Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will remain closed until further notice, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday, adding its reopening will depend on Hamas handing over bodies of deceased hostages.

Netanyahu’s statement came shortly after the Palestinian embassy in Egypt announced that the Rafah crossing, the main gateway for Gazans to leave and enter the enclave, would reopen on Monday for entry into Gaza.

Hamas said later on Saturday it will be handing over two more hostage bodies at 10 p.m. local time (1900 GMT), meaning 12 out of 28 bodies will have been handed over to Israel under a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage deal agreed between Israel and Hamas last week.

ISRAEL SAYS HAMAS TOO SLOW TO RETURN BODIES

The dispute over the return of bodies underlines the fragility of the ceasefire and still has the potential to upset the deal along with other major issues that are included in US president Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war.

As part of the deal, Hamas released all 20 living Israeli hostages it had been holding for two years, in return for almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees and convicted prisoners jailed in Israel.

But Israel says that Hamas has been too slow to hand over bodies of deceased hostages it still holds. The terrorist group has so far returned 10 of 28 bodies and says that locating some of the bodies amid the vast destruction in Gaza will take time.

The deal requires Israel to return 360 bodies of Palestinian militants for the deceased Israeli hostages and so far it has handed over 15 bodies in return for each Israeli body it has received.

Rafah has largely been shut since May 2024. The ceasefire deal also includes the ramping up of aid into the enclave, where hundreds of thousands of people were determined in August to be affected by famine, according to the IPC global hunger monitor.

After cutting off all supplies for 11 weeks in March, Israel increased aid into Gaza in July, scaling it up further since the ceasefire.

Around 560 metric tons of food had entered Gaza per day on average since the US-brokered truce, but this was still well below the scale of need, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

Formidable obstacles to Trump’s plan to end the war still remain. Key questions of Hamas disarming and how Gaza will be governed, the make-up of an international “stabilization force” and moves towards the creation of a Palestinian state have yet to be resolved.

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One to depart for Quantico, Virginia, from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

i24 News – US President Donald Trump was blindsided by Israel’s strike targeting Hamas leaders in Doha last month, and felt that Israeli leadership should be pressured into changing course, said Jared Kushner in a candid discussion of the events leading up to the US-engineered Gaza ceasefire agreement.

Speaking to “60 Minutes,” Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and the architect of the Abraham Accords, said that after the failed Qatar strike, the president felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control,” says Kushner. “It was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu eventually apologized to the Qataris, a strategic US ally, for the strike that targeted Palestinian jihadists harbored by the resource-rich Gulf kingdom.

“I think both Jared and I felt, I just feel we felt a little bit betrayed,” said Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who also took part in the interview.

“It had a metastasizing effect because the Qataris were critical to the negotiation, as were the Egyptians and the Turks,” Witkoff further added. “We had lost the confidence of the Qataris. And so Hamas went underground, and it was very, very difficult to get to them.”

A demonstrator wearing a Cookie Monster costume holds a placard depicting US President Donald Trump, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, US Vice President JD Vance, US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and US House Speaker Mike Johnson as people march down the National Mall to take part in a “No Kings” protest against U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies, in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis

The first of what “No Kings” organizers expect to be more than 2,600 protest events began Saturday in the United States and other countries, a mass mobilization against President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, education and security that organizers say are pushing the country toward autocracy.

The protests — big and little, in cities, suburbs and small towns across the US — follow mass demonstrations in June and reflect the frustration of opponents of an agenda that Trump has rolled out with unprecedented speed since taking office in January.

Saturday’s rallies started outside the US, with a couple of hundred protesters gathering outside the US embassy in London, and roughly hundreds more holding demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona.

By Saturday morning in Northern Virginia, many protesters were walking on overpasses across roads heading into Washington, D.C., and several hundred people gathered in the circle near Arlington National Cemetery, near where Trump is considering building an arch across the bridge from the Lincoln Memorial.

Since Trump took office 10 months ago, his administration has ramped up immigration enforcement, moved to slash the federal workforce and cut funding to elite universities over issues including pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, campus diversity and transgender policies.

Residents in some major cities have seen National Guard troops sent in by the president, who argues they are needed to protect immigration agents and to help combat crime.

“There is nothing more American than saying ‘we don’t have kings’ and exercising our right to peacefully protest,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive organization that is the main organizer of the No Kings marches.

Trump has said very little about Saturday’s protests. But in an interview with Fox Business aired on Friday he said that “they’re referring to me as a king — I’m not a king.”

More than 300 grassroots groups helped organize Saturday’s marches, Greenberg said. The American Civil Liberties Union said it has given legal training to tens of thousands of people who will act as marshals at the various marches, and those people were also trained in de-escalation. No Kings ads and information have blanketed social media to drive turnout.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat, have backed the marches along with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump. An array of celebrities also has backed the movement.

In June, over 2,000 No Kings protests took place, mostly peacefully, on the same day that Trump celebrated his 79th birthday and held a military parade in Washington.

REPUBLICANS CLAIM PROTESTS ARE ANTI-AMERICAN

US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, on Friday echoed a common refrain among the GOP on the No Kings protests.

“Tomorrow the Democrat leaders are going to join for a big party out on the National Mall,” Johnson said at a press conference on Friday. “They’re going to descend on our Capitol for their much anticipated, so-called No Kings rally. We refer to it by its more accurate description: The hate America rally.”

Other Republicans have blasted Democrats and marches like No Kings as motivating people to carry out political violence, especially in the wake of the September assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk, a close confidant of Trump and key members of his administration.

Dana Fisher, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and the author of several books on American activism, forecast that Saturday could see the largest protest turnout in modern US history – she expected that over 3 million people would participate, based on registrations and participation in the June events.

“The main point of this day of action is to create a sense of collective identity amongst all the people who are feeling like they are being persecuted or are anxious due to the Trump administration and its policies,” Fisher said. “It’s not going to change Trump’s policies. But it might embolden elected officials at all levels who are in opposition to Trump.”