supports” – will provide capacity for hundreds of additional truckloads of aid each day.
It will allow more shipments of food, medicine and other essential items into Gaza, US administration officials have told Sky News’ partner network NBC News.
The operation will not require American troops to be on the ground, and Israeli officials could screen the goods at the city’s port, the US officials said.
The port is expected to take a number of weeks to plan and execute.
A desperate policy decision that Biden hoped never to have to make
This is a significant announcement but details are scant. The timing reflects the urgency of the humanitarian situation but it’s also about politics.
‘Port’ is a somewhat misleading word to describe what the Americans intend to construct. It will take the form of a temporary pier or causeway that will allow aid to be offloaded from ships to trucks for distribution.
Importantly, American officials tell us that US boots will not be on the ground in Gaza but that the causeway can be installed from offshore. No more detail has been revealed.
All of this leaves plenty of unanswered questions and exposes deep failures in diplomatic leverage that the United States has over Israel.
Who will build the infrastructure that will be needed on the land end of the pier? Who will distribute the aid once it is offloaded?
Who will manage crowd control and prevent stampedes which will be inevitable without considerable policing of the mass of people. How long will all this take?
Like the airdrop announcement last week, the port announcement represents a desperate policy decision that President Biden hoped never to have to make.
Shipments will come via Cyprus enabled by the US military and a coalition of partners and allies, US officials also told NBC.
Earlier this week, EU officials were in Cyprus to discuss the establishment of a maritime aid corridor with a platform at Larnaca on the island.
Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas attacked the country on 7 October, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250.
More than 100 hostages were released in November in exchange for 240 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The number of Palestinians killed has reached more than 30,700, according to the Hamas-led health ministry in Gaza.
The territory is facing a worsening humanitarian catastrophe, with aid groups warning that it has become nearly impossible to deliver supplies within most of Gaza.
Image: Palestinian children wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Rafah. Pic: Reuters
Many Palestinians, especially in the devastated north, are scrambling for food to survive.
Sir Mark Lowcock, former head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, has told Sky News that without far more aid, there will be an “explosion” in the number of people dying.
“The death toll from starvation and related diseases is going to be larger than the 30,000 people who are estimated to have been killed already by the bombs and the bullets,” he said.
At least two people have been killed and eight others critically injured in a shooting on the campus of Brown University in Rhode Island, officials have said.
The incident is believed to be unfolding near an engineering building on the campus, according to the school’s alert system.
Providence Police and the Rhode Island State Police are responding.
It is unclear at the moment whether arrests have been made.
Brown University says no suspects are in custody and that additional shots may have been fired.
US President Donald Trump corrected an earlier post he shared online, clarifying that a suspect was not in custody. In his previous post, he had stated that a suspect was in custody.
University officials initially told students and staff that a suspect was in custody, but later said this was not the case and police were still searching for a suspect or suspects.
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Officials noted that the information remained preliminary as investigators try to determine what has occurred.
Police are actively investigating and still gathering information from the scene, said Kristy DosReis, the chief public information officer for the city of Providence.
The shooting was reported near the Barus & Holley building, a seven-storey structure that houses the School of Engineering and Physics Department, according to the school’s website.
It includes 117 laboratories, 150 offices and 15 classrooms.
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Brown is a private university with roughly 7,300 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate students.
Providence Council member John Goncalves, whose ward includes the Brown campus, said: “We’re still getting information about what’s going on, but we’re just telling people to lock their doors and to stay vigilant.
“As a Brown alum, someone who loves the Brown community and represents this area, I’m heartbroken. My heart goes out to all the family members and the folks who’ve been impacted.”
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Donald Trump has said the US “will retaliate” after three Americans were killed in a suspected Islamic State attack in Syria.
Two US service members and one civilian died and three other people were injured in an ambush on Saturday by a lone IS – also often called ISIS in Syria and Iraq – gunman, according to the he US military’s Central Command.
The attack on US troops in Syria is the first to inflict fatalities since the fall of President Bashar Assad a year ago.
“This is an ISIS attack,” the US president told reporters at the White House before leaving for the Army-Navy football game in Baltimore.
He paid condolences to the three people killed and said the three others who were wounded “seem to be doing pretty well”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump said “there will be very serious retaliation”.
The shooting took place near historic Palmyra, according to the state-run SANA news agency, and the casualties were taken by helicopter to the al Tanf garrison near the border with Iraq and Jordan.
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The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attacker was a member of the Syrian security force.
Syria’s Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al Din al Baba said authorities are looking into whether the gunman was an IS member or only carried its extreme ideology, and denied reports suggesting he was a security member.
Central Command earlier said in a post on X that the gunman was killed, while the identities of the service members killed wouldn’t be released until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the civilian killed in the attack was a US interpreter.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X: “Let it be known, if you target Americans – anywhere in the world – you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”
The US has hundreds of troops deployed in eastern Syria as part of a coalition fighting IS.
The group was defeated on the battlefield in Syria in 2019 but the UN says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, and its sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al Sharaa, made a historic visit to Washington DC last month as Syria signed a political cooperation agreement with the US-led coalition against IS.
“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Mr Trump said in his social media post, adding that Mr al Sharaa was “extremely angry and disturbed”.
National Guard troops went door-to-door on Friday to evacuate a farming city north of Seattle as severe flooding in western Washington state put levees at risk.
Days of torrential rain have swelled rivers to record or near-record levels, as flooding has stranded families on rooftops, washed over bridges and ripped homes from their foundations.
Burlington, a city of nearly 10,000 residents near Puget Sound – a large inlet of the Pacific Ocean in northwestern Washington – was placed under a full evacuation order with people told to leave immediately and move to higher ground.
The Skagit River, a major waterway that flows from the Cascade Mountains through the Skagit Valley before emptying into Puget Sound, surged to a record high of nearly 38ft (11.6m) at Mount Vernon, about 10 miles south of Burlington.
“We haven’t seen flooding like this ever,” said Karina Shagren, a spokesperson for the state’s emergency management division, adding that there had been no reports of injuries or missing individuals so far.
Image: Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: Reuters
National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies were going door to assist with the evacuations.
Some responders were seen paddling stranded Burlington residents to safety in inflatable river rafts through the muddy floodwaters.
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Later on Friday, the evacuation order was lifted for part of the city, Burlington police department spokesperson Michael Lumpkin said.
However, while water levels appeared to ease a little, Mr Lumpkin said “it’s definitely not an all-clear”.
The intense rainfall was driven by an atmospheric river, a massive stream of moisture drawn from the ocean and carried inland over the Pacific Northwest earlier in the week.
Although rainfall has begun to ease, the National Weather Service has issued a flash-flood warning for the Skagit River basin all the way downstream to its mouth at Puget Sound.
Image: Snohomish, around 40 miles south of Burlington, has also been affected. Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: Reuters
The swollen waters could put enough strain on levees to cause them to fail, the weather service noted.
“Extensive flooding of streets, homes and farmland will be possible” if levees and dikes give way, it said.
The Burlington-Mount Vernon area in Skagit County continues to be the hardest-hit area, facing extensive flooding from days of heavy rainfall stretching from northern Oregon through western Washington and into British Columbia.
National Guard troops were also dispatched to deliver food and check on stranded residents in a number of communities cut off by flooding in adjacent Snohomish County, south of Skagit County.
The flooding washed out or forced the closure of dozens of roads throughout the region, including most of the Canadian highways leading to the port city of Vancouver in British Columbia.
Parts of northern Idaho and western Montana have also been impacted.