Israel has ordered more evacuations in southern Lebanon and threatened to target ambulances, as a fifth UN peacekeeper was wounded in Israel’s escalating conflict with the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Israel’s military on Saturday ordered people in 23 southern Lebanese villages to evacuate to areas north of the Awali River, which flows from the western Bekaa valley into the Mediterranean.

The order, communicated via a military statement, mentioned villages in southern Lebanon that have been recent targets of Israeli attacks, many of which are already almost empty.

The Israeli military also claimed on Saturday, without providing evidence, that Hezbollah militants were using ambulances to transport themselves and weapons and called on medical teams to “avoid dealing with Hezbollah operatives and not to cooperate with them”.

In a post on X, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Arabic spokesperson threatened that it would target “any vehicle carrying armed men, regardless of its type”.

The Lebanese health ministry said on X on Saturday that five hospitals had sustained damage from the Israeli airstrikes in the eastern city of Baalbek and the Bekaa valley. The Israeli military had no immediate comment, and it was not possible to independently verify the hospital strikes.

The Guardian has previously reported that at least 50 paramedics have been killed since Israel launched its most recent attacks on Lebanon. All have belonged to healthcare services affiliated with either Hezbollah or Amal, another Shia political party – affiliations that rights experts say do not affect their protected status under international law.

The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) last week was forced to close its clinic in a southern suburb of Beirut and temporarily stop its activities in another one in the north, because of heavy airstrikes, the group said in a statement on Thursday.

A UN report last week accused Israel of pursuing a concerted policy of destroying Gaza’s healthcare system in the war in the strip, including “relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities”, saying this constituted war crimes and extermination as a crime against humanity.

Israel, which accuses the UN of institutional bias against it and claims Hamas hides in healthcare facilities, rejected the findings.

At least 15 people were killed and 37 wounded in Israeli strikes across three different areas in Lebanon, the Lebanese health ministry said on Saturday. One of the targeted locations was in the town of Deir Billa in northern Lebanon, which had not been struck before. A marketplace in the southern city of Nabatieh was also targeted.

Nine people were killed and 15 injured in the village of Maaysra, a mostly Christian mountain area north of Beirut, while four were killed and 18 injured in Barja in the Shouf district south of the capital, the ministry said.

In Deir Billa, the ministry reported two dead, four wounded and “body parts” after an Israeli strike. DNA tests were being carried out to determine the identity of the remains, the statement added.

Lebanon’s official National News Agency had said an “Israeli strike” targeted a house in the village where families from south Lebanon had taken refuge.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, said Hezbollah had fired nearly 320 projectiles from Lebanon into Israel on Saturday, without giving further details. It declared areas around some towns in north Israel closed to the public.

Another member of Unifil, the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, was struck by gunfire on Friday, the organisation said on Saturday, adding that the man was stable after undergoing surgery to remove the bullet.

The statement also said Unifil’s position in the southern Lebanese town of Ramyah sustained significant damage as a result of explosions after nearby shelling, but did not specify who was responsible for either attack.

A total of five UN peacekeepers were injured on Thursday and Friday when the Israeli military fired on the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon on three occasions, drawing condemnations from the global body and various countries. Unifil has accused Israel of deliberately targeting its positions.

A group of 40 countries participating in the Unifil mission issued a joint statement on Saturday condemning the recent attacks on the peacekeepers’ base and calling for all parties to ensure their safety.

“Such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated,” said the joint statement, posted on X by the Polish UN mission and signed by countries including leading contributors Indonesia, Italy and India.

The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, said his government would ask the UN security council to issue a new resolution calling for a “full and immediate ceasefire”.

The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, in a call on Saturday with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, expressed “deep concern” about reports that Israeli forces had fired on UN peacekeeping positions in recent days and urged Israel to ensure safety for them and the Lebanese military, the Pentagon said.

Austin also “reinforced the need to pivot from military operations in Lebanon to a diplomatic pathway as soon as feasible”, according to the Pentagon statement.

Hezbollah said it had attacked the outskirts of Tel Aviv with a swarm of drones on Friday, without giving further details. Israel said there were no casualties reported when its military detected and intercepted two drones from Lebanon.

The Israeli military claimed it had hit about 200 targets in Lebanon with artillery and airstrikes and killed about 50 Hezbollah fighters and dismantled dozens of weapons storage sites.

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah militants erupted one year ago when the Iranian-backed group began launching rockets at northern Israel in support of Hamas on 8 October, at the start of the war in Gaza.

It has intensified in recent weeks, with Israel bombing southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Bekaa valley, killing many of Hezbollah’s leaders, and sending ground troops across the border.

Hezbollah, for its part, has fired rockets deeper into Israel.

The Israeli campaign has forced approximately 1.2 million people from their homes since 23 September, according to the Lebanese government.

Israel says its Lebanon offensive aims to secure the return home of tens of thousands of people who evacuated from northern Israel because of Hezbollah rocket fire.

As of Friday the death toll had reached 2,255 since the beginning of hostilities, the Lebanese health ministry said on Saturday.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Saturday that more Lebanese people had been displaced than during the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, when about 1 million fled their homes.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Hunger and malnutrition rates could rise “exponentially” in Lebanon, if Israel follows through with threats to escalate the current military operation which has so far killed more than 2,000 and displaced as many as a million people, according to a leading UN expert.

“Israel has the ability to starve Lebanon – like it has starved Palestinians in Gaza,” said Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. “If you look at the geography of Lebanon, Israel has the power to absolutely put a stranglehold on the food system. There is a huge risk of hunger and malnutrition rates skyrocketing very quickly in Lebanon.”

Acute hunger rates could rise very quickly because food security in Lebanon was precarious even before Israel launched its full-scale aerial bombardment in mid-September, as growing hostilities with Hezbollah since 7 October had already displaced 40% of local farmers, disrupting local production and interrupting trade flows and access to markets, according to the UN World Food Programme.

Access to adequate food is becoming increasingly challenging, as entire communities have been forced to abandon their homes and farmland in southern Lebanon and as civilian areas in Beirut come under heavy aerial attack.

In June, the UN added Lebanon to its list of hunger hotspots, warning that a quarter of the population faced acute levels of food insecurity amid the simmering conflict, soaring inflation, rising global wheat prices, and diminishing humanitarian aid for the country’s 1.5 million Syrian and Palestinian refugees.

On Friday, Fakhri will face questions at the UN general assembly over the findings of his latest report, which argues that starvation campaigns are always deliberate and that the state of Israel should be held criminally accountable for the mass starvation of Palestinians.

“Famines are human-made and are always the result of one group starving another, therefore should always be understood as a political problem,” said Fakhri.

“There is clear evidence that Israeli officials have used starvation both as a war crime and as a crime against humanity – which are fundamental violations of international law with no exceptions. Famine causes lasting physical and psychological harm to survivors, and may cause harm for generations to come. You cannot turn starvation on and off like a ceasefire.”

On 9 October 2023 – two days after the Hamas attack which killed more than 1,100 people – Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a “complete siege” of Gaza and said he would halt the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel. By December, Gazans accounted for 80% of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger, according to UN and international aid agency figures.

Fakhri’s report published in July said that never in post-second world war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

Some aid has reached Gaza but humanitarian groups say just a fraction of what Palestinian civilians need to survive is getting through. Israel says that aid is arriving in Gaza but not being distributed.

In September, UN and Israeli government data showed that deliveries of food and aid to Gaza sank to their lowest in seven months due to new rules imposed by Israel.

Inside Gaza, aid distribution is complicated by fuel shortages, and Israeli checkpoints. More than 300 aid workers have been killed in the territory, according to the UN.

Fakhri was the first in the UN system to raise the alarm of the risk of genocide through starvation within weeks of the start of the conflict. He argues that the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza did not start on 7 October.

“It takes years of political choices, and a significant degree of military and financial power to be able to starve another population. It also requires an international system that enables this to happen, so countries that continue to send money and weapons to Israel are also culpable.”

Israel has repeatedly rejected accusations of genocide, blamed Hamas for the violence and suffering in Gaza and has said that more aid is being allowed to enter the enclave. The government did not respond to requests for reaction to Fakhri’s comments.

More than 42,100 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, with at least 98,100 others injured and an estimated 10,000 unaccounted for and presumed dead, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Fakhri’s report to the UN frames starvation as a violation of international law for which states and corporations could be held accountable by the international court of justice (ICJ) and domestic courts. Currently, starvation is understood strictly as a violation of humanitarian law, a war crime for which only individuals can be prosecuted.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defense minister Gallant are the first individuals to be formally accused by an international court of deliberate starvation.

“Framing starvation campaigns like the ones we see in Gaza and the Sudan as only a crime under the laws of war is problematic – and empirically impossible. Military supply chains are inherently connected to humanitarian supply chains which are inherently connected to civilian supply chains,” said Fakhri, a law professor at the University of Oregon.

“If you use starvation in any instance, whether it’s against armed combatants or otherwise, guaranteed you will starve a civilian population en masse,” Fakhri added.

The world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the current population, and yet the prevalence of hunger, malnutrition and famine is on the rise. Food insecurity is concentrated in Africa and the Arab world because the food systems are fragile by design, according to Fakhri.

“Starvation is always used as a weapon to displace people from their land or weaken their relationship with their land. It is often connected to annexation, occupation and land acquisition, and that’s what’s playing out in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon,” said Fakhri.

At least 22 people have been killed in airstrikes in northern Gaza, with Israeli forces stepping up their campaign on the besieged Palestinian territory even as fighting in the new war in Lebanon escalates.

On Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) renewed its evacuation orders for Palestinians still living in the decimated northern half of Gaza, although many residents say the fighting and Israeli sniper fire make it impossible to leave.

Avichay Adraee, an IDF spokesperson, told people that the area includes parts of Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood and sections around Jabalia, the urban refugee camp.

In a social media post, Adraee asked people living there to head south to al-Mawasi, a coastal area of southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of people are already displaced. A total of 84% of the territory is currently under evacuation orders, pushing civilians into ever-dwindling “humanitarian zones” which Israel has bombed regardless.

The UN says an estimated 400,000 people are trapped by the latest ground fighting and artillery fire centred in Jabalia, which has now entered a second week.

“It is getting tougher every day. The fear and the conditions are unspeakable,” said Badr Alzaharna, 25, from Gaza City. “I cannot leave. I want to travel but I can’t. Rafah crossing has been closed since May.”

Gaza’s ministry of health appealed on Friday for medical teams to be allowed access to the northern half of the strip to evacuate the wounded, and for fuel deliveries to the north’s struggling hospitals, warning that civilians caught up in the intense shelling and airstrikes are running out of food and water. Seven World Health Organization missions were impeded from access to northern Gaza by Israeli forces this week, the UN body said. Also on Saturday, the World Food Programme, the UN food agency, reported that no food aid has reached northern Gaza since 1 October, with a 35% drop in the supply of food to families around the rest of Gaza, raising new fears of extreme hunger and famine that have already plagued the strip for a year.

The last food supplies – canned food, flour, high-energy biscuits and nutrition supplements – have been distributed to shelters and health facilities in the north, and it is unclear how long they will last. Israel has consistently denied blocking aid and food to Gaza.

Airstrikes overnight on Friday on Jabalia destroyed an entire building and severely damaged several more, according to medics and first responders, who are still recovering missing people from under the rubble and ruins created by a 20-metre deep impact crater.

At least six women and seven children were among the dead, and a strike in another part of Jabalia in the early hours of Saturday killed two parents and injured their baby, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said. Hospitals across Gaza reported receiving a total of 49 bodies and 219 wounded people in the past 24 hours.

The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest strikes and civilian deaths in Gaza.

Israel has nominally controlled the northern half of Gaza since the beginning of the year, and has cut the territory in two by creating what it calls the Netzarim corridor, which separates what was once the densely populated Gaza City from the rest of the strip. However, it has since frequently re-entered Gaza City and other areas in the north of the strip where it says Hamas fighters are regrouping.

In Lebanon, the health authority said that 60 people were killed and another 168 wounded in the past 24 hours, and the United Nations peacekeeping force that operates on the blue line separating Israel and Lebanon said its headquarters in Naqoura had been targeted a second time. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the fire.

Israel stepped up its campaign against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah last month after a year of tit-for-tat fire triggered by Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.

The new war in Lebanon has heightened the risk of a region-wide escalation drawing in Iran and the US. Ceasefire talks on ending the fighting in Gaza have been stalled since July.

Muslims in India say they have been fired from their jobs and face the closure of their businesses after two states brought in a “discriminatory” policy making it mandatory for restaurants to publicly display the names of all their employees.

The policy was first introduced by Yogi Adityanath, the hardline Hindu monk who is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Last month the state of Himachal Pradesh, governed by the opposition Congress party, announced it would also make it compulsory for all names of workers and employees to be put on display.

Both state governments have said it is to ensure compliance with health and safety rules and vending regulations in the north Indian states. However, locals and activists have alleged that the new rules are instead a thinly veiled attack on Muslim workers and establishments.

Names in India widely signify religion and caste and there are growing fears among Muslim business owners in Uttar Pradesh that this will lead to targeted attacks or economic boycotts, particularly by hardline Hindu groups that are active in the state.

“This order is dangerous, it forces us to wear our religion on our sleeve,” said Tabish Aalam, 28, who comes from a long line of specialist chefs in the city of Lucknow. “I am sure the government knows this, and that is why it is being exploited.”

Uttar Pradesh is governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) that also rules at the centre under the prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose decade in power has been marked by growing anti-Muslim discrimination and attacks.

Adityanath is viewed as one of the most hardline leaders in the BJP. Since he became chief minister in 2017, he has introduced a flurry of policies that are accused of enabling the targeting of Muslims or fuelling anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

Business owners in Uttar Pradesh said they had fired Muslim staff as a result of the new laws, fearing they would become a target. Other Muslim-run businesses said they had already been harassed as a result of the policy, with some considering closure.

Rafiq, 45, the Muslim owner of a highway restaurant in the Uttar Pradesh city of Muzaffarnagar, said he had fired his four Muslim employees in July after police demanded he put the names of all workers on a sign outside.

“I had to fire my Muslim staff because I was concerned for their safety following the order,” he said. “Displaying names makes us vulnerable and a very easy target. If, for instance, there is communal tension that keeps taking place, we will be easily identified as Muslims and targeted.”

Rafiq said he had little doubt as to why the Adityanath government was enforcing these new rules. “Displaying names will identify people’s religions, which I suspect is intended to discourage people from eating at Muslim-owned or Muslim-staffed restaurants,” he said. So far, Rafiq said, he had resisted police pressure to comply, but he said that if he was forced to, he would probably shut down his business altogether.

Calls for economic boycotts of Muslims have been prominent in the state and there have been rising incidents of attacks against Muslim vendors over the past five years. Last month, the state leader of Bajrang Dal, a rightwing Hindu vigilante group, was captured on video at a meeting calling for attenders to pledge: “I will not buy goods from any Muslim shopkeeper.”

Among the Muslims recently fired from a job as a cook was Idrees Ahmed, 31, who had held the position for seven years. He alleged he was among several Muslim members of staff let go as a result of the new policy.

“The owner of the restaurant is a Hindu, and most of the other staff members were also Hindu,” Ahmed said. “When the order was issued, the owner called me and other Muslim staff members and apologised before asking us to go home.”

Ahmed said he had been “emotionally shattered” by the ordeal and was struggling to support his family of five as no other restaurants would hire him. “I lost a job simply because of my religion,” he said. “I know so many Muslims who were working in different restaurants but were fired after the order.”

In Muzaffarnagar, some alleged that only Muslim-owned businesses were being forced to comply. Mohammad Azeem, 42, who runs a small roadside stall, said he was the only business owner harassed by police to display his name on a sign. “The administration is deliberately trying to create a divide,” he said. “Why did they ask me selectively?”

Praveen Garg, a BJP spokesperson in Uttar Pradesh, said the policy was to ensure restaurant hygiene, and he emphasised that “nobody is being denied permission to work”.

“The government was obligated to take this action after becoming aware of situations in which food was purposefully contaminated,” Garg said. “There have been instances where persons from a specific community have been caught polluting meals with dirty items that a Hindu cannot consume.”

Several incidents suggesting that vendors had mixed spit and urine with food and drink items recently went viral and led to arrests in the state. However, despite allegations by rightwing Hindu groups that there was a Muslim conspiracy to commit “spit jihad”, there was no evidence that the incidents were specifically targeted at Hindus.

In July, India’s supreme court blocked a separate order by the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand governments – both BJP-ruled states – that had demanded restaurants along the route of an annual Hindu pilgrimage display the names of their owners and operators. A petition against the order brought by opposition politicians argued that it was “discriminatory on grounds of religion”.

Despite the controversy and allegations of stirring up religious division, in September the state government of Himachal Pradesh said it would soon be following Uttar Pradesh’s example.

It cited food hygiene as well as fears over an “influx of migrants” as the reasons behind bringing in the policy. Vikramaditya Singh, a Himachal Pradesh Congress leader and state minister, said the matter was still under deliberation.

“There will be no compromise with the internal security of the state. The law is applicable for everybody. Why should one particular community feel threatened or have apprehensions?” said Singh. However, he added that if there were widespread concerns about the display of names “then some other way will be explored”.

Business owners accused the local Congress party of going against its pledges of secularism and using the divisive policy to court the Hindu-majority vote in the state.

Sharik Ali, 27, who runs a small restaurant in Shimla, in Himachal Pradesh, said: “I will not feel safe after displaying my name on my stall. We have seen how Muslims across India have been attacked in the last 10 years of Modi’s rule, but I was not expecting this from the Congress government. They know what will fetch them votes.”

Donald Trump deliberately withheld disaster aid to states he deemed politically hostile to him as US president and will do so again unimpeded if he returns to the White House, several former Trump administration officials have warned.

As Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton have ravaged much of the south-eastern US in the past two weeks, Trump has sought to pin blame upon Joe Biden’s administration for a ponderous response to the disasters, even suggesting that this was deliberate due to the number of Republican voters affected by the storms.

But former Trump administration officials have said the former president, when in office, initially refused to release federal disaster aid for wildfires in California in 2018, withheld wildfire assistance for Washington state in 2020, and severely restricted emergency relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017 because he felt these places were not sufficiently supportive of him.

The revelations, first reported upon by E&E News, have raised major doubts over what Trump’s response to disasters would be should he win next month’s presidential election. The former president has already been criticized for his role in spreading misinformation about Helene and Milton that has allegedly slowed the disaster response and even led to online death threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) staff and meteorologists.

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics – because they didn’t vote for him,” said Kevin Carroll, former senior counselor to the homeland security secretary John Kelly during Trump’s term. Carroll said Kelly, later the president’s chief of staff, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release the federal funding via Fema to these badly hit areas.

“It was clear that Trump was entirely self-interested and vengeful towards those he perceived didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told the Guardian. “He even wanted to pull the navy out of Hawaii because they didn’t vote for him. We were appalled – these are American civilians the government is meant to provide for. The idea of withholding aid is antithetical to everything you want from in a leader.”

The effort to overcome Trump’s reluctance to provide aid for California succeeded only after the then-president was provided voting data showing that Orange county, heavily damaged by the wildfires, has large numbers of Republican voters, according to Olivia Troye, who was a homeland security adviser to the Trump White House.

“We had to sit around and brainstorm a way where he would agree to this because he looked at everything through a political lens,” Troye told the Guardian. “There were instances where disaster declarations would sit on his desk for days, we’d get phone calls all the time on how to speed things up, sometimes we had to get [Vice-President] Mike Pence to weigh in.

“It was shocking and appalling to us to see a president of the United States behaving in this way. Basically if it doesn’t benefit him, he’s not interested. We saw this in the Covid pandemic too, when it was red states versus blue states, and it’s still evident in his demeanor now, where he’s politicizing disaster response. It’s dangerous and reckless.”

One of the most “egregious” delays, Troye said, came after Hurricane Maria smashed into Puerto Rico, causing widespread damage and nearly 3,000 deaths. In the wake of the disaster, Trump claimed the death toll had been inflated “to make me look as bad as possible”, called the mayor of San Juan “crazed and incompetent”, and halted billions of dollars of federal support for the island.

Ultimately, Fema covered debris cleanup in Puerto Rico, and Trump visited the US territory, throwing paper towels to hurricane survivors. But not all recovery costs for the island were paid for by the federal government, with an independent inspector general report finding that Fema mismanaged the distribution of aid following Maria.

This came just months before Trump agreed to pay 100% of Florida’s costs after the state was hit by Hurricane Michael. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump said, according to an autobiography written by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor. “I must have won 90% of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”

While officials around Trump were able to persuade him to relent somewhat in these instances, the former president held firm in refusing to provide disaster relief to Washington after wildfires ravaged the east of the state, largely destroying the communities of Malden and Pine City, in 2020.

For months, Trump denied Washington’s request for federal help due to his dislike of Jay Inslee, the state’s Democratic governor and a prominent critic, according to an aide of Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican congresswoman whose district was scorched by wildfires.

McMorris Rodgers wrote to Trump to side with him in his dispute with Inslee while pleading with the president to release the funding. “Despite our governor’s bad faith personal vendetta against your administration, people in my district need support, and I implore you to move forward in providing it to those who have been impacted by devastating wildfires in our region,” McMorris Rodgers wrote.

Trump, however, did not agree to provide the help, which was only given once Joe Biden came into office. “Trump consciously and maliciously withheld assistance in a fit of juvenile pique because my state had the effrontery to question his policies,” Inslee told the Guardian.

“What’s so stunning is that Trump enjoys his authoritarian instincts in refusing to help people. Most human beings would feel guilt in punishing people in pain whose homes are in ashes or are under 8ft of water. It’s a window into the darkness of his soul, frankly. We’ve seen with North Carolina again that he will use natural disasters for his own purposes and his fragile ego. He’s a clear and present danger.”

Carroll and Troye, former Trump administration officials, predicted there would be fewer constraints on Trump withholding disaster aid should he win another term in the White House. Several Trump allies, including those who wrote the Project 2025 conservative manifesto, have called for the Republican nominee to root out dissenters and install obedient political apparatchiks within the federal government to help enact his wishes.

“Next time you won’t have the integrity of Mike Pence: you’ll have JD Vance who will do whatever Trump wants,” said Troye, who is a Republican but has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. “It’s concerning to think about a future Trump administration with just loyalists in these positions around him in these sort of moments that should be non-partisan.

“I hope voters are paying close attention to contrast between the responsible leadership shown by Biden and Harris and the dangerous demeanor of Donald Trump.”

Just last month, Trump signaled that his deal-making over disaster aid would not change if he were president again, warning that he would block assistance to California unless the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, agreed to deliver more water to farmers.

“Gavin Newscum [Newsom] is going to sign those papers,” Trump said from his golf course in California. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary of the Trump campaign, did not answer questions regarding the allegations made by Carroll and Troye, and instead referenced efforts by Trump to improve forest wildfire management and repeated debunked claims that disaster relief money has been diverted by Fema to migrants.

“President Trump visited Georgia twice in one week to tour destruction from Hurricane Helene and has encouraged his supporters to donate more than $6m for relief efforts on the ground,” she said.

“Kamala Harris stole $1bn from Fema to pay for illegal migrant housing and now there’s nothing left for struggling American citizens. President Trump is leading during this tragic moment while, once again, Kamala leaves Americans behind.”

SpaceX launched its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday on its boldest test flight yet, catching the returning booster back at the pad with mechanical arms.

Towering almost 121 metres (400ft), the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico, like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea. The last one, in June, was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding.

This time, the SpaceX founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, upped the challenge and risk. The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier. The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 71-metre booster.

“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX’s Dan Huot observed with excitement from near the launch site. “I am shaking right now.”

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice from its headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the Gulf of Mexico like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch.

Once free of the booster, the retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world, targeting a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The June flight came up short at the end after pieces of it came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles.

SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads – not on them.

Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for the Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone. Nasa has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use the Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.

Joe Biden will visit Germany this week, government sources in Berlin said, after he cancelled a planned trip last week over deadly Hurricane Milton.

The senior German officials who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed media reports that the US president would travel to Berlin, probably within the next week, but declined to provide further details. Planning for the visit was believed to be ongoing.

German media said Biden would meet chancellor Olaf Scholz and president Frank-Walter Steinmeier for talks in Berlin on Friday expected to cover Ukraine and the Middle East.

The cancellation of the original trip upended plans for a summit of the so-called Ramstein group of countries providing weapons to Ukraine. The meeting at the US airbase of the same name would have discussed possible new aid commitments to Ukraine.

Germany had said UK prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron would join the event alongside Biden and Scholz, with 20 other leaders expected to attend. It was thought to be unlikely that such a meeting could take place during Biden’s sharply curtailed rescheduled visit, which was originally slated to cover four days.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been set at the Ramstein summit to lay out a “victory plan” for Ukraine to leaders. When the event was called off, he quickly organised a tour of European capitals to make the case for their enduring support.

After talks with Zelenskyy on Friday in Berlin, Scholz announced a €1.4bn (£1.2bn) military aid package for Ukraine by the end of 2024, calling it a signal to Russia that the west would not stop backing Kyiv.

The aid will be given jointly with partner countries Belgium, Denmark and Norway, and includes more air defence, tanks, combat drones and artillery.

“It is a clear message to (Russian president Vladimir) Putin – playing for time will not work. We will not let up in our support for Ukraine,” Scholz said. Germany has been the second biggest supplier country of arms to Ukraine after the United States since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Biden’s trip to Berlin would be his first bilateral visit to Germany as president, after he attended the G7 summit at Bavaria’s Elmau castle in June 2022. The original itinerary included a trip to Angola to fulfil a promise to go to Africa as US leader.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledged last week that there was little time remaining in Biden’s presidency to reschedule as the US prepares to elect his successor. “Three months is not a long time,” she said.

In August, Biden personally thanked Scholz for his contribution to a large-scale prisoner exchange with Russia involving 26 detainees including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the former US marine Paul Whelan, which hinged on Berlin agreeing to a jailed FSB hitman.

Joe Biden will visit Germany this week, government sources in Berlin said, after he cancelled a planned trip last week over deadly Hurricane Milton.

The senior German officials who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed media reports that the US president would travel to Berlin, probably within the next week, but declined to provide further details. Planning for the visit was believed to be ongoing.

German media said Biden would meet chancellor Olaf Scholz and president Frank-Walter Steinmeier for talks in Berlin on Friday expected to cover Ukraine and the Middle East.

The cancellation of the original trip upended plans for a summit of the so-called Ramstein group of countries providing weapons to Ukraine. The meeting at the US airbase of the same name would have discussed possible new aid commitments to Ukraine.

Germany had said UK prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron would join the event alongside Biden and Scholz, with 20 other leaders expected to attend. It was thought to be unlikely that such a meeting could take place during Biden’s sharply curtailed rescheduled visit, which was originally slated to cover four days.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been set at the Ramstein summit to lay out a “victory plan” for Ukraine to leaders. When the event was called off, he quickly organised a tour of European capitals to make the case for their enduring support.

After talks with Zelenskyy on Friday in Berlin, Scholz announced a €1.4bn (£1.2bn) military aid package for Ukraine by the end of 2024, calling it a signal to Russia that the west would not stop backing Kyiv.

The aid will be given jointly with partner countries Belgium, Denmark and Norway, and includes more air defence, tanks, combat drones and artillery.

“It is a clear message to (Russian president Vladimir) Putin – playing for time will not work. We will not let up in our support for Ukraine,” Scholz said. Germany has been the second biggest supplier country of arms to Ukraine after the United States since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Biden’s trip to Berlin would be his first bilateral visit to Germany as president, after he attended the G7 summit at Bavaria’s Elmau castle in June 2022. The original itinerary included a trip to Angola to fulfil a promise to go to Africa as US leader.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledged last week that there was little time remaining in Biden’s presidency to reschedule as the US prepares to elect his successor. “Three months is not a long time,” she said.

In August, Biden personally thanked Scholz for his contribution to a large-scale prisoner exchange with Russia involving 26 detainees including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the former US marine Paul Whelan, which hinged on Berlin agreeing to a jailed FSB hitman.

The mother of a seven-year-old boy who was torn from the arms of his grandmother and drowned in one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters is among more than 620,000 claimants who will have their case heard this month in the largest group claim in English legal history.

Gelvana Aparecida Rodrigues da Silva, 37, lost her son Thiago on 5 November 2015 when the Fundão dam, near Mariana in eastern Brazil, collapsed, releasing about 50m cubic metres of toxic waste.

The avalanche of water reached the small community of Bento Rodrigues within minutes, killing 19 people, including Thiago, who had been staying with his grandmother at the time.

“His grandmother said that he asked for Jesus,” said Da Silva of her son’s final moments. “He called for Jesus to save him. But they got ripped apart.”

Thiago’s body was found a week later, 60 miles (100km) away. “That moment, my life ended,” she said. “Everything changed.”

The iron ore waste stored in the dam rapidly moved down various watercourses, spilling over their banks and into the neighbouring municipalities of Mariana, Barra Longa, Rio Doce and Santa Cruz do Escalvado.

It destroyed bridges, roads, houses, factories and other commercial premises, as well as farmland, wildlife and historic churches containing priceless artefacts.

About 620,000 individuals, 46 Brazilian municipalities, 2,000 businesses and 65 faith-based institutions are to claim damages from the Anglo-Australian mining company BHP at a high court trial in London scheduled to be heard over 12 weeks, from 21 October.

Tom Goodhead, the chief executive of the international law firm Pogust Goodhead, which is representing the claimants, said they will argue that BHP is liable as a 50% shareholder in Samarco, the joint venture company responsible for managing the Fundão tailings dam.

It is further claimed that BHP, who were in a joint venture with the Brazilian iron-ore mining company Vale, were negligent in that although “they were aware of the risks of the dam collapsing, they funded its expansion”, Goodhead said. The claimants are seeking up to $44bn (£33.6bn) in compensation.

BHP, along with Vale and Samarco, established the Renova Foundation to provide compensation for individuals and some small businesses for loss and damages, as well as mitigating environmental impacts. The company said it would defend the legal action.

A BHP spokesperson said: “The Fundão dam collapse was a tragedy and our deepest sympathies remain with the impacted families and communities.

“The Renova Foundation, established in 2016 as part of our agreement with the Brazilian authorities, has spent more than $7.7bn on emergency financial assistance, compensation and repair and rebuilding of environment and infrastructure to approximately 430,000 individuals, local businesses and Indigenous communities.

“BHP Brasil is working collectively with the Brazilian authorities and others to seek solutions to finalise a fair and comprehensive compensation and rehabilitation process that would keep funds in Brazil for the Brazilian people and environment affected, including impacted Indigenous communities.

“BHP continues to defend the legal action in the UK. We believe that the UK litigation, which, if successful, would not see claimants receive payment until 2028 at the earliest, duplicates – and harms – local remedial efforts in Brazil.

“As a non-operating joint-venture partner in Samarco, BHP Brasil does not have operational or day-to-day control of the business. BHP did not own or operate the dam or any related facilities.”

Thiago’s father, who died two years ago, received a small payment for compensation after the disaster, which he shared with Da Silva, but she said she had not had any personal contact with the companies involved.

She said: “The only thing that we are asking for is justice, for this to never happen to any other mother. No money in the world can bring my son back, but I want them to be responsible for this, for this crime.”

Goodhead said: “To our knowledge, this is the largest ever group action in the English courts and we believe, probably the largest anywhere in the world. And that’s likely by value as well as the number of claimants who are participating in it.”

Russia and China blocked a proposed consensus statement for the East Asia Summit drafted by south-east Asian countries, mainly over objections to language on the contested South China Sea, a US official said on Saturday.

A draft statement arrived at by consensus by the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations was put to the 18-nation East Asia Summit meeting in Laos on Thursday evening, the official said.

“Asean presented this final draft and said that, essentially, this was a take-it-or-leave-it draft,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

The United States, Japan, Australia, South Korea and India all said they could support it, the official said, adding: “The Russians and the Chinese said that they could not and would not proceed with a statement.”

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told a news conference in Vientiane on Friday the final declaration had not been adopted because of “persistent attempts by the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to turn it into a purely political statement”.

China’s Washington embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The US official said there were a couple of issues of contention, but the key one was how it referred to the UN convention on the law of the sea (Unclos), going further than in the previous 2023 EAS statement.

However, the official said, “there was certainly no language that was getting into the nitty gritty of any particular standoff, no language that was favouring any claimant over any other”.

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea and has stepped up pressure on rival claimants, including several Asean countries, notably the Philippines. Asean has spent years negotiating a code of conduct with Beijing for the strategic waterway, with some Asean states insisting it be based on Unclos.

China says it backs a code, but does not recognise a 2016 arbitral ruling that said its claim to most of the South China Sea had no basis under Unclos, to which Beijing is a signatory.

According to a draft seen by Reuters, the proposed EAS statement contained an extra sub-clause over the 2023 approved statement, and this was not agreed to. It noted a 2023 UN resolution saying that Unclos “sets out the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and seas must be carried out”.

Another sub-clause not agreed said the international environment, including “in the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, Myanmar, Ukraine and the Middle East … present challenges for the region”.

The Chinese premier, Li Qiang, told the summit Beijing was committed to Unclos and striving for an early conclusion of a code of conduct, while stressing its claims have solid historical and legal grounds.

“Relevant countries outside the region should respect and support the joint efforts of China and regional countries to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea, and truly play a constructive role for peace and stability in the region,” he said.

A 20-year genetic investigation of the remains of Christopher Columbus has turned conventional historical wisdom on its head by concluding that the explorer whose voyage to the New World changed the course of global history may have been a Spanish Jew rather than a son of Genoa.

The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central part in the creation of Spain’s mighty empire hailed from the very community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled from their kingdom in the same year Columbus reached the Americas.

The findings of the investigation were announced on Saturday night during a special programme shown on the national broadcaster, RTVE, to coincide with Spain’s national day, which commemorates Columbus’s arrival in the New World on 12 October 1492.

José Antonio Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada who has led the research, said his analysis had revealed that Columbus’s DNA was “compatible” with a Jewish origin.

“We have very partial, but sufficient, DNA from Christopher Columbus,” he said. “We have DNA from his son Fernando Colón, and in both the Y [male] chromosome and mitochondrial DNA [transmitted by the mother] of Fernando there are traces compatible with a Jewish origin.”

While Lorente acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth, he said the likelihood was that he had come from the Spanish Mediterranean region.

“The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’s origin lay in the western Mediterranean,” said the researcher. “If there weren’t Jews in Genoa in the 15th century, the likelihood that he was from there is minimal. Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes things very tenuous.”

Given that there were no solid theories nor clear indications that Columbus could have been French, Lorente added, the search area narrowed still further.

“We’re left with the Spanish Mediterranean area, the Balearic islands and Sicily. But Sicily would be strange because then Christopher Columbus would have been written with some trace of Italian or the Sicilian language. That all means that his most likely origin is in the Spanish Mediterranean area or the Balearic islands which belonged to the crown of Aragón at the time.”

According to RTVE, Lorente’s findings have put an end to 500 years of speculation over Columbus’s birthplace and nationality. Over the centuries, it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish. After analysing 25 possible places, then focusing on a shortlist of eight, Lorente alighted on western Europe.

His history-changing conclusions, however, have been greeted with extreme caution by some of his peers.

“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País.

“My conclusion is that the documentary never shows Columbus’s DNA and, as scientists, we don’t know what analysis was undertaken.”

Rodrigo Barquera, an expert in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said he was surprised the findings had been shared without prior scrutiny from others in the scientific community.

“Normally, you send your article to a scientific journal,” he told El País. “An editor is then assigned to the piece and at least three independent reviewers examine the work and decide whether it’s scientifically valid or not. If it is, it gets published and so the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree with it or not. Putting it on the screen, far from that dialogue and with all this media focus gets in the way of the scientific community being able to say something about it.”

Lorente defended his actions to the same newspaper, saying: “Our team and the university have always considered this study into Christopher Columbus and his family as a single, joined-up and inseparable unit, and nothing will be published until the investigation is completed.”

Saturday’s revelation came two days after Lorente and his team said that DNA analysis of the remains of Columbus, his son Fernando and his brother Diego “definitively confirmed” that the partial skeleton kept in a tomb in Seville Cathedral was that of the famous navigator.

Although Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war.

If Columbus was a Sephardic Jew – Sefarad being the Hebrew name for the Iberian peninsula – his identity would be a significant historical irony, and something he would have been keen to conceal from society and his illustrious patrons.

His arrival in the Americas paved the way for the rise of Spain’s dazzlingly rich and powerful American empire, which rose just as Ferdinand and Isabella, who sponsored Columbus’s voyages, expelled Spain’s Jews amid antisemitic fears about supposed racial purity. Centuries of persecution, pogroms and regional expulsions culminated in 1492 when the country’s Jewish population was ordered into exile, forced to convert to Catholicism or burned at the stake.

In 2015 Spain sought to atone for the expulsion, which it termed “a historic mistake” by passing a time-limited law offering Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the Jews who were driven from the country at the end of the 15th century.

About 132,000 people of Sephardic descent applied for citizenship before the offer elapsed in October 2019. More than half of those who applied were from Latin American countries including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Chile and Ecuador.

Two shattering events played a critical role in British scientists’ efforts to develop technology that could transform the treatment of people who suffer traumatic injuries in wars or disasters.

The first was the blast that devastated Beirut on 4 August 2020, when a vast store of ammonium nitrate exploded in the city, killing more than 200 people and injuring 7,000. The second was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has left hundreds of thousands of casualties have been inflicted since war erupted there in February 2022.

“Both the Beirut blast and the battles in Ukraine have caused thousands of dreadful extremity wounds and crush injuries in people who would lose legs and arms without urgent medical technological intervention,” said Anthony Bull, a professor of musculoskeletal mechanics at Imperial College London.

“In the past, providing that costly, complex intervention – during conflict or in the wake of natural catastrophes – has been a major problem, however.”

Prof Bull and his colleague Dr Mehdi Saeidi began a collaboration in 2016 that aimed to take a radical new approach to the problem – by finding simple ways of making complex medical devices to help those with catastrophic injuries caused by natural disasters or warfare. Instead of relying on devices flown in from developed nations, toolkits and manuals could be developed and distributed to local people so they could make their own devices in garages or factories using conventional equipment.

“We concentrated on devices known as external fixators,” Saeidi told the Observer. “These are used when a gunshot or a mine explosion or a collapsed building severs a person’s leg or arm bones. By holding pieces of shattered bone together, the injured person’s deep flesh wounds get a chance to recover and their limbs can be saved.

“Crucially, this is not done by inserting a metal rod into a limb as this could trigger serious ­infections. Instead, it is held outside and is attached to the bone through pins that are pushed through a person’s arm or leg.”

However, external ­fixators are complex and expensive. A single device can cost more than £2,000 and in conflict zones they are difficult to access. Sometimes homemade fixators are made but they often lead to serious complications.

To get round this problem, Bull and Saeidi launched their project along with ­colleagues at Imperial and other international institutions, with funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

“We designed simple ways to make external fixators and tested them in Sri Lanka,” said Bull. “It was looking good. Then the Beirut explosion happened and there was an immediate call for hundreds of fixators to be sent there. We were not ready to help at this stage. Fortunately, other countries were able to step in and eventually send ­supplies. Nevertheless, it hit home that our ­initial idea had been the right one.”

Since then, Bull and Saeidi have developed sets of instructions that can be used to manufacture fixators with limited skills and resources. “All that is needed is a supply of aluminium and some stainless steel rods,” said Saeidi. “It is very straightforward.”

The value of this work was revealed in February 2022. After Russian troops poured across the border into Ukraine, hundreds of people suffered catastrophic injuries and faced losing limbs without fixators to save their arms and legs.

“We got an urgent call from local doctors who were desperate for help and we were able to point them to our website, which had instructions on how to make fixators,” said Bull. “A couple of days later, a workshop in eastern Poland sent us a photo of a fixator they had just made from our instruction kit. In the first few days of the war, 150 of them were deployed and will have helped prevent injured people from losing legs or arms.”

Since then, Saeidi has created a tool kit for making ­fixators and these are being tested in Kenya and Rwanda with the aim of perfecting a technology that is ready for use anywhere in the wake of earthquakes or wars.

“When you get events like Beirut or Ukraine you get a sudden surge in terrible injuries,” said Bull. “We need simple ways to help doctors in these circumstances and that is what our fixator kits should do.”

She’s not long on charisma or passion but keeps perfect rhythm and is never prone to temperamental outbursts against the musicians beneath her three batons. Meet MAiRA Pro S, the next-generation robot conductor who made her debut this weekend in Dresden.

Her two performances in the eastern German city are intended to show off the latest advances in machine maestros, as well as music written explicitly to harness 21st-century technology. The artistic director of Dresden’s Sinfoniker, Markus Rindt, said the intention was “not to replace human beings” but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible.

The Sinfoniker, long known for innovation and political statements, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with the Robotersinfonie at the Hellerau hall in a concert divided into two parts, one purely human and, after the interval, one that is robot-led.

In the second half, three-armed MAiRA clutches a trio of stubby lightsabers, each with a different colour, to mark time. The ensemble is divided into three parts, each responding to its own baton to create cross rhythms.

The composer Andreas Gundlach wrote the aptly named Semiconductor’s Masterpiece for 16 brass musicians and four percussionists playing wildly diverging time signatures. Some begin slowly and accelerate while the others slow down. Gundlach told the local public broadcaster MDR that MAiRA’s technical skills ensured the music sounded smooth, “like it came from a single source”.

To pull off a two-decade-long dream, Rindt worked with specialists from Technical University Dresden’s CeTI, which stands for Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop. It pursues innovation based on the principle that robots and people can cooperate rather than compete.

Rindt taught MAiRA conducting as he would a human, displaying arm movements up to 40 times so she could integrate and adopt them with ever-increasing complexity during two years in development.

Each “arm” has seven joints, allowing it to move and stretch in all directions. But if she gets a little too forceful, slamming down on a beat, a safety mechanism kicks in to prevent her from doing any damage to herself or the musicians.

Rindt told MDR he had the idea of stepping aside for a sophisticated robot 23 years ago while rehearsing an intricate composition. One of the bassoonists told the conductor: “You’re conducting the clarinets in 3/4 time and I have 5/8, a totally different tempo – what should I do, no one is conducting me?” And the conductor answered: “I’m not a robot.”

Local media reported an enthusiastic reception for the world premiere on Saturday night, which is to be followed by a livestreamed concert on Sunday.

MAiRA is perhaps the most technically advanced robot to conduct music but she is not the first. In 2008, a 1.2-metre-tall automaton with a baton conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mitch Leigh’s The Impossible Dream from the Man from La Mancha. Nine years later, the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra performed in Pisa with YuMi, billed as a “collaborative” dual-arm robot conductor. And in South Korea in July 2023, an android robot took the conductor’s podium at Seoul’s National Theater of Korea.

During its quarter-century of existence, Dresden’s Sinfoniker has often pushed the envelope of contemporary music. In 2006, it played an arrangement of the soundtrack of the classic silent film Battleship Potemkin from the balconies of a communist-era housing development in central Dresden, while the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys played on the roof.

And in 2017, it staged a festival “against isolation and intolerance” during the Trump presidency close to the US-Mexican border wall near Tijuana and performed with Mexican and US musicians.