The construction of a new port in Gaza and a U.S military-built pier offshore are underway, but the complex plan to bring more desperately needed food to Palestinian civilians is still mired in fears over security and how the aid will be delivered. A senior U.S. military official told reporters on Thursday the U.S. is on track to begin delivering aid using the new port and pier by early May. Satellite photos show major port construction along the shore near Gaza City, but aid groups say they have broad concerns about their safety and reservations about how Israeli forces will handle security there.

Palestinian hospital officials said Israeli airstrikes on the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip killed at least five people. More than half of the territory’s population of 2.3 million have sought refuge in Rafah. Israel has conducted near-daily raids there as it prepares for an offensive in the city. Four people were killed in Israeli tank shelling in central Gaza. Officials said that a ship traveling in the Gulf of Aden came under attack Thursday. It was the latest assault likely carried out by Yemen’s Houthi rebels over the Israel-Hamas war.

A ship traveling in the Gulf of Aden has come under attack, the latest assault carried out by Yemen’s Houthi rebels over Israel’s ongoing war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The attack comes after the U.S. military said early Thursday an allied warship shot down a Houthi missile targeting a vessel the day before near the same area. The Houthis claimed both assaults, which comes after a period of relatively few rebel attacks on shipping in the region over Israel’s ongoing war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In Thursday’s attack, a ship was targeted just over 25 kilometers southwest of Aden. That's according to the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center.

Defense attorney Emil Bove has traced former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s long relationship with Donald Trump early in his cross-examination during the former president’s hush money trial in New York. Bove on Thursday showed how Pecker had flexed his power to help his friend long before the presidential election. Bove says back in 1998, the former publishing executive tried to squelch a negative National Enquirer story about Trump’s then-wife Marla Maples. Though the story was published anyway, Pecker has acknowledged he attempted to stop it. Bove posited that Trump helped drive magazine sales — and Pecker wanted to maintain close access to him.