By SAMY MAGDY, LEE KEATH and TIA GOLDENBERG (Associated Press)

CAIRO (AP) — The United Nations says it has suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity. It also said no aid trucks entered in the past two days via a floating pier set up by the U.S. for sea deliveries.

The U.N. has not specified how many people remain in Rafah after the Israeli military launched an intensified assault there on May 6, but there appears to be several hundred thousand people.

Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the U.N’s World Food Program, warned that “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse.” If food and other supplies don’t resume entering Gaza “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread,” she said.

The warning came as Israel seeks to contain the fallout from a request by the chief prosecutor of the world’s top war crimes court for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, a move supported by three European countries, including key ally France. The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged “use of starvation as a method of warfare,” a charge they and other Israeli officials angrily deny. The prosecutor accused three Hamas leaders of war crimes over killings of civilians in the group’s Oct. 7 attack.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

The crisis in humanitarian supplies has spiraled in the two weeks since Israel launched an incursion into Rafah on May 6, vowing to root out Hamas fighters. Troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has been closed since. As of May 10, only about three dozen trucks made it into Gaza via the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel because fighting makes it difficult for aid workers to reach it, the U.N. says.

The main agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, announced the suspension of distribution in Rafah in a post on X, without elaborating beyond citing the lack of supplies.

Etefa said the WFP had also stopped distribution in Rafah after exhausting its stocks. It continues passing out hot meals in central Gaza and “limited distributions” of reduced food parcels in central Gaza, but “food parcel stocks will run out within days,” she said.

Etefa said 10 trucks entered through the U.S.-made pier on Friday and were taken to its warehouse in central Gaza. But a delivery Saturday of 11 trucks was stopped by crowds of Palestinians who took supplies, and only five trucks made it to the warehouse. No further deliveries came from the pier on Sunday or Monday, she said.

The U.N says some 1.1 million people in Gaza – nearly half the population — face catastrophic levels of hunger and that the territory is on the brink of famine.

Until early May, some 1.3 million people were crowded into Rafah after fleeing Israel’s offensive elsewhere in the territory. At least 810,000 of those have fled since Israel launched its incursion into the city. Those fleeing have scattered across southern Gaza, erecting sprawling tent camps or crowding into U.N. schools already heavily damaged from Israel’s previous offensives.

While no one faces imminent arrest from the ICC move, the announcement deepens Israel’s global isolation at a time when it is facing growing criticism from even its closest allies over the war in Gaza.

Belgium, Slovenia and France each said Monday they backed the decision by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan. Their support exposes divisions in the West’s approach to Israel.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz headed to France on Tuesday in response, and his meetings there could set the tone for how countries navigate the warrants — if they are eventually issued — and whether they could pose a threat to Israeli leaders.

Israel still has the support of its top ally, the United States, as well as other Western countries that spoke out against the decision. But if the warrants are issued, they could complicate international travel for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, even if they do not face any immediate risk of prosecution because Israel itself is not a member of the court.

Related Articles

Trudy Rubin: Netanyahu moves toward military reoccupation of Gaza with no exit strategy

Helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and others could reverberate across the Middle East

War crimes prosecutor seeks arrest of Israeli and Hamas leaders, including Netanyahu

Biden tells Morehouse graduates that scenes in Gaza from the Israel-Hamas war break his heart, too

David Brooks: The authoritarians have momentum, and here’s partly why

The prosecutor also requested warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh. Hamas is already considered an international terrorist group by the West. Both Sinwar and Deif are believed to be hiding in Gaza. But Haniyeh, the supreme leader of the Islamic group, is based in Qatar and frequently travels across the region. Qatar, like Israel, is not a member of the ICC.

As Israeli leaders came to grips with the prosecutor’s decision, violence continued in the region, with an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank killing at least seven Palestinians, including a local doctor, according to Palestinian health officials.

In a statement Monday night about the warrant requests, France said it “supports the International Criminal Court, its independence, and the fight against impunity in all situations.”

“France has been warning for many months about the imperative of strict compliance with international humanitarian law and in particular about the unacceptable nature of civilian losses in the Gaza Strip and insufficient humanitarian access,” said the statement from France, which has a large Jewish community and close trade and diplomatic ties with Israel.

The war between began on Oct. 7, when Hamas-led terrorists crossed into Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 250 hostage. Khan accused Hamas’ leaders of crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder and sexual violence.

Israel responded with an offensive, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between noncombatants and fighters in its count. The war has sparked a humanitarian crisis that has displaced much of the coastal enclave’s population and driven parts of it to starvation, which Khan said Israel used as a “method of warfare.”

Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib said Monday in a post on social media platform X that “crimes committed in Gaza must be prosecuted at the highest level, regardless of the perpetrators.”

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders condemned the prosecutor’s move as disgraceful and antisemitic. U.S. President Joe Biden also lambasted the prosecutor and supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. The United Kingdom called the move “not helpful,” saying the ICC does not have jurisdiction in the case, while Israeli ally Czech Republic called Khan’s decision “appalling and completely unacceptable.”

A panel of three judges will decide whether to issue the arrest warrants and allow a case to proceed. The judges typically take two months to make such decisions.

Experts warned that any warrants could complicate relations between Israel and even allies that condemned the move.

Yuval Kaplinsky, a former senior official in Israel’s Justice Ministry, said countries that are party to the court would be obliged to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if they visit, although he said some of those countries might find legal loopholes that could help them avoid that.

“They would prefer (that) Netanyahu does not visit rather than have him visit in London and have the entire world watch him avoid extradition,” Kaplinsky said.

Since the war began, violence has also flared in the occupied West Bank.

On Tuesday, an Israeli raid into the Jenin refugee camp and the adjacent city of Jenin killed at least seven Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

The military said its forces struck militants during the operation while the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group said its fighters battled the Israeli forces.

However, according to Wissam Abu Baker, the director of Jenin Governmental Hospital, the medical center’s surgery specialist, Ossayed Kamal Jabareen, was among the dead. He was killed on his way to work, Abu Baker said.

Jenin and the refugee camp, seen as a hotbed of militancy, have been frequent targets of Israeli raids, long before Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza broke out.

Since the start of the war, nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed in West Bank fighting, many of them militants, as well as others throwing stones or explosives at troops. Others not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Israel says it is cracking down on soaring militancy in the territory, pointing to a spike in attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. It has arrested more than 3,000 Palestinians since the start of the war in Gaza.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem, which it later annexed, and the Gaza Strip, which it withdrew troops and settlers from in 2005. Palestinians seek those territories as part of their future independent state, hopes for which have been dimmed since the war in Gaza erupted.

Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press journalists Majdi Mohammed in the Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem, John Leicester in Paris, and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

By JAKE COYLE (AP Film Writer)

CANNES, France (AP) — Donald Trump’s reelection campaign called “The Apprentice,” a film about the former U.S. president in the 1980s, “pure fiction” and vowed legal action following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. But director Ali Abbasi is offering to privately screen the film for Trump.

Following its premiere Monday in Cannes, Steven Cheung, Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the Trump team will file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”

“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Cheung said.

“The Apprentice” stars Sebastian Stan as Trump. The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the defense attorney who was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations of suspected communists.

Asked about the Trump campaign’s statement Tuesday in Cannes, Abbasi told reporters: “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?”

But the Iranian Danish director also struck a less combative tone as he discussed the film at its festival press conference. He offered to screen “The Apprentice” for Trump and talk it over.

“I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike,” said Abbasi. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”

In the film, Cohn is depicted as a longtime mentor to Trump, coaching him in the ruthlessness of New York City politics and business. Early on, Cohn aided the Trump Organization when it was being sued by the federal government for racial discrimination in housing.

“The Apprentice,” which is labeled as inspired by true events, portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that guided his rise as a businessman and, later, as a politician. Stan’s Trump is initially a more naive real estate striver, soon transformed by Cohn’s education.

The film notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.

That scene and others make “The Apprentice” a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the U.S. presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.

Related Articles

Trump or Biden? Either way, US seems poised to preserve heavy tariffs on imports

Election deniers moving closer to GOP mainstream, report shows, as Trump allies fill Congress

Trump Media and Technology Group posts more than $300 million net loss in first public quarter

Michael Cohen testifies he stole from Trump Org at hush money trial

Nikki Haley faces a murky path forward and a key decision on whether or not to endorse Trump

After the premiere, Abbasi addressed the Cannes audience, saying “there is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism.”

“The good people have been quiet for too long,” he said. “So I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”

Listing wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, Abbasi, whose previous film ” Holy Spider ” depicted a serial killer murdering women in Iran, warned of trouble ahead.

“In the time of turmoil, there’s this tendency to look inwards, to bury your head deep in the sand, look inside and hope for the best — hope for the best, hope for the storm to get away,” Abbasi said. “But the storm is not going to get away. The storm is coming. The worst times are coming.”

The film’s premiere unfolded while Trump’s hush money trial continued in New York.

By PAUL WISEMAN (AP Economics Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — As president, Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on foreign steel, which hurt Clips & Clamps Industries, a Michigan auto supplier — raising its materials prices, making it harder to compete with overseas rivals and costing it several contracts.

Jeff Aznavorian, the company president, thought he might enjoy some relief once Joe Biden entered the White House. Instead, Biden largely preserved Trump’s tariffs — on steel, aluminum and a mass of goods from China.

“It was a little surprising that an ideologically different administration would keep the policies so intact,’’ Aznavorian said, recalling how a previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had fought for freer trade. “That’s just so different from a 2024 Biden administration.’’

Trump and Biden agree on essentially nothing, from taxes and climate change to immigration and regulation. Yet on trade policy, the two presumptive presidential nominees have embraced surprisingly similar approaches. Which means that whether Biden or Trump wins the presidency, the United States seems poised to maintain a protectionist trade policy — a policy that experts say could feed inflation pressures.

Last week, in fact, Biden announced some new tariffs, on Chinese electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells and other products, that he said would keep Beijing from flooding the United States with cheap imports.

The protectionist tilt of the two presidential contenders reflects the widespread view that opening the nation to more imports — especially from China — wiped out American manufacturing jobs and shuttered factories. It’s an especially potent political topic in the Midwestern industrial states that will likely decide who wins the White House.

“If you look at the election, it’s obvious,’’ said William Reinsch, a former trade official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Where are the deciding states? Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — right there, you can see that trade is going to have an outsize role.’’

In their own ways, the two candidates have ditched a U.S. commitment to relatively frictionless trade — low barriers and scant government interference — that were a bedrock of American policy for decades after World War II. The idea was that free trade would hold down costs and aid consumers and businesses across the world.

In recent years, though, the perception grew that while free trade benefited households and companies, it hurt workers, with American jobs falling victim to cheaper foreign labor.

“The once nearly unanimous Washington consensus on free trade is dead,” Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s lead trade negotiator, crowed in his 2023 book, “No Trade Is Free.’’

Yet like free trade, trade protectionism carries its own economic price. It can raise costs for households and businesses just as the nation is struggling to fully tame inflation. It tends to prop up inefficient companies. It spurs retaliation from other nations against American exporters. And it typically sours relations with allies and adversaries alike.

Trump, who brazenly labeled himself “Tariff Man,’’ tried to pummel America’s trading partners with import taxes, vowing to shrink America’s trade deficits, especially with China.

He did pressure Mexico and Canada into rewriting a North American trade deal that Trump insisted had destroyed U.S. manufacturing jobs. He also persuaded China to agree to buy more American farm goods. But his efforts didn’t revive the manufacturing base — factory jobs make up a smaller share of U.S. employment than they did before his presidency — or shrink America’s trade deficits.

Trump has vowed more of the same in a second term. He’s threatening to impose a 10% tariff on all imports — and a 60% tax on Chinese goods.

“I call it a ring around the country,’’ Trump said in an interview with Time magazine.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, warns that the consequences would be damaging. Trump’s tariff plans, Zandi said, “would spark higher inflation, reduce GDP and jobs and increase unemployment, all else equal.”

Related Articles

Election deniers moving closer to GOP mainstream, report shows, as Trump allies fill Congress

Trump Media and Technology Group posts more than $300 million net loss in first public quarter

Michael Cohen testifies he stole from Trump Org at hush money trial

Nikki Haley faces a murky path forward and a key decision on whether or not to endorse Trump

Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate. Ex-president’s backers say he shares faith, values

A year after the import taxes were imposed, Zandi estimates, average consumer prices would be 0.7 percentage points higher than they would otherwise be. A report out Monday, from Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, estimates that for families in the middle of the U.S. income distribution, Trump’s tariff proposals would amount to a tax of at least $1,700 a year.

For his part, Biden favors subsidizing such key industries as chipmaking and EV manufacturing to give them a competitive edge. It’s a stance that reflects worry that China’s rising military and technological might imperils America’s national security. As last week’s announcement showed, Biden isn’t averse to new tariffs, either. His top trade negotiator, Katherine Tai, has opened an investigation into Chinese trade practices in the shipbuilding industry, likely a prelude to imposing further sanctions on Beijing.

“The laissez-faire economic model of trade wasn’t working for the United States,’’ said Elizabeth Baltzan, a senior adviser to Tai. “We want to correct for that. The measures you take in order to get a fairer (economy) may involve measures that could be labeled protectionist. But I think you have to ask what you’re protecting” — notably working-class communities.

Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist who was an early critic of the globalization of the 1990s and 2000s, views Biden trade policies more favorably than he does Trump’s approach.

“Trump’s was knee-jerk and incoherent; there is little evidence that his trade restrictions on China did any good to workers or the middle class in the U.S.,’’ Rodrik said.

By contrast, he said, “Biden’s approach is strategic and based on rebuilding U.S. manufacturing capacity and investing in the green transition, so fundamentally strengthening the U.S. economy rather than crass protectionism.”

Either way, a consensus formed in recent years that U.S. trade policy had to change. Moving factories to low-wage countries like Mexico and China in the 1990s and early 2000s, critics say, fattened corporate profits and enriched executives and investors but devastated American factory towns that couldn’t compete with cheap imports.

David Autor, a leading economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two colleagues concluded in a 2016 paper that from 1999 to 2011, cheap Chinese imports wiped out 2.4 million American jobs.

More recently, China’s rise as America’s No. 1 geopolitical rival has created a bipartisan effort to reduce America’s reliance on Beijing for supplies of everything from pharmaceuticals to “rare earth’’ minerals for electric cars and cellphones.

Though this sea change in policy may have started with Trump, discontent with free trade and with an increasingly combative China had been building for years. One of Trump’s first presidential acts was to dump a free trade agreement the Obama administration had negotiated with 11 Pacific Rim countries.

Then Trump really got going. He imposed taxes on foreign washing machines and solar panels. Next, he labeled steel and aluminum imports a threat to national security and hit them with tariffs.

Finally, he started perhaps the biggest trade war since the 1930s: He hammered $360 billion of Chinese products with tariffs for Beijing’s efforts to surpass U.S. technological supremacy through illicit tactics, including cybertheft. China lashed back with retaliatory taxes of its own: It targeted American farmers, in particular, to try to hurt Trump’s constituency in rural America.

Did Trump’s tariff war achieve anything?

A study by Autor and colleagues at the University of Zurich, Harvard and the World Bank concluded that Trump’s import taxes failed in their goal to return jobs to the American heartland. The tariffs, the study found, “neither raised nor lowered U.S. employment’’ where they were supposed to protect jobs.

Worse, the retaliatory taxes imposed by China and other nations on U.S. goods had “negative employment impacts,’’ especially for farmers. These were only partly offset by billions in government aid that Trump bestowed on farmers to cushion their pain.

The Trump tariffs also damaged companies that relied on supplies that were affected by the tariffs. In Plymouth, Michigan, Clips & Clamps doesn’t even use much imported steel. Yet it was still hurt by the tariffs because they allowed American steel producers to raise their prices.

“Our raw material prices here in the United States tend to be 20% higher than Europe and Mexico and 40% to 60% higher than China,’’ Aznavorian said. His overseas rivals, he said, enjoy “significantly cheaper’’ costs.

If Trump’s trade war fizzled as policy, though, it succeeded as politics. Autor’s study found that support for Trump and Republicans running for Congress rose in the areas most exposed to the import tariffs — the industrial Midwest and manufacturing-heavy Southern states like North Carolina and Tennessee.

After entering office, Biden retained many of Trump’s trade policies and made no effort to revive Obama’s old Pacific Rim trade pact. He kept Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, while letting some trading partners avoid it until they reached a quota. He also retained China tariffs. Biden even turned up the heat on Beijing by restricting its access to advanced computer chips and the equipment to make them.

“Trade and national security have been combined into one thing,’’ Reinsch said. “This is the first time we’ve had an adversary that posed both an economic and a security challenge. The Soviet Union was a security challenge, but it was never an economic threat. Japan was an economic threat in the ’80s, but it was never a security threat; they were an ally. China is both, and it’s been complicated trying to figure out how to deal with that.’’

Biden’s China policies are “grounded in national security,’’ said Peterson’s Lovely. “That makes it harder to critique because national security is always this black box that only those with the highest security clearance get to see.’’

The Biden administration has rankled some U.S. allies by offering subsidies to encourage U.S. companies to manufacture goods in America. Under Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, auto buyers can receive a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electric vehicle. But the credit applies only to EVs assembled in North America. And the full credit goes only to EVs in which at least 60% of battery parts are made in North America and 50% of the “critical minerals’’ used in the vehicle — like cobalt, copper and lithium — come from the United States or a country with which the U.S. has a free trade deal.

“It’s important that the United States develop its own clean energy sector, in collaboration with its allies and partners, thereby not becoming dependent on Chinese technologies,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator who is vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. “When trade is increasingly being weaponized, it’s important that the U.S. does not become overly dependent on China for strategic products.’’

Biden’s initiatives — including incentives to produce green technology and computer chips in the United States — have spurred what looks like a surge of investment in manufacturing. Karen Dynan of the Peterson Institute has reported that investment in U.S. factories surged at an 80% annual rate in the January-March period compared with the final three months of 2023, helping fuel the economy’s unexpectedly strong performance.

The United States seems unlikely to reverse its tilt toward protectionism anytime soon. China, struggling to revive its own economy, is trying to export its way out of trouble, threatening to overwhelm world markets with cheap EVs and other products.

As for Aznavorian, he hopes the U.S. mends trade relations with its allies.

“We need friendly trade partners in order to compete against China,’’ he said.

Yet when it comes to China and other U.S. adversaries, Aznavorian said, he’s convinced that protectionist trade policies are “definitely here to stay.’’