Graz school shooting survivors not in life-threatening condition, hospitals say
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(BELGRADE and LONDON) — Eleven people injured in a school shooting in Graz, Austria, on Tuesday are still being treated but are not in life-threatening condition, officials at the three hospitals treating the patients told ABC News.
Ten people were killed in the shooting at a high school in Austria’s second-largest city on Tuesday, with the shooter also dying by suicide in a bathroom during the incident, according to local officials.
Twelve people were initially injured, one of whom died in hospital on Tuesday.
Austrians observed a nationwide minute of silence on Wednesday morning to mourn the victims.
The suspect, a 21-year-old Austrian citizen and former student of the school who never graduated, acted alone, authorities said. The shooter used a long gun and a handgun which were found at the scene and are now being investigated, a Styria police spokesperson said.
The suspect — who was not employed at the time of the shooting — legally owned the two weapons used in the attack, officials said.
Police had no prior records on the suspect, a spokesperson said, and there was no prior warning. Officials searching the premises where the suspect lived found a farewell letter, but police have not offered a motive for the attack.
“The school shooting in Graz is a national tragedy that has deeply shocked our entire country,” Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said in a statement posted on social media.
He added, “Young people suddenly ripped from the lives they had ahead of them. There are no words for the pain and grief that all of us — all of Austria — are feeling right now.”
ABC News’ Morgan Winsor, Kevin Shalvey, Felix Franz and Megan Forrester contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — At least 66 Palestinians have been killed in shootings near aid distribution sites on back-to-back days in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.
At least 30 people were killed in a shooting on Wednesday near an aid site close to the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. This is one of the four operational aid sites run by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
In relation to the shooting, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement it was “currently unaware of IDF fire during daylight hours that corresponds with the footage circulated in the media.” The video was “under review,” the IDF said.
However, the IDF said it did fire “warning shots” overnight Wednesday toward people who it said were “advancing while posing a threat to the troops.”
“The IDF is aware of reports regarding individuals injured, the details are under review,” the statement said.
The shooting Wednesday came one day after at least 36 were killed, the highest one-day death toll from a shooting near an aid distribution center since the opening of the GHF sites last month, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution site in central Gaza, according to two local hospitals in Gaza. Over 100 people were injured in the shooting, according to the two hospitals.
The IDF said in a statement on Tuesday that troops fired “warning shots to distance suspects,” who were advancing in the area and “posed a threat to troops.”
The Israeli army said the warning shots were fired “hundreds of meters form the aid distribution site,” before it opened.
“The IDF is aware of reports regarding several individuals injured in the area,” it said. “An initial inquiry suggests that the number of reported individuals injured does not align with the information held by the IDF.”
“The details are under review,” the IDF said.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — which has been running aid distribution in Gaza since Israel lifted its 11-week blockade last month — resumed aid distribution on Monday after previous shootings near aid sites, saying it gave out 1,386,000 meals at two sites. The GHF has not specified what it considers a meal.
The GHF has closed its aid distribution sites several times since it began distributing meals after several shooting incidents. As of Wednesday, at least 224 people had been killed while trying to get aid from GHF aid distribution sites, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The blockade was instituted to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages taken during Hamas’ surprise terror attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people and led to the capture of hundreds, Israel said.
The GHF was first announced on May 19 — three days after the Israeli government began its increased military operation in Gaza. After the end of an 11-week Israeli blockade on aid entering Gaza, the GHF — a private contractor backed by the U.S. and Israel — took over distributing aid in Gaza.
Humanitarian groups and the United Nations have said the GHF politicizes aid and criticized the role of IDF forces in the operation.
Palestinians in Gaza remain at risk of extreme starvation and famine even after Israel lifted the blockade on all humanitarian aid entering the Strip, according to aid groups like the U.N., the International Committee of the Red Cross and others.
The death toll in the 20-month Hamas-Israel war also crossed 55,000 on Wednesday, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health. There have been another 127,394 injuries during the war, the health ministry said.
(WASHINGTON) — Humanitarians in Sudan, where a two-year civil war has given rise to the world’s most acute needs and made assistance increasingly difficult, warn that a vacuum left by cuts to U.S. funding for aid programs cannot be filled.
The civil war between the country’s army and a paramilitary group has displaced 11 million people internally and 4 million more are refugees in other countries. It’s the only place in the world where famine conditions have been confirmed in multiple locations, and the United Nations says 30 million Sudanese require assistance — or 60% of the country’s population.
The U.S. shuttered its arm for foreign assistance at the beginning of July, formerly the U.S. Agency for International Development, folding it under the State Department in a move Secretary of State Marco Rubio said marked the end of an “era of government-sanctioned inefficiency.” And the U.S. Senate could vote on legislation proposed by the Trump Administration as soon as this week to claw back over $8 billion in funding due to be dispersed for USAID in the remainder of the fiscal year.
“Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited,” Rubio wrote on Substack, adding the U.S. “will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect.”
The months-long drawdown of USAID reduced its staff by 83% — down from 10,000 employees to a few hundred — and resulted in stop-work orders for grantees of its funds, including in Sudan. The State Department says the life-saving work of the agency, which distributes grants to aid implementers, is continuing, and said its new “America First” foreign assistance policy would be accountable to policymakers in Washington instead of global entities like the United Nations.
A senior State Department official last week called the end of USAID and the institution of a new overarching office at State “a milestone for American engagement in the world,” saying U.S. assistance abroad would be “linked up diplomatically” with U.S. interests.
The British medical journal Lancet found that in the absence of USAID’s funds and works, 14 million more people would die in the next five years, a third of those children under 5.
The senior State Department official downplayed the study.
“You can go back and relitigate all these little decisions. That’s not our focus. That’s not the secretary’s focus,” the official said. “We are excited about what sort of the America First foreign assistance agenda is going to look like, and how much impact we can have moving forward.”
Meanwhile, in the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis, where access for emergency food and medical workers has been made increasingly difficult by warring parties, people are fleeing violence on foot, children are malnourished, and Sudanese are dying from treatable conditions.
Pietro Curtaz, an emergency logistics coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) said children he sees crossing Sudan’s border are malnourished at a rate of 29%.
The cuts to USAID — and the chaos that followed — have “come with a body count” in Sudan said Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan in the last year of the Biden administration from 2024 to 2025.
There were 29 USAID employees in Sudan in 2023, at the outset of the war, according to then-administrator Samantha Powers.
The July 1 reprogramming of USAID into the State Department cut two additional U.S. staffers dedicated to Sudan, leaving just nine remaining in the region, said Andrea Tracy, a former USAID Sudan official who now runs her own humanitarian funding mechanism for the country.
Tracy saw colleagues lose their jobs on a daily basis as USAID wound down the programs it funded in the country, she told ABC News in a June phone call.
“I was talking to one of the regional directors the other day, and just that morning, she got an email saying another 40 programs are going to be cut,” she said. “So we haven’t found the floor yet.”
The dramatic reorientation of U.S. aid abroad comes as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany have announced a scaling down of their own foreign assistance budgets and as humanitarian crises in places like Sudan — where the civil war has stretched into a third year — deepen.
According to data from the U.N., USAID provided 44% of the world’s humanitarian funding in 2024 for Sudan.
A U.N. spokesman told ABC News that “food aid, nutrition support and essential health services” have been cut back as the U.N.’s annual fund for Sudan is funded at only 14%.
“Without urgent additional support, the risk of famine and further deterioration remains high,” said Dan Teng’o, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The State Department did not respond to requests by ABC News for the current data on its assistance commitments to Sudan after foreign aid freezes and layoffs.
But it said in a statement that “foreign assistance continues to arrive in Sudan,” citing a $56 million donation to the World Food Programme and a wheat grain delivery under USAID that would feed “as many as 3.2 million people for an entire month.”
It also said emergency assistance continues for refugees of Sudan who have been displaced to “seven neighboring countries due to the conflict.”
Important dollars for refugee assistance are in jeopardy, too, as humanitarians brace for the impacts of a proposed $1.7 billion cut to U.S. refugee assistance. As a part of Rubio’s reorganization, the State Department proposed a 50% reduction for aid to the world’s refugees in its 2026 budget request to Congress.
Chain reactions and health care at the brink
Humanitarians, who are legally protected under international law, have not been spared from the violence of the civil war, which has deprived people of the chance to stave off starvation and made access increasingly difficult.
Five humanitarians in June died when a U.N. convoy came under attack, the U.N. said.
In the void, small, grassroots organizations began to sprout when war broke out two years ago. A coalition known as Mutual Aid stood up emergency clinics and soup kitchens that became “a lifeline” for Sudanese, Tracy said. The coalition was backed by nearly 80% funding from USAID, organizers have said.
When the White House on President Donald Trump’s first day in office froze all U.S. assistance abroad, Tracy said, some 1,500 of the kitchens in Sudan closed almost immediately.
Perriello, whose role as the special envoy in Sudan has been left vacant by the Trump administration, said the Mutual Aid coalition was among a group of “edgy efforts … redefining approaches to aid.” These programs suffered the first and “deepest” cuts, he said.
Tracy said the pain from the cuts has been felt most acutely in the health sector, where medicine is not moving the way it used to and a “chain” of “different components that rely on each other” are not in place.
“Once you break one of those components, it all breaks,” she said.
MSF, which provides emergency medical care in Sudan, is operating in a country where the World Health Organization estimates only 20 to 30% of health facilities are operational.
“Wherever we look in Sudan, you will find humanitarian and medical needs. All those needs are overwhelming, urgent, and unfortunately, unmet,” Claire San Filippo, MSF’s emergency coordinator for Sudan, said.
A “case study” for impact of cuts
At the Tine border point in Chad, east of the violence-plunged Darfur region of Sudan, Curtaz, the emergency coordinator for MSF, told ABC News the cuts are impossible to miss.
“Clinically … we tend to see people that are in much worse condition than before because of all of that,” he said.
MSF is independent and donor-funded, taking no dollars from the U.S. government and therefore not directly affected by the cuts and shutdown of USAID.
Sudan has become a “case study” for the “impact of those cuts,” Curtaz said.
“One of the examples you can touch first,” he said, is the lack of shelter for refugees under a 110-degree sun. People arrive by foot in Chad having spent the day with no form of shelter, he said.
The 18,000 people hosted in Tine should have had at least 350 toilets, meeting a standard in acute situations of one toilet for every 50 people, Curtaz said. But for a group surging toward 20,000 people, it had only nine toilets.
Asked whether the large, interconnected humanitarian system is neglecting Sudan, Curtaz agreed.
“A majority of the weight is lying on us, on the host community and on grassroots organizations that are doing their best to support the population,” he said. “So, yes.”
“For the first time in my life,” Tracy said, MSF doctors and administrators told her “‘We really need the USAID money … to come back online, because we’re carrying way more of a load than we can handle. We’re falling apart here.’”
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(LONDON) — American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander, who had been held captive by Hamas in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, was released on Monday after successful negotiations between the U.S. and the Palestinian group.
Alexander’s mother, Yael, has arrived at Re’im military base in Israel near the Gaza border to see her son before he’s taken to a hospital in Tel Aviv. Retired Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch, the Israeli coordinator for prisoners of war and missing persons, and U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are also heading to the military base, an Israeli official told ABC News.
Israeli security officials told ABC News there would be a temporary pause in combat, airstrikes and aerial reconnaissance in the area of Gaza where Alexander was to be released. The pause will last until Alexander crosses into Israeli territory, officials said, which is expected to take less than 30 minutes.
Alexander, a New Jersey native, traveled to Israel at the age of 18. He was serving in the Israel Defense Forces when captured from his base close to the Gaza frontier during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. He was 19 when abducted and has had two birthdays while in captivity.
Alexander is the last living American citizen still believed to be held hostage by Hamas. The terror group is believed to also be holding the bodies of four dead American hostages, according to U.S. officials.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday met with Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, per a readout from his office. Netanyahu also spoke with President Donald Trump, the statement said, with the Israeli leader thanking Trump for his assistance in securing Alexander’s release.
“The prime minister discussed the last-ditch effort to implement the outline for the release of the hostages presented by Witkoff, before the escalation of the fighting,” the statement said. “To this end, the prime minister instructed that a negotiating delegation be sent to Doha tomorrow.”
“The prime minister clarified that the negotiations will only take place under fire,” it added.
Hamas announced its intention to free Alexander on Sunday, describing the decision as a “part of the steps being taken to achieve a ceasefire.”
The statement said Hamas has been in contact with American officials “over the past few days” as part of ceasefire negotiations.
Trump posted to Truth Social saying Alexander’s release “is the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict.”
A U.S. official familiar with the deal to release Alexander told ABC News that the agreement came together in recent days via direct talks between the U.S. and Hamas.
Alexander’s release is being viewed as a goodwill gesture toward the Trump administration and a potential opening to jumpstart talks surrounding the broader conflict, U.S. officials told ABC News.
Still, officials said the U.S. did not secure all the concessions it was seeking. Negotiators had also been pushing Hamas for the release of the remains of the four dead American hostages still held in Gaza, officials said.
Alexander’s family said in a statement released through the Hostage Families Forum that it was informed of Hamas’ announcement and “is in continuous contact with the U.S. government regarding the possibility of Edan’s expected release in the coming days.”
They added that “it is forbidden to leave any hostage behind” and said that “Israel is committed to ensure the return of all 58 remaining hostages without delay.”
Alexander was one of the 253 hostages taken during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, in which some 1,200 people were also killed, according to Israel.
Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza had killed 52,829 people and wounded 119,554 more as of Sunday, according to figures released by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in the strip.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Shannon K. Kingston contributed to this report.
