Foreign News
Israelis praise Trump at huge rally ahead of expected hostage release by Hamas in Gaza
Hundreds of thousands of people have held a rally in Tel Aviv, ahead of the expected release of Israeli hostages by Hamas.
Addressing the crowds, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said the hostages “are coming home” and praised Donald Trump for making a Gaza ceasefire and hostage return deal possible.
In Gaza, Palestinian officials said about 500,000 people had returned to northern Gaza – which lies in ruins – in the past two days, following the withdrawal of Israeli troops.
Meanwhile Egypt confirmed it would host a summit on Monday to finalise an agreement aimed at ending the war.
More than 20 leaders including Trump would attend the summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, an Egyptian presidential spokesperson said. French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer are confirmed to be travelling to Egypt on Monday.
Trump is expected to visit Israel on Monday before heading to Egypt. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner also addressed the Tel Aviv rally on Saturday.
Under the ceasefire and hostage release deal announced on Thursday, Hamas was given 72 hours – until 12:00 local time (09:00 GMT) on Monday – to release all the 48 hostages it is still holding after two years of war, 20 of whom are assumed to be alive.
A top Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, told AFP news agency that “according to the signed agreement, the prisoner exchange is set to begin on Monday morning as agreed, and there are no new developments on this matter”.
He said Hamas militants on the ground had not yet notified the movement’s leadership about the logistics of the handover.
Aviv Havron, whose family members were murdered and others kidnapped in the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, told the BBC in Tel Aviv: “It’s so important for the community… that they come back. Without this, we can’t restart our lives.
“My sisters and two brothers in law were murdered. Seven of my family members were kidnapped – my older sister was kidnapped, her daughter, her grandchildren. Four bodies of Be’eri [community] members are still in Gaza,.”
Shulamit and David Ginat, who also attended the Tel Aviv rally, told the BBC all the hostages must be saved.
“They’re our brothers and sisters. We want to heal again. We want to stop the war, stop the pain and heal again,” Shulamit said.
Many in the crowd yelled “Thank you, Trump!” – but also booed when Witkoff mentioned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Speaking just afterward, the couple said they were angry at him over the failure to prevent the 7 October attack, the war and the failure to bring the hostages home sooner.
“He wants to continue the war only because he wants to stay prime minister,” David said.
In Gaza, Hamas has called up thousands of fighters to reassert control over areas of Gaza recently vacated by Israeli troops, according to local sources.
The Hamas mobilisation had been widely anticipated amid growing uncertainty about who will govern Gaza once the war ends and fears of internal violence. There have also been reports of armed clashes between Hamas and Gaza clans.
Displaced Palestinians have continued to move north in Gaza in large numbers, in many cases arriving to find their homes destroyed.
“There is no house anymore. Everything is gone,” lawyer Mosa Aldous said over the phone from Gaza City.
Raja Salmi, 52, told AFP she reached Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood to find her home also gone.
“I stood before it and cried. All those memories are now just dust,” she said.
Under the terms of the ceasefire and hostage release deal, the amount of aid entering Gaza is due to be scaled up but the World Food Programme (WFP) told the BBC that a surge of aid lorries had “not yet” entered Gaza, reporting only two to three lorries entering the territory daily.
With full access, WFP, a UN agency, said it intended to restore its regular food distribution system, boosting aid through 145 distribution points across Gaza.
Cogat, the Israeli military body overseeing the entry of aid into Gaza, said 500 trucks had entered on Thursday of which around 300 were distributed inside Gaza by the UN and other organisations.
A recent report by the world’s leading hunger monitor Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), backed by the UN, estimated that 500,000 people in Gaza – a quarter of the territory’s population – were suffering from famine.
Israel has repeatedly denied that starvation is taking place in Gaza, and Netanyahu has said that where there is hunger, it is the fault of aid agencies and Hamas.
About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 on southern Israel.
Israel responded by launching a military offensive that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
[BBC]
Two people have died and several are feared buried after landslides in New Zealand’s North Island.
The deaths were reported at Welcome Bay, while rescue workers are still searching through rubble at a different site in a popular campground on Mount Maunganui.
There are no “signs of life”, authorities said, adding that they have a “rough idea” of how many people are missing but are waiting for an exact figure. They provided no other details except that the group includes “at least one young girl”.
The landslides were triggered by heavy rains over the last few days, which led to flooding and power outages across the North Island. One minister said the east coast resembled “a war zone”.
New Zealand is “heavy with grief” after the “profound tragedy” caused by recent weather, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said on X.
Footage from the campsite on Mount Maunganui, an extinct volcano, shows a huge slip near the base of the volcanic dome, as rescuers and sniffer dogs comb through crushed caravans and flattened tents.
Authorities said that the search would continue through the night. “This is a complex and high-risk environment, and our teams are working to achieve the best possible outcome while keeping everyone safe,” said Megan Stiffler, the deputy national commander for the Urban Search and Rescue team,
The extinct volcano is a sacred Māori site and one of the most popular campgrounds in New Zealand, with a local holiday website describing it as a “slice of paradise”. But it has been repeatedly hit by landslides in recent years.
“I heard this huge tree crack and all this dirt come off, and then I looked behind me and there’s this huge landslide coming down,” Australian tourist Sonny Worrall told local broadcaster TVNZ.
“I’m still shaking from it now… I turned around and had to jump out of my seat and just run,”he added. He saw it happen while swimming in a hot pool.
Hiker Mark Tangney told the New Zealand Herald he heard people screaming from under the rubble. “So I just parked up and ran to help… We could hear people screaming: ‘Help us, help us, get us out of here’,” he said.
Those calls persisted for about half an hour and then went silent, Tangney said.
A surf club in another part of Mount Maunganui has been evacuated following fears of more landslides.
A state of emergency has been declared in the Bay of Plenty where Mount Maunganui sits, and various parts of the North Island, including Northland, Coromandel, Tairāwhiti and Hauraki.
Several areas reported their wettest days on record on Thursday. Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, for example, received three months worth of rain within a day, according to local media.
Some 8,000 people were without power as of Thursday morning, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported.
The wife of a man who was swept away in the Mahurangi River is holding out hope that he will survive.
“I know his personality is strong, wise,” she told RNZ, adding that he was a fisherman back home in Kiribati and knew how to swim and dive.
The man, 47, was driving to work with their nephew when the car they were in fell into the river.
He had pushed the nephew towards a branch so the nephew could hoist himself onto land; but the older man did not manage get back up himself, according to the report.
“It’s been a very big event for us as a country, really hitting almost our entire eastern seaboard of the North Island,” said Minister for Emergency Management Mark Mitchell.
“The good news is that everyone responded really quickly, and there was time to get prepared. That helps to mitigate and create a very strong response,” he told RNZ.
December to February are typically the sunnier months in New Zealand but in recent years heavy rains and storms have become more frequent.
In February 2023, parts of the island were devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle, which is to date the costliest cyclone to hit the Southern Hemisphere, with damage amounting to NZ$13.5bn ($7.9bn; £5.9bn).
This week’s flooding has added to the toll for the local communities that are still rebuilding.
[BBC]
Usha Vance, the wife of Vice-President JD Vance, has announced she is pregnant with her fourth child.
In a post on X, the second lady said she is looking forward to welcoming a boy in late July.
“Usha and the baby are doing well,” a statement posted on Tuesday to the second lady’s social media account read.
Vance and his wife, Usha, 40, have three young children: Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
Usha Vance (née Chilukuri) was born and raised in the working-class suburbs of San Diego, California, to a mechanical engineer father and a molecular biologist mother who had moved to the US from Andhra Pradesh, India.
She met JD Vance as a student at Yale Law School in 2010, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”.
Before becoming second lady, Usha Vance had a legal career, including a job as a corporate litigator at firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco. She also worked for conservative judges, Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court and appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh, before he was appointed by Trump to the Supreme Court.
Usha Vance is the first to have a baby as second lady, though other first ladies have had children while their husbands were in office.
First lady Frances Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland, gave birth to daughter Esther in the White House in 1893, followed by a second child, Marion, who was born outside the White House.
JD Vance has been one of the most vocal members of the Trump administration in calling for higher birth rates in the US.
“Let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America,” he said in 2025.
(BBC)
Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani, known as Valentino, has died at the age of 93.
One of the giants of 20th Century fashion, Valentino’s creations were worn by celebrities and well-known figures including Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow.
He co-founded the Valentino fashion house in 1960 and ranked alongside Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld at the top of the profession.
In a statement posted on Instagram, the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation said: “He passed away peacefully in his Roman home, surrounded by the love of his family.”
The foundation said Valentino will be lying in state at Rome’s Piazza Mignanelli between 21 and 22 January.
Valentino’s funeral service will be held the following day at the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs, the foundation said.
Born in Lombardy in May 1932, Valentino was known for his collections that displayed luxury, wealth and opulence.
He moved to Paris to study at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne when he was just 17, and went on to work with designers Jacques Fath, Balenciaga, Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche.
His adoption of his signature colour “Valentino red”, inspired by a trip to Spain, helped elevate the brand to global fame with the debut of the iconic fiesta dress.
It became so meaningful for the house that for Valentino’s last collection in 2008 all the models wore red dresses for the finale.
Valentino designed the wedding dress of Princess Madeleine of Sweden when she married British-American financier Christopher O’Neill in June 2013.
In December 2023, he was honoured with the outstanding achievement award at the British Fashion Awards which were held at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
(BBC)
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