The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) is temporarily pausing its food distribution operations from a U.S.-built pier in Gaza after its warehouses were hit by rockets, representing the latest blow to efforts to get humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip from the pier.

The U.S. has spent some $320 million building the pier in the Mediterranean Sea to facilitate the delivery of aid into Gaza. But there have been chaotic scenes of hundreds of Palestinians looting aid convoys, and the structure has been battered by choppy weather.

Aid arrived at the pier on Saturday with about 492 metric tons being delivered, according to U.S. Central Command.

‘To date, USCENTCOM has assisted in the delivery of more than 1,573 metric tons (~3.5 million pounds) of humanitarian aid. No U.S. military personnel went ashore in Gaza,’ the agency said in a statement. ‘This ongoing effort in support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to deliver additional aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza is entirely humanitarian in nature and involves aid commodities donated by several countries and humanitarian organizations.’

But on Sunday, Cindy McCain, WFP’s executive director, said the U.N. program was halting distribution due to safety concerns.

‘Right now, we’re paused because I’m concerned about the safety of our people after the incidents yesterday,’ she said on CBS News.

McCain said that two warehouses were rocketed on Saturday, ‘[S]o we’ve stepped back just for the moment to make sure that we’re in – on safe terms and on safe ground before we’ll restart.’

She said operations elsewhere are ongoing.

‘Temporarily pausing operations at floating dock for a UN security assessment to ensure staff & partners’ safety,’ the WFP said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The U.N. confirmed that the WFP is ‘temporarily pausing operations at the floating dock until a thorough assessment of the security situation is conducted to ensure the safety of our staff and our partners.’

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to Fox News Digital that the pier is still operational and that 1,573 metric tons have been delivered from the pier. The spokesperson also said that U.S. military personnel are not operating in Gaza.

Relief agencies have pushed Israel to reopen land routes to bring in aid to Gaza. Israel, however, says it has allowed trucks to enter and says it is the fault of the U.N. as to why the aid hasn’t been distributed.

President Biden had announced his plan to build a pier during his State of the Union address in March, and the initial estimate was to get it up and running in 60 days. But the first aid trucks did not arrive at the pier until May 17.

Former IDF spokesperson and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Jonathan Conricus told Fox News Digital that ‘The continued provision of aid to civilians in Gaza is an Israeli priority in order to keep fighting and ultimately defeating Hamas and freeing both Israel and Gaza of this murderous terror regime.’

‘Hamas continues to intentionally disrupt the provision of aid and continues to attack and loot warehouses, harass aid convoys and steal and sell international aid,’ he said. ‘According to the behavior of various U.N. officials since Oct. 7, I will not hold my breath to hear their condemnation of Hamas’ efforts to obstruct the provision of aid, only to criticize Israel. I urge the WFP and all other international NGOs to resume provision of aid.’

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

With parts of the U.S. hunkering down for an intense hurricane season, a bipartisan pair of lawmakers is pushing to unchain the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from the layers of government bureaucracy they say have ‘bogged’ the agency down.

Reps. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., and Garret Graves, R-La., come from two states that have traditionally borne the brunt of the summer storm season. They want House leadership to take up their bill aimed at elevating FEMA to a Cabinet level position as soon as possible ahead of the rough weather period.

‘The predictions are not good,’ Moskowitz said of the coming storm season. ‘But now is the time for people to prepare in the community. Now’s the time to take advantage.’

FEMA sits under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where it was relegated when the department was created after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. 

Moskowitz and Graves disagree over whether that was the right move – but both insisted it’s an untenable situation today.

‘Look, Homeland Security is becoming a little more partisan in the eyes of Congress…I’ve got to make sure that disaster management doesn’t become partisan. Disasters don’t strike Democrats or Republicans. It strikes everybody, it strikes Americans,’ Moskowitz said.

Graves told Fox News Digital of FEMA’s placement under DHS in a separate interview, ‘I understand the design and the intention, but it has not turned out as something that’s been beneficial.’

‘Let’s be honest, DHS can’t even handle the border. It completely failed at securing the southern border,’ Graves said. ‘I don’t think we need that type of leadership involved in disaster preparation, disaster prevention, disaster response, and recovery.’

‘This is all about efficiency, it’s about being agile, being able to quickly pivot, move, and respond to some of these catastrophic disasters that we’ve seen in the United States over the past few decades.’

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting an 85% likelihood of an ‘above-normal’ Atlantic hurricane season this year, according to a late May press release.

It’s predicting eight to thirteen hurricanes in the period between June 1 and Nov. 30, including four to seven that are likely to be Category 3 or higher. NOAA is expecting 17 to 25 named storms in total.

‘We are seeing flooding in places we didn’t see before, right? We’re seeing saltwater intrusion. We’re seeing… more rain being dumped in places. We’re seeing more fires, and we’re seeing stronger hurricanes. All of this is related to climate change,’ Moskowitz said. ‘FEMA is going to be busy, right? And they’re going to continue to get busier. And I just think in order for FEMA to get better…they can’t do that so long as they’re in Homeland Security.’

Graves said there’s a backlog of hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster relief claims being tied down by the bureaucracy of being under DHS.

‘We have hundreds of millions – and probably billions of dollars – in outstanding claims with FEMA right now from a 2016 flood that happened in South Louisiana. Hurricane Ida, Hurricanes…Delta, Zeta, storms that happened earlier this decade – all of them have billions of dollars in outstanding claims,’ Graves said.

‘This really is just an agency that has gotten bogged down in bureaucracy. And when you think about the needs of a community in the aftermath of a disaster, people have gone through these traumatic experiences. In some cases, they’ve lost everything. The last thing in the world we need is our own government re-victimizing them.’

Fox News Digital reached out to DHS for comment.

Dozens of former intelligence officials who signed a letter warning Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop ‘has all the classic earmarks’ of Russian disinformation are either declining to retract or doubling down despite the device being entered as evidence in his ongoing criminal trial.

Fox News Digital reached out to all 51 individuals who signed the heavily scrutinized October 2020 letter, published just before the 2020 presidential election, asking if they regretted signing it now that the laptop is being used by the prosecution arguing Hunter committed a federal gun crime.

‘No,’ former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper simply said, also declining to publicly remove his name from the letter or concede that those signing onto it should have waited longer for more information to develop.

Mark S. Zaid, an attorney representing signatories Ronald Marks, Marc Polymeropoulos, Douglas Wise, Paul Kolbe, John Sipher, Emile Nakhleh and Gerald O’Shea, sent Fox News Digital a statement on behalf of his clients that doubled down on the importance of the letter and claimed it was ‘patriotic’ to sign it.

‘There continues to be by many a calculated or woefully ignorant interpretation of the October 2020 letter signed by fifty-one former intelligence officials concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop,’ Zaid, who once posted online that Trump’s election was ‘very scary,’ said in the statement.

‘A careful and objective reading of the document reflects that even today its content is accurate. It served as nothing more than a warning letter of what we have known for decades: certain foreign governments – including Russia – continue to try and actively interfere in our domestic affairs and our guard must remain vigilant. Every patriotic American should have signed that letter.’

Greg Treverton, a signatory who previously served as chair of the National Intelligence Council, defended the letter in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

‘This is very old news,’ Treverton said. ‘What we said was true, we were inferring from our experience, and it did look like a Russian operation. We didn’t, and couldn’t of course say it was a Russian operation. Enough said.’

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden hung up the phone when contacted by Fox News Digital and did not respond to a follow-up text and email.

Former CIA chief of staff Larry Pfeiffer declined to comment, and former National Counterterrorism Center National Director Russ Travers said, ‘These issues were addressed… several years ago.’

Two of the signatories – Patty Brandmaier and Brett Davis – passed away in 2023.

‘We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement – just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,’ the letter stated, before explaining several reasons why the laptop is ‘consistent’ with Russian disinformation.

‘Our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue is consistent with two other significant data points as well. According to the Washington Post, citing four sources, ‘U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.’’

‘In addition, media reports say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in this case. According to USA Today, ‘…federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani… is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.’’

‘Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,’ the original headline from Politico story on the letter from the 51 former officials said. 

When asked about Politico’s characterization of the letter in the headline compared to his statement on behalf of his clients and why his clients did not publicly push back on it after publication, Zaid told Fox News Digital that in journalism ‘sometimes not even the writer of the story chooses the headline content’ and that ‘pretty much two people wrote the letter, and everyone else just signed.’

‘These are not people who often would pay attention to the media details. I couldn’t even tell you if they saw the Politico story. Many of them have since spoken out and very clearly clarified what they meant.’

Hunter Biden’s laptop, the contents of which were first published by the New York Post in 2020, has long been dismissed by Democrats as Russian disinformation and news outlets across the country seized on the letter from former intel officials as definitive proof the laptop was not legitimate.

Several members of the Biden campaign vigorously denied the legitimacy of the laptop leading up to the November election while appearing to be coordinating the release of the Politico story. The article was published days before a debate between Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and President Trump, where Biden claimed, ‘There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant.’

Despite claims from former officials that the laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, Fox News Digital reported that federal investigators with the Department of Justice knew in December 2019 that Hunter Biden’s laptop was ‘not manipulated in any way’ and contained ‘reliable evidence,’ but were ‘obstructed’ from seeing all available information, according to an IRS whistleblower involved in the probe – nearly a year before the former intelligence officials and Joe Biden declared it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The laptop was introduced into evidence in a Delaware courtroom last week by prosecutor Derek Hines and handed to FBI agent Erika Jensen, who had earlier explained how the FBI authenticated the laptop and extracted data. In the gun trial, she testified about dozens of text messages, metadata, photos and short videos found on phones and iCloud accounts belonging to Biden. 

Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former National Intelligence Council Chair Thomas Fingar, former National Security Agency Deputy Director Rick Legett, former CIA acting Director John McLaughlin, former CIA acting Director Michael Morell, former Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Mike Vickers, former Defense Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Doug Wise, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Nick Rasmussen, former National Counterterrorism Center acting Director Russ Travers, former National Counterterrorism Center Deputy Director Andy Liepman, former CIA chief of staff John Moseman, former CIA chief of staff Larry Pfeiffer, former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash, former National Security Agency general counsel Glenn Gerstell, former CIA chief of staff Rodney Snyder, former CIA analyst and manager David Priess, former CIA Deputy Director of Analysis Pam Purcilly, former CIA senior operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, former CIA senior intelligence officer Chris Savos, former CIA senior intelligence officer John Tullius, former CIA senior intelligence officer David A. Vanell, former CIA senior operations officer Kristin Wood, former CIA inspector general David Buckley, former CIA analyst and targeting officer Nada Bakos, former CIA senior intelligence officer Patty Brandmaier, former CIA senior intelligence officer James B. Bruce, former CIA intelligence analyst David Cariens, former CIA operational support officer Janice Cariens, former CIA senior operations officer Paul Kolbe, former CIA analyst Peter Corsell, former CIA senior intelligence officer Brett Davis, former national intelligence officer Roger Zane George, former CIA senior intelligence officer Steven L. Hall, former national intelligence officer Kent Harrington, former national security executive Don Hepburn, former dean of CIA’s Kent School of Intelligence Analysis Timothy D. Kilbourn, former CIA officer Ron Marks, former CIA technical operations officer Jonna Hiestand Mendez, former director of CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program Emile Nakhleh, former CIA senior operations officer Gerald A. O’Shea, former CIA deputy chief of staff Nick Shapiro, former CIA senior operations officer John Sipher, former National Security Council senior director for intelligence programs Stephen Slick, former CIA deputy assistant director for global issues Cynthia Strand, former CIA Deputy Executive Director Greg Tarbell, former National Intelligence Collection Board Chairman David Terry, former National Intelligence Council Chair Greg Treverton, and former CIA director of analysis Winston Wiley.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report

President Biden has long attempted to distance himself from his family’s business dealings as he ran for and eventually became president, but a new report details just how involved those in the president’s inner circle have been in Biden family ventures.

Biden has shared a personal bookkeeper with this son, Hunter Biden, a personal lawyer with this brother, Jim Biden, and the former head of then-Vice President Biden’s Secret Service detail helped Jim Biden investigate a potential Chinese business partner, according to a report from Politico.

While the Bidens have long said they observe strict ‘firewalls’ when it comes to discussing business with each other, the Politico report details just how involved those in the president’s orbit have been in dealings with Hunter and Jim Biden.

In one case, the president’s brother, Jim Biden, hired the head of the former vice president’s Secret Service detail, Dale Pupillo, to investigate a Chinese executive the president’s son, Hunter Biden, was traveling to meet in 2017.

The president’s brother stressed during the February impeachment inquiry that he personally commissioned the investigation into the executive so that he was not going into the situation blind, but insisted he did not know the details of the potential venture being led by his nephew.

‘I wanted to know who I was meeting with and if there were any complications at all,’ he said at the impeachment interview, noting that it was common in the Biden family to keep the details of business dealings away from each other.

The executive, Patrick Ho, was later arrested and convicted on federal corruption charges.

The Politico report notes that Jim Biden had a long habit of tapping those connected to his powerful older brother. In one case, in 1975, during Joe Biden’s first Senate term, Jim Biden secured a loan from the senator’s old law firm, Walsh, Monzack & Owens, to help fund his nightclub business.

One of those partners, Mel Monzack, has gone on to serve as the president’s personal attorney and campaign treasurer. Monzack’s current firm has also served as the registered agent for the president’s personal S Corporation, CelticCapri, which handles income from activities such as writing and speaking fees.

Monzack has also served as Jim Biden’s personal attorney, helping to negotiate a proposed deal that would have given the president’s brother’s company a 35% stake in the Americore hospital chain.

While the deal fell through, Monzack’s involvement raised questions, though Jim Biden has insisted he does not have knowledge of the attorney’s arrangement with President Biden.

‘I don’t have the full depth of what he does or doesn’t do,’ he said in February. ‘But I know that he’s intricately involved and has been, you know, for the last 40 or 50 years.’

Another close associate of President Biden, body man Fran Person, stayed involved with Hunter Biden after leaving government in 2014. Emails showed that Person, who the Bidens have said became like a son to them over the course of Joe Biden’s service in the Senate and as vice president, pitched Hunter Biden on a plan to develop SeaWorld parks in China in a deal between Person’s business and the state-owned Chinese Development Bank in 2015.

WhatsApp messages that were revealed as part of an IRS investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax matters also showed conversations between Person and Hunter Biden, including conversations in which Person told Hunter Biden his Chinese business partner, Bo Zhang, was eager to help the president’s son overcome his growing financial troubles.

The Politico report also detailed the role another Hunter Biden business partner, personal bookkeeper Eric Schwerin, played in the family, with President Biden leaning on the bookkeeper to handle his own finances.

Nevertheless, Schwerin testified during the impeachment inquiry that there was no intermingling between the president and his son’s finances.

The connection between the president’s orbit and his family even extended to President Biden’s personal physician, Army doctor Kevin O’Connor. O’Connor served as then-Vice President Biden’s personal physician and grew close to Biden throughout his time in the Biden administration. The doctor now serves as Biden’s White House physician, the report notes.

In between those two roles, the president’s brother, Jim Biden, sought O’Connor’s help as part of his proposed Americore deal. According to the report, the president’s brother wanted to partner with the Veterans Affairs Department ‘to use vacant space at rural hospitals to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.’

The White House did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

Maverick populist leader Nigel Farage sent shockwaves across Britain’s general election as he returned to frontline politics last week, with his party set to disrupt the Conservative Party’s centuries-old grip as the most popular right-wing force in the country.

Farage announced on Monday that he will lead the right-wing Reform UK party and seek a seat in Parliament for the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea in the July 4 general election to ‘make Britain great again.’

‘So I’m back. I’m standing as a candidate in this election. I’ve taken the leadership over of Reform UK,’ Farage said in a video posted to X, referring to the successor of the Brexit Party. ‘You know why? I see our country going down the drain. I believe in Britain. These boring idiots that lead the Labour and Conservative parties are not worth the space.’

The announcement comes after Farage’s nearly half-decade hiatus from political campaigning amid the success of the Brexit campaign to leave the European Union (EU). Britain voted to leave the EU in the contentious 2016 referendum and formally departed in 2020.

‘I can’t turn my back on those millions of people who followed me, believed in me,’ Farage said in a speech. ‘I’ve changed my mind because I can’t let down millions of people.’

Farage’s campaign launch did not go without problems, as a woman threw a McDonald’s milkshake over him as he left an event. Local police arrested the woman on suspicion of assault.

The populist leader’s political comeback is set to shake up the already fragile election campaign of the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who called a surprise snap election last month amid declining popularity and internal party turmoil. 

A YouGov poll this week stated that Farage-led Reform UK is trailing behind the Conservative party by just two points and may soon eclipse it as the country’s second most popular political party. The poll stated that around 17% of the surveyed voters would back Reform UK, with 19% voting for the Conservative Party. 

The Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, would receive the overwhelming 40% of the vote and is set to gain the majority of seats in Parliament, according to the same poll.

‘Finally the U.K. has a politician willing to stand up and say what the people have been saying for years,’ Thomas Corbet-Dillon, a former adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, told Fox News Digital. ‘No more immigration. The majority of issues facing our country, lack of housing, overwhelmed health services and lack of jobs has been made worse by the Conservative Party, who have imported millions of people from the third world, against the wishes of the people.’

He noted, ‘Nigel Farage has become the most important politician in the U.K. and may actually live up to the title of the British Trump,’ adding, ‘Farage is breaking the establishment Conservative Party just like Trump broke the establishment Republican Party in 2016. MAGA Americans should support Nigel and the Reform Party from across the pond.’

Former Conservative cabinet minister Nadine Dorries, who served under the government of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, speculated that Reform UK is on track to take over as the country’s main right-wing party.

‘I’m guessing that after the appalling events of the past few days over candidate selection, that Reform will have overtaken us in the polls by Saturday evening,’ Dorries said on X, referring to internal clashes within the party over selecting which candidates are allowed to run in select areas.

The Conservative campaign has so far failed to pick up steam and has been marred by a series of political miscalculations, while Reform UK is gaining momentum and outflanking the Conservatives over right-wing issues such as immigration and patriotism.

Sunak was forced to issue a groveling apology on Friday after he left a D-Day commemoration event early to conduct an election interview that will air only next week. ‘After the conclusion of the British event in Normandy, I returned back to the UK. On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay in France longer – and I apologise,’ Sunak wrote on X.

Farage seized on Sunak’s D-Day error, saying the Conservative leader ‘could not even be bothered to attend the international event above Omaha Beach,’ adding in another post on X, ‘Patriotic people who love their country should not vote for him.’

The Tories, as the Conservatives are commonly called, sought to counteract the rising popularity of Reform UK by promising to curb immigration, highlighting the introduced scheme to send some asylum-seekers to Rwanda as a deterrent against illegal migration.

Reform UK, meanwhile, committed to an aggressive crackdown on immigration, proposing a ‘one in, one out’ migration quota and increasing taxes on foreign employees.

Net migration levels soared to nearly 700,000 last year, a figure that both the Conservatives and the Labour Party promised to reduce if elected.

Farage’s party represents the most potent challenge to the Conservative Party’s domination as the country’s premier right-wing political force, likely reshaping the party and pushing it further to the right.

In 2016, at the peak of the campaign to leave the EU, Farage’s previous pro-Brexit political party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), polled at around 17%, forcing Conservatives to move rightwards and adopt the policies of the insurgent populists.

In the 2019 election, Farage’s Brexit Party agreed to stand down candidates and not oppose Conservative candidates in exchange for the Conservative Party agreeing to a timely departure from the EU without any delays. Reform UK and Farage have ruled out a similar deal this election.

Farage and his party are currently projected to win only four seats in the new Parliament due to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, in which the candidate with the most votes in the area wins the seat.

The party is expected to massively contribute to the Conservatives’ electoral defeat by splitting the right-leaning vote, paving the way for Labour Party candidates. 

‘Farage knows that Reform won’t win any seats, but he doesn’t seem to care that a vote for Reform only helps Labour. He’s doing exactly what Keir Starmer wants him to do,’ the Conservative Party said in a statement.

In Clacton, despite the town’s overwhelming support for right-leaning candidates, Farage will face a tough competition against his Conservative rival Giles Watling. 

This will be Farage’s eighth attempt to win a seat in Parliament.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.