Israel is preparing to launch what is expected to be a massive ground operation inside Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where some 1.5 million Palestinians have taken shelter. The Israeli army has begun ordering tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the city to evacuate.

On Monday, Israel’s Defense Forces ordered an evacuation of Rafah, signaling that a long-promised ground operation could be imminent. The Israeli army has described Rafah as the last significant Hamas stronghold after seven months of war, and its leaders have repeatedly said clearing Rafah is necessary to defeat the Islamic militant group.

Overnight, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that Israel was left with no choice but to act in Rafah after Hamas terrorists carried out a deadly rocket attack from Rafah earlier in the day that left four Israeli soldiers dead.

A potential ground operation comes as last-ditch efforts by international mediators, including the CIA, to broker a cease-fire have failed to produce a deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out a military operation in Rafah. According to Israel’s army, forces are beginning with a ‘limited scope operation.’

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an army spokesman, said some 100,000 people were being ordered to move to a nearby Israel-declared humanitarian zone called Muwasi. He said Israel published a map of the evacuation area.

These orders have been issued through air-dropped leaflets, text messages and radio broadcasts so that Palestinians could get the information.

‘Anyone found near (militant) organizations endangers themselves and their family members. For your safety, the (army) urges you to evacuate immediately to the expanded humanitarian area,’ one flyer read.

He said Israel has expanded humanitarian aid into Muwasi, including field hospitals, tents, food and water.

Israel’s army said on the social media platform X that it would act with ‘extreme force’ against Hamas terrorists, and urged the population to evacuate immediately for their safety.

The move also comes as the Biden administration reportedly put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-manufactured ammunition to Israel for the first time since the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.

Two Israeli officials told Axios that the weapons shipment was stopped last week, leaving officials within the Israeli government scrambling to understand why.

About 1.5 million Palestinians – more than half of Gaza’s population – are sheltering in Rafah, as they have been forced to evacuate other areas in the Gaza Strip, amid Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Former President Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are showcasing that they hauled in over $76 million last month, as the presumptive GOP nominee works to reduce his fundraising deficit to President Biden in their 2024 election rematch.

The announcement came as Trump this weekend headlines the RNC’s spring donor retreat, which is being held in Palm Beach, Florida. 

The haul by Trump and the RNC is up from $65.6 million in March. But Biden and the Democratic National Committee combined raked in roughly $90 million in March. And according to campaign disclosures, the president had more than twice as much money in his campaign coffers as the Republican challenger and predecessor in the White House as of the beginning of April.

But Trump and the RNC’s fundraising has soared since the former president clinched the 2024 GOP nomination in March, and his top political advisers repeatedly insist they’ll have enough campaign cash to compete with Biden.

‘President Donald J. Trump is not only winning across every battleground state, but we are raising the resources necessary to deliver a victory in November,’ Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement Saturday that announced the April haul.

 ‘With half of funds raised coming from small dollar donors, it is clear that our base is energized. The Republican Party is united, and voters nationwide are ready to FIRE Joe Biden and elect President Donald J. Trump,’ they added.

‘Our team will continue working every day to exceed expectations, raise the funds we need, and build an unmatched party infrastructure to prove that President Trump’s momentum is unstoppable,’ RNC chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump added in the statement.

Whatley, the former North Carolina GOP chair, and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, were installed as the new RNC leadership by Trump in early March as he effectively took over control of the party after clinching the nomination.

The fundraising figures were first revealed earlier on Saturday as Trump campaign officials gave a one-hour presentation to donors at the closed-door retreat, Republican sources confirmed to Fox News. The weekend confab is being held at the Four Seasons oceanfront resort in Palm Beach and at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, which is located a few miles north.

During the presentation, which was first reported Saturday by the New York Times, Trump campaign officials emphasized that the former president is ahead in the key battleground states of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, and competitive in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden narrowly carried all six of those states in 2020 to defeat Trump and win the White House.

Trump’s advisers also said they aimed to expand the map in Minnesota and Virginia, where they said their polling shows Trump competitive in states Biden comfortably won four years ago.

The RNC spring retreat provided a brief break for Trump from his criminal trial in New York City. The former president is being tried on nearly three-dozen state felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records in relation to hush-money payments during the 2016 election he made to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about his alleged affair with the adult film actress.

Trump has repeatedly denied falsifying business records as well as the alleged sexual encounter with Daniels.

Mike Pompeo, when he was U.S. secretary of state, shared intel with the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic suggesting a ‘high likelihood’ that the deadly coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab, according to The Telegraph.

An intelligence alliance known as ‘Five Eyes’ reportedly met in January 2021 to discuss the lab-leak theory, the outlet reported. Around the same time, Pompeo is said to have shared information from classified American reports put together by the State Department to then-U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, as well as representatives from New Zealand, Canada and Australia. 

The British newspaper says two former Trump administration officials believe Raab – and the U.K. government as a whole – ignored the lab leak theory due to pressure from government scientists who leaned toward the theory that the illness had been transferred from animals to humans. 

‘We saw several pieces of information and thought that they were, frankly, gobsmacking,’ one former official who worked on the intelligence in Pompeo’s report told The Telegraph. ‘They obviously pointed to the high likelihood that this was indeed a lab leak.’

The reports, consisting of information collected in the early days of the pandemic, were also shared with the U.K. via Five Eyes between October and December 2020. Five Eyes consists of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Information in one document obtained by The Telegraph states U.S. officials accused Chinese officials of ‘stonewalling,’ as well as ‘gross corruption and ineptitude.’ The information also reportedly showed that the Chinese military had been working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years before the pandemic, and that lab researchers got sick soon before COVID-19 was first reported in the area. 

On May 1, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic called for a criminal probe into the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

The demands for an investigation come after the release of an interim staff report accusing EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak of funding ‘dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, without sufficient oversight.’

EcoHealth Alliance is a non-governmental organization based in the United States and focused on researching pandemic prevention.

According to congressional lawmakers, EcoHealth used taxpayer dollars ‘to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)’ in China. 

The NGO disputes that claim.

Fox News Digital previously reported that EcoHealth Alliance received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that U.S. taxpayer funds flowed to Chinese entities conducting coronavirus research through EcoHealth Alliance.

Fox News’ Timothy H.J. Nerozzi and Brooke Singman contributed to this report. 

The Biden administration has put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-manufactured ammunition to Israel for the first time since the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, according to a report.

Two Israeli officials told Axios that the weapons shipment was stopped last week, leaving officials within the Israeli government scrambling to understand why.

When asked about the report, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council told Fox News Digital that it has supported Israel’s defense since the Oct. 7 attack.

‘The United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the October 7 attacks, passed the largest ever supplemental appropriation for emergency assistance to Israel, led an unprecedented coalition to defend Israel against Iranian attacks, and will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Israel can defend itself from the threats it faces,’ the statement said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out a military operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where some 1.5 million Palestinians have taken shelter, and where Hamas maintains its last remaining stronghold.

The potential Rafah operation to root out Hamas terrorists comes despite warnings from President Biden and other Western officials that doing so would result in more civilian deaths and worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis.

The Biden administration has said there could be consequences for Israel should it move forward with the operation without a credible plan to safeguard civilians.

Biden has also faced criticism from Americans who are against his support of Israel, most recently seen in protests that have erupted across college campuses nationwide. 

The current war in Gaza began after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, in which the terrorist organization killed 1,200 people, and took about 250 people hostage.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.