Driver in custody after striking pedestrians in France, interior minister says
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(LONDON) — A driver was taken into custody after allegedly striking and injuring several pedestrians and cyclists in southwestern France, the interior minister said.
“An investigation has been opened,” Laurent Nunez, the minister, said in French on social media. “At the request of the prime minister, I am heading to the scene.”
The strikes appeared to have been along a “route” through Saint Pierre and Dolus, two villages about 4 miles apart on the island of Oleron, Nunez said.
Two of those who were struck were in serious condition and three others were injured, he added.
Details about the driver and the vehicle were not immediately released.
(PARIS) — When Alexander Boecker and his wife, Julia Schwartz, woke up last Sunday morning, the first headlines were not what they expected.
One of their company’s machines — a Boecker AgiLo furniture lift — had been used in a jewel heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris and the image of their lift beneath the iconic French museum’s balcony was already everywhere.
Last week’s Louvre heist saw four masked thieves steal eight pieces of jewelry valued at $102 million, sparking a national outcry and nationwide manhunt. The daring heist took just seven minutes, leaving investigators searching for answers as to how one of the world’s most secure museums was robbed in such a brief window of time.
Based in Werne, a small town in western Germany, Boecker is a third-generation family firm that employs more than 600 people and earns about 150 million euros ($174 million) a year, according to its website. Its lifts are designed to move furniture, pianos and scaffolding — not priceless treasures.
“At first we were shocked,” Boecker told ABC News. “It was a reprehensible act. They had used our device to do it.”
By Sunday evening, once it was clear no one had been hurt, the shock gave way to dark humor, the 42-year-old noted.
“We put some slogans together we found funny,” Boecker said.
His wife, who heads the company’s marketing department, came up with the line that would soon go viral: “When you need to move fast.”
On Monday morning, the company licensed the now-famous photo of the Louvre heist — their lift in full view — and posted it online with the slogan.
“We expected maybe a few laughs,” Boecker said. “Not millions.”
By Thursday, the post had reached 4.3 million views — an extraordinary leap from their usual 20,000.
Inside the office, other slogans were considered: “Return on investment in only seven minutes” and “Even professional criminals rely on the best machines.” In the end, they decided to hold back.
“We didn’t want to cross the line,” Boecker said. “Of course, it’s a crime — a very serious one. We didn’t want to make fun of that.”
The AgiLo in question had been sold to a French rental company in 2020. On Oct. 15, 2025, the thieves arrived posing as clients, attended a short demonstration, learned how to operate the lift — then drove away with it. The rental company reported the theft to police that same day.
Boecker described his machines as “safe, reliable, durable — and as quiet as a whisper.”
“Over 99% of the reactions are positive,” he said. “Some people wrote, ‘Who says Germans don’t have a sense of humor?'”
He noted that they may stop the campaign, since they don’t want to “step over a line.”
“But still,” Boecker said with a smile. “Quite a story, and quite a lift.”
(NEW YORK) — Dozens of humanitarian organizations have begun rapidly scaling up operations in the hopes of delivering aid to Gaza again amid the Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Items in Gaza — including food, clean water, medicine and hygiene products — are running low, the organizations say. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of families have been displaced, many living in tents in extremely crowded areas.
Humanitarian aid workers told ABC News that they will face several challenges in delivering aid to Gaza. Israeli authorities have limited the amount of aid that can enter the strip, and destroyed roads and neighborhoods make it difficult to reach areas of the enclave.
Additionally, winter is fast-approaching, and aid workers say they have a limited amount of time to deliver provisions to help Palestinians in Gaza get through the cold weather months.
“We’re not asking for anything unreasonable. We’re asking for the volume of aid that entered Gaza Strip before the escalation in October 2023,” Tess Ingram, communications manager for UNICEF, told ABC News. “I think that’s something to watch for in the coming days. Does the aid flow? Are the crossings open? Is the U.N. enabled to do its job, to serve the children of Gaza. … But the other part is, does the ceasefire hold? The stakes are really high right now, so that ceasefire has to hold.”
Lifting restrictions on aid
The U.N. said that Sunday, Oct. 12, was the first day progress was seen in the scale-up of humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands of hot meals and bread bundles were distributed in the north and south, according to the U.N. Additionally, cooking gas entered the strip for the first time since March as well as tents, frozen meat, fresh fruit, flour and medicine, the U.N. said.
However, on Monday, no trucks entered Gaza because of the transfer of Israeli hostages, and border crossings were also closed on Tuesday due to the Jewish religious holiday of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
Israeli officials announced on Tuesday it would not reopen the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt and would limit aid entering Gaza after Hamas failed to return all the bodies of the deceased hostages, as called for under the ceasefire agreement.
“Starting tomorrow, only half of the agreed number of trucks — 300 trucks — will be allowed to enter, and all of them will belong to the U.N. and humanitarian NGOs, with no private sector involvement,” COGAT, the Israeli defense body in charge of coordinating aid to Gaza, said in a statement. “No fuel or gas will be allowed into the Strip, except for specific needs related to humanitarian infrastructure.”
Hamas said the rubble makes it logistically challenging to locate the bodies of the deceased hostages, but Israel said it believes Hamas knows where the hostages’ bodies are and is purposefully delaying their return.
Jolien Veldwijk, CARE Palestine Country Director, said the number of trucks entering Gaza is just “a trickle” of what is needed to meet the needs of the population.
“The destruction is significantly worse than compared to seven, eight months ago,” she told ABC News, compared to the first ceasefire when she was also in Gaza.
Multiple organizations, including CARE, said they have not been able to get aid into Gaza since March 2, when Israel imposed a total blockade — in an effort to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages — that lasted for 11 weeks.
The organization said their repeated requests to deliver aid have been denied by Israeli authorities. Veldwijk said supplies are currently stuck in warehouses in Egypt and in Jordan.
Similarly, James Hoobler, a humanitarian policy adviser with Oxfam America, told ABC News the group has had 4,000 food parcels and a large volume of essential water sanitation and hygiene equipment stuck in its warehouse in Amman, Jordan, since March.
Some organizations say they are also running into red tape while trying to access the strip.
“We’re running out of supplies now,” Veldwijk said of the CARE team on the ground in Gaza. “We still can’t bring anything in. … We’re desperate to get our supplies in, but we’re also sort of desperate for all the border crossings to open.”
Ingram, from UNICEF, who is currently in Gaza, said limiting the volume of aid entering the strip is the opposite of what is needed but that UNICEF has seen some success in its operations on the ground since the ceasefire went into effect.
“We are able to move far more freely, get access to areas that we haven’t been able to get to for a while,” she told ABC News. “We don’t have to coordinate our movements with the Israeli authorities anymore, which means that we’re not facing delays or denials.”
She went on, “So for example, the last three days, I was in and around Gaza City, and that was kind of the first time in a while that we were able to get into parts of Gaza City that were the focus of that intense bombardment in August and September, and really get a sense of how that has affected the area and how people are planning to resume living there, and what they need.”
Aid workers added that rebuilding sanitation networks is also necessary but will be a challenge until the supplies entering Gaza necessary increase.
“I went to a big wastewater dam in Gaza City, which is surrounded by residential area, and it’s at risk of flooding because the pumps aren’t working,” Ingram said. “Sanitation presents a massive disease risk if we don’t get on top of it. So, we need to really improve the systems that remove solid waste, that deal with sewage and wastewater.”
Clearing rubble and rebuilding roads
Destruction across Gaza also presents a logistical challenge in delivering aid to the civilian population. Many roads have been destroyed, and rubble may be hiding unexploded ordinances.
Zaheer Kham, global director of fundraising for the humanitarian charity Human Appeal, told ABC News that he received a message from teams on the ground in Gaza on Tuesday that rubble in the roads is starting to be removed.
“Is it enough? Of course not, we need heavy machinery to remove the rubble in the roads that has accumulated over two years,” he told ABC News.
Humanitarian workers told ABC News that rebuilding water networks will be critical in the rebuilding effort in Gaza, but it comes with many logistical challenges.
Aid workers said water that comes from the ground in Gaza is very salty from years of degradation. Drinking water needs to be desalinated, which is accomplished by desalination plants across Gaza, aid workers say.
“There needs to be quite a bit of work to make sure that they’re all functioning properly.” Ingram said. “There’s some that are out of service. So, there’s work that needs to go into making sure that drinking water production increases.”
The network of pipes that brought water into homes has mostly been destroyed so most people in Gaza receive their water from water trucks, which collect drinking water from desalination plants and distribute it throughout the strip.
Ingram said the trucks have gone through wear and tear, which may limit their ability to distribute water as water networks and wells are rehabilitated.
“The water trucks themselves are a limited fleet that have done two years in a war zone over rubble,” she said. “They need maintenance and repairs.”
Aid workers say there are many groundwater wells, which pump domestic water that people use for cooking, cleaning and showering, many of which need repairs.
Veldwijk said CARE has rehabilitated water networks in the past to bring drinking water and domestic water to people’s homes to complement the water supplied by trucks, but some of have been destroyed and need to be rebuilt.
She said the group is also working to rehabilitate wells as well as desalination units.
Aid workers added that rebuilding sanitation networks is also necessary but will be a challenge until the supplies entering Gaza necessary increase.
“I went to a big wastewater dam in Gaza City, which is surrounded by residential area, and it’s at risk of flooding because the pumps aren’t working,” Ingram said. “Sanitation presents a massive disease risk if we don’t get on top of it. So, we need to really improve the systems that remove solid waste, that deal with sewage and wastewater.”
Clearing rubble and rebuilding roads
Destruction across Gaza also presents a logistical challenge in delivering aid to the civilian population. Many roads have been destroyed, and rubble may be hiding unexploded ordinances.
Zaheer Kham, global director of fundraising for the humanitarian charity Human Appeal, told ABC News that he received a message from teams on the ground in Gaza on Tuesday that rubble in the roads is starting to be removed.
“Is it enough? Of course not, we need heavy machinery to remove the rubble in the roads that has accumulated over two years,” he told ABC News.
Veldwijk said the roads being destroyed make it difficult to travel from southern Gaza to central Gaza to northern Gaza and if all the border crossings are opened, supplies can more easily be funneled throughout Gaza.
Aid workers say entire sections in Gaza have been destroyed, making it difficult to find people who may be in need of aid.
“It’s like being inside the skeleton of a city,” Ingram said of visiting neighborhoods in Gaza City and Jabalia, just north of Gaza City. “Everything is gray. Things that would normally tell you where you are, are gone, and it’s very disorienting.”
On Tuesday, the U.N. Development Programme announced that the cost of rebuilding Gaza is estimated at around $70 billion, with $20 billion needed in the next three years alone.
Fast-approaching winter season
With the cold weather months approaching, humanitarian organizations say there is an urgent need to get warm clothes and blankets into Gaza.
Winters in Gaza are usually not very severe with low temperatures typically in the 40s F, but heavy rains and its seaside location can make it feel colder.
“It really is a race against time,” Hoobler, with Oxfam America, said. “Winterization is a major issue, especially with the amount of destruction to housing that we’ve seen. So, we know people are in very overcrowded conditions there. They don’t have adequate shelter. Many of the makeshift shelters that people were in were destroyed in bombings.”
Nine out of 10 homes have been damaged or destroyed in Gaza, meaning some people are sleeping in homes with missing walls or roofs while others are sleeping in tents, according to Ingram, increasing the need for mattresses, blankets and other provisions.
Ingram said that last winter, some children — including babies — died of hypothermia, which she said is preventable with the proper supplies.
She added that she is concerned that many children in Gaza have only one or two sets of clothes, many of which are not warm enough for winter months.
“Our aim is to provide every child in the Gaza Strip under the age of 10 with a new set of winter clothes during the ceasefire and a new pair of shoes,” Ingram said. “That goal is heavily dependent on the volume of aid that gets into the Gaza Strip, so we remain hopeful, but we do call on both parties to the conflict to adhere to the terms of the ceasefire.”
Workers describe the housing the Bangladesh government is building for thousands of Rohingya refugees. ABC
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration is asserting that it has secured substantial financial commitments for the Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh from partner nations as reports claim that U.S. foreign aid cutbacks have worsened the crisis facing the persecuted group, according to a State Department document obtained exclusively by ABC News.
Per the document, the State Department says it has secured $64.6 million in aid commitments from partner countries in September alone, marking what it calls “a significant development in the Trump administration’s effort to encourage burden sharing with other nations to address humanitarian crises across the globe.”
State Department data indicates that 11 countries, including the U.K., Bangladesh, Japan, Qatar, Australia, Thailand, South Korea, and the Netherlands, have increased their aid to the Rohingya people by more than 10% under the Trump administration in 2025 compared to the last year of the Biden administration, the document states.
The level of influence the Trump administration had over the uptick in aid from these foreign governments is not clear.
The Trump administration also pledged more funding to support Rohingya refugees in September, committing $60 million to the cause in addition to $73 in new assistance announced in March.
In 2024, the final year of the Biden administration, the U.S. contributed just over $300 million to the Rohingya, over 50% of total support for that year, records show.
“The Trump administration has continuously called on nations around the world to join the United States in offering humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations like Rohingya refugees,” a senior State Department official said. “The media narrative that the obligation to provide aid falls solely on the Trump Administration is tired and ignores the reality that many other countries, including regional actors, have repeatedly failed to step up.”
The State Department’s push to ramp up foreign aid for the Rohingya comes as the AP has published a report asserting that Rohingya children have died in a camp located in Myanmar because of the Trump administration’s USAID cuts. (Notably, the report covers impact to Rohingya children in Myanmar; the Trump administration’s fundraising efforts have focused on supporting Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.)
“Let me be absolutely clear: the Associated Press’ claim that children are dying because of recalibrated U.S. foreign assistance levels is completely false and downright irresponsible,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement.
