Good morning.
Raed Jamal sends the message shortly after he returns, empty-handed, from a food distribution point to his tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in south-west Gaza. “The tanks came and started firing. Three boys near me were martyred,” says the 36-year-old, who has four children. “I didn’t even get anything, just two empty boxes.”
Jamal’s journey involved a long walk to and from a former residential neighbourhood bulldozed by Israeli forces and turned into one of four militarised food distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is based in Delaware in the US.
In a new visual investigation, the Guardian has examined these food points. Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking aid from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN.
The GHF sites – at Tal al-Sultan, Saudi neighbourhood, Khan Younis and Wadi Gaza – are located in evacuation zones, which means civilians seeking food have to enter areas they have been ordered to leave. According to GHF’s Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes.
These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The head of Unrwa, Philippe Lazzarini, has said “the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves”.
What is the GHF and what happened to the former aid sites? GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, employs US mercenaries at the sites, which opened in May. They replaced 400 non-militarised aid points run under a UN system that Israel claimed had to be shut down because Hamas was diverting aid from it. No evidence for this has been provided.
Jeffrey Epstein accuser urged FBI to investigate Trump decades ago – report
A woman who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago has told the New York Times that she urged law enforcement officials at the time to investigate powerful people in the couple’s orbit, including Donald Trump.
Maria Farmer was among the first women to report Epstein and his partner, Maxwell, of sexual crimes back in 1996 when, according to a new interview with the Times, she also identified Trump among those close to Epstein as worthy of attention.
She told the Times she had repeated that message when she was re-interviewed by the FBI about Epstein in 2006. She said she had raised Trump’s name specifically because of an unsettling encounter with him late one night in 1995 in Epstein’s offices, which she said she had told law enforcement agents at the time and has since recounted publicly.
Has Trump been accused of anything? Law enforcement agencies have not accused the president of any wrongdoing related to Epstein, and he has never been named as a target of any investigation.
Trump’s border tsar to target sanctuary cities in US: ‘We’re gonna flood the zone’
The Trump administration is targeting so-called sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive, after labelling them “sanctuaries for criminals” after the shooting of an off-duty law enforcement officer in New York City, allegedly by an undocumented person with a criminal record.
Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s border chief, vowed to “flood the zone” with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents, in an all-out attempt to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people.
What did he say about New York? “What we’re going to do [is deploy] more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want – more agents in the community and more agents in the work site.”
In other news …
A federal judge sentenced an ex-Kentucky police officer to nearly three years in prison for using excessive force during the 2020 deadly raid on Breonna Taylor’s home, declining a justice department recommendation that he should not be jailed.
A man who wore a large weight-training chain around his neck and approached his wife while a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine scanned her knee at a clinic in New York died after the device forcefully pulled him, police and media reported.
Chinese authorities have arrested six people and launched disciplinary investigations into almost 30 others after more than 230 kindergarten children were poisoned by food coloured with industrial-grade lead paint.
Stat of the day: Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley
Economic inequality has reached a staggering milestone in Silicon Valley: just nine households hold 15% of the region’s wealth, according to research from San Jose State University. A mere 0.1% of residents hold 71% of the tech hub’s wealth.
Don’t miss this: I used to believe in the American dream. Then the police killed my son
Bijan Ghaisar, 25, was unarmed when he was shot in his car by two officers. Charges against the men were dismissed – but seven years on his mother, Kelly, is still fighting for her boy. The family lost more than their son that day: “We lost our faith in our country, our government. We saw that nothing, absolutely nothing we had believed about our country was true,” she said.
Climate check: Texas flood protest goes to Washington – ‘No more kids lost to climate disasters’
Twenty-seven blue, pink and purple trunks were placed within view of the White House yesterday, each representing a child who died when Camp Mystic in Texas was overwhelmed by a devastating flood. The campaigners held signs that said, “Flood warnings came late, budget cuts came fir$t” and “No more kids lost to climate disasters”.
Last Thing: British woman finally hands over 16th-century painting identified as stolen 50 years ago
A 16th-century Madonna and Child painting that ended up with a woman in the UK after it was stolen from a museum in Italy half a century ago is to be returned to its rightful owner. As the Guardian reported in March, the woman had refused to return the artwork, even though it is on the most-wanted lists of various police forces, including Interpol and the Italian carabinieri.
Sign up
First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.
Get in touch
If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@theguardian.com
