The last time Nassar al-Hammouni talked to his son, Ayman, it was by telephone and the 12-year-old was overflowing with plans for the coming weekend, and for the rest of his life. He had joined a local football team and planned to register at a karate club that weekend. When he grew up, he told Nassar, he was going to become a doctor, or better still an engineer to help his father in the construction job that took him away from their home in Hebron every week.

None of that – the football, the karate or his imagined future career – will happen now. Last Friday, two days after the call to his father, Ayman was killed, shot by Israeli fire, video footage seen by the Guardian suggests.

The killing of children on the West Bank is no longer out of the ordinary, particularly since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stepped up operations in the occupied territory after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the beginning of the Gaza war. The intensity has increased since the January ceasefire in the strip.

So far this year about two children a week have been killed, slightly over the average rate for 2024 when 93 children were killed. Human rights workers fear the numbers may continue to increase as the IDF brings Gaza techniques to the West Bank, ejecting tens of thousands of people from their homes, flattening districts and loosening further the “rules of engagement” covering when a soldier is permitted to open fire.

They are calling it “Gazafication” and it is becoming the new normal. But what sets Ayman al-Hammouni’s case apart is the clarity of the evidence, illustrated by footage from two security cameras, that tells the story of the child’s last moments.

Ayman and his 10-year-old brother, Aysar, had gone with their mother, Anwar, to visit their grandfather and their uncles who lived in another part of Hebron, Jabal Jawhar. The trip across town took an hour in Hebron’s grinding traffic and involved crossing from Palestinian-controlled Hebron to an area run by the IDF, part of the complex patchwork of territorial division imposed on the West Bank.

Jabal Jawhar is not far from the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and his biblical family are supposedly buried, a site sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians. On Friday nights before Jewish settlers come to pray there, the IDF has been conducting aggressive patrols in the surrounding Palestinian districts. The army, increasingly staffed and led by Israelis from the national religious right, is widely perceived on the West Bank to be acting as the armed wing of the settler movement.

At about 6.30pm, Ayman had just run an errand to his grandfather’s flat and returned to his uncle Tariq’s house when there was a commotion on the main road, 60 metres away down a sloping paved alleyway.

A shot was heard and people began to run, and a young man from the neighbourhood whose uncle lived next door drove up the alley in a white car, its windscreen pierced by a bullet. He parked outside Tariq’s house and got out, examining a wound where a fragment of glass had nicked his shoulder.

The scene was recorded by two security cameras, one at the corner of Tariq’s courtyard pointing down the alley, and the other perched outside the top-floor flat of Ayman’s grandfather, Mohammad Bader al-Ajlouni, looking over the cars in front of Tariq’s house and across the alley, at 90 degrees to the other camera angle.

Both sets of footage show Ayman and two of his cousins coming out of Tariq’s house along with another of his uncles, Nadeem al-Ajlouni, who gives the injured man a tissue for the cut in his shoulder. Ayman looks on, a slight figure leaning on the back of the white car, a brown bag slung around his shoulder.

Then there is more commotion from the alleyway and another shot, sending the small knot of people scurrying for cover, including Ayman and his cousins. Ayman runs inside the gate of Tariq’s house and out of view of the cameras, and then another shot rings out from down the alleyway. This was the bullet that is believed to have hit Ayman. The footage does not prove beyond question who fired it, but it does make clear it came from the direction of Israeli soldiers who were advancing on the house and who arrived at the scene seconds later.

In the confusion, it seems to take a few seconds before Ayman is noticed. It was Nadeem, his young uncle, who saw him first. “He was lying on the steps of the house, just inside the gate. I went to pick him up but I could tell he was already gone,” Nadeem said.

Then the cameras show another surge of panic and the silhouettes of three soldiers advancing up the alley, guns pointed, one with a bright torch shining along the barrel. The injured neighbour, Ayman’s cousin, and his little brother Aysar, who by now had come down from his grandfather’s flat, all scramble away between the parked cars. Nadeem runs out of Tariq’s front gate carrying Ayman but drops his jacket and then Ayman in his desperation to get away.

The boy’s body is left lying on the ground between a car and Tariq’s garden wall as the soldiers reach the house. They look around for a few seconds and then spot the body, and at that point they turn around and calmly walk away, the screams of Ayman’s mother at their backs after she stumbles on the body of her son.

Nadeem scoops Ayman’s limp body up once more and he and Tariq head off down the alley in the footsteps of the retreating soldiers, in the direction of a nearby hospital.

It was already too late. The family have yet to receive the medical report but an advocacy group, Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), drawing on its contacts in the Hebron hospital where Ayman was taken, said the bullet entered his back and lodged in his lungs.

Nassar and Nadeem also said Ayman was shot in the back, while Mohammad, the grandfather, said the wound was to the upper abdomen.

Nassar got the call in Ramallah, where he works in a construction and a security job for the Palestinian Authority. First a relative told him Ayman had been shot, but Nassar demanded the truth and by the time he was on the road he already knew his son was dead.

A friend drove him through the night, navigating the army checkpoints along the way. At one spot north of Bethlehem, known as the “container checkpoint”, Nassar was told to get out of the car with a gun pointed at him.

The bereaved father said that on hearing of what had happened in Hebron, an Arabic-speaking soldier began to taunt him, claiming to have been the one who shot Ayman, telling Nassar: “Convince me that I shot him for nothing.

“We hope that you will follow your son,” he recalled the soldier adding.

The IDF did not respond to questions about Ayman’s death. In some previous cases, under media pressure an investigation is announced, although it rarely results in substantive action. In 2019 a soldier was sentenced to one month of community service for shooting dead a 14-year-old boy in Gaza. But even such trivial accountability is vanishingly rare.

An Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, has calculated the probability of an Israeli soldier facing prosecution for killing Palestinians to be just 0.4% – one prosecution in 219 fatalities brought to the military’s attention.

On Wednesday, Aysar went back to school for the first time since the shooting, but he could not face seeing his older brother’s classroom across the corridor from his own. Nassar asked the teacher if he could be moved.

Ayman was a premature baby and was in a hospital incubator for more than a month, Nassar recalled. But being a child is not much of a protection on the West Bank.

“It is about rage and revenge,” Nassar said. “They don’t care if it’s a child, or a woman, or an old person. No one’s safe any more.”

The latest round of talks on the second phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has yet to make any progress and it was unclear whether they would resume on Saturday, a senior Hamas official has said.

The ceasefire took effect on 19 January after more than 15 months of war following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, the deadliest in the country’s history.

During the initial six-week phase of the ceasefire, Gaza militants freed 25 living hostages and returned the bodies of eight others to Israel, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

A second phase of the fragile truce was supposed to secure the release of dozens of hostages still in Gaza and pave the way for a more permanent end to the war.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had sent a delegation to Cairo, and Egypt, which is mediating, said “intensive talks” on the second phase had begun, with delegations from Israel and Egypt’s fellow mediators Qatar and the US.

But by early on Saturday, there was no sign of consensus and a Hamas source accused Israel of delaying the second phase.

“The second phase of the ceasefire agreement is supposed to begin tomorrow morning, Sunday … but the occupation is still procrastinating and continuing to violate the agreement,” the source told Agence-France Presse.

A Palestinian source close to the talks told AFP that, despite the absence of a Hamas delegation in Cairo, discussions were under way to find a way through the impasse.

Max Rodenbeck, of the International Crisis Group thinktank, said the second phase could not be expected to start immediately. “But I think the ceasefire probably won’t collapse also,” he added.

The preferred Israeli scenario is to free more hostages under an extension of the first phase, rather than a second phase, the defence minister, Israel Katz, said. Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s attack, 58 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Hamas, for its part, has pushed hard for phase two to begin, after it suffered staggering losses in the devastating war.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Friday that the Israel-Hamas ceasefire “must hold”.

“The coming days are critical. The parties must spare no effort to avoid a breakdown of this deal,” Guterres said in New York.

The truce enabled more aid to flow into the Gaza Strip, where more than 69% of buildings were damaged or destroyed, almost the entire population was displaced, and widespread hunger occurred because of the war, according to the UN.

In Gaza and throughout much of the Muslim world, Saturday also marked the first day of the month of Ramadan, during which the faithful observe a dawn-to-dusk fast.

Among the rubble of Gaza’s war-wrecked neighbourhoods, traditional Ramadan lanterns hung and people performed nightly prayers on the eve of the holy month.

“Ramadan has come this year, and we are on the streets with no shelter, no work, no money, nothing,” said Ali Rajih, a resident of the hard-hit Jabaliya camp in north Gaza. “My eight children and I are homeless, we’re living on the streets of Jabaliya camp, with nothing but God’s mercy.”

The Gaza war began with Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

The Israeli retaliation has killed more than 48,000 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN has deemed reliable.

Although the truce has in effect held, there have been a number of Israeli strikes, including on Friday when the military said it targeted two “suspects” approaching troops in southern Gaza. A hospital in Khan Younis said it had received the body of one person killed in a strike.

In return for the release of the captives held in Gaza, Israel released nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners from its jails. Gaza militants also released five Thai hostages outside the truce deal’s terms.

The latest round of talks on the second phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has yet to make any progress and it was unclear whether they would resume on Saturday, a senior Hamas official has said.

The ceasefire took effect on 19 January after more than 15 months of war following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, the deadliest in the country’s history.

During the initial six-week phase of the ceasefire, Gaza militants freed 25 living hostages and returned the bodies of eight others to Israel, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

A second phase of the fragile truce was supposed to secure the release of dozens of hostages still in Gaza and pave the way for a more permanent end to the war.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had sent a delegation to Cairo, and Egypt, which is mediating, said “intensive talks” on the second phase had begun, with delegations from Israel and Egypt’s fellow mediators Qatar and the US.

But by early on Saturday, there was no sign of consensus and a Hamas source accused Israel of delaying the second phase.

“The second phase of the ceasefire agreement is supposed to begin tomorrow morning, Sunday … but the occupation is still procrastinating and continuing to violate the agreement,” the source told Agence-France Presse.

A Palestinian source close to the talks told AFP that, despite the absence of a Hamas delegation in Cairo, discussions were under way to find a way through the impasse.

Max Rodenbeck, of the International Crisis Group thinktank, said the second phase could not be expected to start immediately. “But I think the ceasefire probably won’t collapse also,” he added.

The preferred Israeli scenario is to free more hostages under an extension of the first phase, rather than a second phase, the defence minister, Israel Katz, said. Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s attack, 58 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Hamas, for its part, has pushed hard for phase two to begin, after it suffered staggering losses in the devastating war.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Friday that the Israel-Hamas ceasefire “must hold”.

“The coming days are critical. The parties must spare no effort to avoid a breakdown of this deal,” Guterres said in New York.

The truce enabled more aid to flow into the Gaza Strip, where more than 69% of buildings were damaged or destroyed, almost the entire population was displaced, and widespread hunger occurred because of the war, according to the UN.

In Gaza and throughout much of the Muslim world, Saturday also marked the first day of the month of Ramadan, during which the faithful observe a dawn-to-dusk fast.

Among the rubble of Gaza’s war-wrecked neighbourhoods, traditional Ramadan lanterns hung and people performed nightly prayers on the eve of the holy month.

“Ramadan has come this year, and we are on the streets with no shelter, no work, no money, nothing,” said Ali Rajih, a resident of the hard-hit Jabaliya camp in north Gaza. “My eight children and I are homeless, we’re living on the streets of Jabaliya camp, with nothing but God’s mercy.”

The Gaza war began with Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

The Israeli retaliation has killed more than 48,000 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN has deemed reliable.

Although the truce has in effect held, there have been a number of Israeli strikes, including on Friday when the military said it targeted two “suspects” approaching troops in southern Gaza. A hospital in Khan Younis said it had received the body of one person killed in a strike.

In return for the release of the captives held in Gaza, Israel released nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners from its jails. Gaza militants also released five Thai hostages outside the truce deal’s terms.

Two days after initially downplaying the outbreak as “not unusual,” the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Friday said he recognizes the serious impact of the ongoing measles epidemic in Texas – in which a child died recently – and said the government is providing resources, including protective vaccines.

“Ending the measles outbreak is a top priority for me and my extraordinary team,” Kennedy – an avowed anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who for years has sown doubts about the safety and efficacy of vaccines – said in a post on X.

Kennedy said his federal Department of Health and Human Services would send Texas 2,000 doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine – typically meant to be given to children in a series of two shots at 12 to 15 months old as well as between the ages of four and six years old – through its immunization program.

Earlier, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) upheld the role of vaccines in offering protection against measles after an unvaccinated child died from an infection this week. The death, reported on Wednesday, was the first US fatality from the highly contagious disease in a decade. Government data shows a growing outbreak with more than 140 cases reported in Texas since late January.

The child’s death and the hospitalization of nearly 20 other patients in Texas have put Kennedy’s vaccine views to the test.

Kennedy founded the Children’s Health Defense anti-vaccine group. However, he has claimed he is not “anti-vaccine” and has said he would not prevent Americans from getting vaccinated.

A total of 164 measles cases were reported as of 27 February across Alaska, California, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, Rhode Island and Texas, information from the CDC showed. About 95% of those infected were unvaccinated people, including children whose parents did not follow CDC recommendations to get them immunized with safe, effective vaccines providing protection against measles as well as other easily preventable diseases. Another 3% were from people who received only one of the two required shots for immunity, CDC data showed on Friday.

These cases were reported in nine jurisdictions, including Kentucky, marking a near 80% jump from 93 cases reported a week ago.

Also on Friday, Kennedy’s health and human services department announced plans to eliminate public participation in many of the agency’s policy decisions – a proposal that explicitly flouts a promise of “radical transparency” that he previously made to Congress while lawmakers considered confirming his appointment to the cabinet of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration.

The health and human services department has allowed such public comment on a range of agency actions for decades. It would mark a noted shift in the rulemaking process at the agency, which directs $3tn in healthcare spending and oversees the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and programs such as Medicare and Medicaid – which insure more than 140 million people.

Reuters contributed reporting

Twenty-five years ago, the US eliminated the measles virus. Measles is extremely contagious, and sporadic cases and outbreaks are expected.

But as of 28 February, 146 people in Texas – the majority of whom are unvaccinated children – have contracted measles. Twenty have been hospitalized, according to the Texas department of state health services. One “school-aged child” who was not vaccinated died this week, according to a 26 February statement – the first measles death in the US since 2015.

Nine other cases have been reported in a neighboring county in New Mexico, say state health officials.

“This is a significantly sized outbreak,” says Dr Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease physician in New York City and author of the book Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health. The CDC defines an outbreak as three or more related cases; last year, a total of 285 cases were reported across 31 states and Washington DC.

Here’s everything to know about measles as the virus spreads.

What is the recent history of measles in the US?

The last major US measles outbreak occurred in 2019, when nearly 1,300 people caught the virus. According to the CDC, this almost cost the US its elimination status. (Measles is considered eliminated when it hasn’t spread in a region for 12 or more consecutive months.)

Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says the latest case numbers are “still the tip of the iceberg” and are on track to reach or surpass those of past outbreaks.

That’s largely due to declines in vaccination rates in the US and worldwide that have contributed to a fourfold rise in measles outbreaks from 2023 to 2024 alone. “I think we’re still on that trajectory,” Hotez says. “I would imagine 2025 is going to be a pretty rough year for measles.”

What is measles, and who normally gets it?

Measles is a respiratory virus that mostly affects children, but can also affect adults who were never infected or vaccinated against it, says Robert Bednarczyck, an epidemiologist and associate professor of global health at Emory University in Georgia.

Measles is often lumped together with mumps and rubella because there’s one vaccine, known as MMR, that protects against all three diseases. But they’re each caused by different respiratory viruses.

How does measles spread?

The measles virus lives in the nose and throat mucus of infected people. When they cough, sneeze or breathe, viral particles slingshot into the air, where they can linger for up to two hours. “You don’t even have to have direct or close contact with an infected individual” to get sick, says Hotez. This is why measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know of.

According to the CDC, if one person has measles, up to 90% of people who are not immune and breathe the contaminated air or touch an infected surface will get sick. Unlike other respiratory bugs, it is not seasonal.

A person infected with measles is contagious for about eight days, including the four days before a rash appears, and the four days after. This is problematic, says Ratner, because it means you can spread the virus without knowing it.

How do I know if I have measles and what are the symptoms?

You may not know you have measles right away because symptoms typically emerge one to two weeks after exposure. Around that time, you might develop a cough, runny nose, red and watery eyes, and high fever, according to the CDC. At this point you might assume you have the flu, but in another two to three days you may find tiny white spots inside your mouth, Bednarczyck says, which “is a clear giveaway” for measles.

Three to five days in, you might develop the classic rash: red patches on the face that dot the hairline, then spread to the neck, trunk, arms, legs and feet, says the CDC. The darker your skin, the more likely you’ll see small raised bumps in the same areas without discoloration. Although it looks painful, a measles rash usually isn’t itchy.

Overall, you might feel sick for about a week, says the World Health Organization, and the rash could take five to six days to fade away. If you suspect that you or your child has measles, call the doctor’s office or hospital before you arrive, says Ratner, so they can reduce your exposure to others in the waiting room.

Do most people recover from measles?

Most people who catch measles recover with no lingering consequences, say experts. But complications can affect a relatively large number of people who get the virus; some are very serious.

Ear infections, for example, occur in about one out of every 10 children with measles, according to the CDC. As many as one in 20 will get pneumonia, which is the most common cause of measles-related death in young kids. About one in every 1,000 children will develop brain swelling called encephalitis, which can cause deafness, convulsions or intellectual disability. Data show that about one to three of every 1,000 kids with measles will die from these complications.

A fatal central nervous system disease called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis can happen to very few people about seven to 10 years after they recover from measles; the risk is higher for those who get measles before age two.

Unvaccinated people, children younger than age five, adults over age 20, people with weakened immune systems, and pregnant people face the greatest risks of measles complications, says the CDC. Even so, it’s important to remember that anyone, regardless of their health, can get seriously ill and die from measles, says Ratner – especially considering there are no treatments for the virus. Some hospitalized people may receive vitamin A, which may reduce their risks of bad outcomes, says Ratner, but it’s not a cure.

How do you prevent measles?

Because measles is airborne, face masks can help protect against infection, experts say. But vaccination is by far the best way. Before the US measles vaccination program began in 1963, about 3 to 4 million people caught the virus, 48,000 were hospitalized, 1,000 developed encephalitis, and 400 to 500 died each year in the US, according to CDC data.

There are two doses. The first, which children get aged 12 to 15 months, is about 93% effective, and the second, which kids get between ages four and six, is about 97% effective. That means roughly three out of every 100 people who are fully vaccinated still get measles after exposure to the virus, says the CDC.

Still, the vaccine can lower the odds of severe disease and the likelihood of spreading it to others, says Ratner, including those who can’t get vaccinated because they’re too young or have weakened immune systems. And research suggests that the virus diminishes the antibodies you’ve acquired for other germs, says Bednarczyck, leaving you vulnerable to all sorts of infections, especially if you aren’t vaccinated.

The measles shot is safe, according to decades of research. One infamous 1998 study of 12 children suggested a link between MMR and autism; it was later retracted for “scientific fraud”. Several papers have since proved that association wrong.

If you are exposed to measles and have not been vaccinated or have only received one dose, you can receive a measles vaccine within 72 hours of exposure, says Ratner, which could prevent infection or reduce the chances you get really sick. Kids too young for vaccination and people considered high-risk for severe disease could receive an antibody treatment called immunoglobulin within six days of exposure via IV or a shot in their arm.

Infection and vaccination against measles are both thought to offer lifelong immunity – that is, you can’t get measles twice. But if you’re unvaccinated and have been infected, says Ratner, you should roll up your sleeve anyway to protect against mumps and rubella.

MMR contains a weakened version of the measles virus, which causes a harmless infection that helps people develop immunity. So some people shouldn’t get the vaccine, says the CDC, including those who are pregnant, have a weakened immune system due to disease or treatment, or have a parent or sibling with a history of immune system problems.

Should I be concerned about measles in the US?

If you’ve been vaccinated, you are well protected against the virus. But overall, the CDC says measles is a concern for the US. Fewer children worldwide are getting their measles shots, fueled in part by Covid-related anti-vaccine rhetoric. This means infections could become more common as unvaccinated travelers spread the virus. “Our control of measles is really a testament to the vaccine and our ability to use it,” says Bednarczyck, “but we’re potentially sitting right on the edge of where we might start seeing more widespread outbreaks.”

From the 2019-20 to 2023-24 school year, vaccinations among US kindergartners dropped from 95% to just below 93%. It’s a concerning trend, says Ratner, because we need at least 95% vaccination coverage to achieve herd immunity, which is when enough people are immune to measles to prevent significant spread. Within individual states, rates can be even lower; Idaho, for example, has a 80% vaccination rate.

A Kurdish militia has declared a ceasefire in its 40-year insurgency against Turkey after its imprisoned leader called for the group to disarm and dissolve earlier this week.

“We are declaring a ceasefire to be effective from today on. None of our forces will take armed action unless attacked,” the executive committee of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) said in a statement.

The announcement followed a call from the jailed PKK founding member Abdullah Öcalan earlier this week, signalling a desire to end an armed insurgency that has lasted for more than 40 years across south-eastern Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq and into neighbouring Iran. Öcalan, 75, has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul since being captured by Turkish security forces in Kenya in 1999.

“I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,” he said in a letter read out to a jubilant crowd of allies in Istanbul. “All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”

The announcement rippled across the Middle East, and may affect an array of Kurdish militia groups with long-held but varied ties to the PKK. The group, which is classified as terrorist in Turkey, the US and the UK, called Öcalan’s announcement part of “a new historic process” for the Middle East.

The group’s executive committee also called for Öcalan to be freed from his island prison, in order to “personally direct” a meeting that would prompt them to lay down their weapons. “In order for this to happen, a suitable security environment must be created,” it said.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, also called Öcalan’s message the start of a new phase for peace efforts, although his government has publicly rebuffed suggestions that Öcalan’s call could be followed by peace talks.

“There is an opportunity to take a historic step toward tearing down the wall of terror that has stood between [the Turkish and Kurdish people’s] 1,000-year-old brotherhood,” he said.

Erdoğan’s administration has instead sought a unilateral ceasefire from the PKK, after his rightwing nationalist coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, suggested last October in the Turkish parliament that Öcalan could be granted a form of parole if the group were to lay down its arms and disband.

An earlier ceasefire between the PKK and Ankara broke down in 2015, prompting a period of violent attacks and reprisals across northern Iraq, Turkey and Syria that claimed thousands of lives. The International Crisis Group estimates that 7,152 people have since been killed in clashes or terror attacks in Turkey and northern Iraq, including 646 civilians, 1,494 members of the Turkish security forces and 4,786 militants.

The PKK executive committee said it agreed with the contents of Öcalan’s call, adding that “we will fully comply with and implement the requirements of the call on our part”. Even so, the group echoed the statements of Kurdish politicians, campaigners and leaders in adding that “democratic politics and legal grounds must also be secured for its success”.

Amid months of shuttle negotiations involving Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party before Öcalan’s announcement, Turkish authorities arrested dozens of its members.

In a series of dawn raids across 51 Turkish cities last month, Turkish forces detained at least 282 people including members of DEM, journalists and academics. The interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, accused those arrested of being “suspected members of a terrorist organisation”, later mentioning the PKK.

Despite the wave of arrests, some observers believe Erdoğan and his allies could seek the group’s support for constitutional changes to allow him to remain in power.

“There will be a series of meetings next week, including state officials and politicians, and many things will become clearer and more concrete. We hope that everything will be arranged in the next three months,” said Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a member of DEM who visited Öcalan in prison and brought his letter back to Istanbul.

Öcalan’s announcement has the potential to affect Kurdish-led forces in north-eastern Syria that are negotiating their future position with Damascus, as well as battling Turkish-backed militias in the area.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed coalition of militia groups that has fought Islamic State militants in Syria for a decade, are under increasing pressure from Damascus and Ankara despite their efforts to remain in control of swaths of north-eastern Syria including two major cities.

The group said Turkish forces conducted airstrikes and bombardments near the Tishrin dam, a frequent flashpoint of conflict between the SDF and Turkish-backed militias since the overthrow of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last December.

Gen Mazloum Abdi, the commander-in-chief of the SDF, said earlier this week that Öcalan had written and informed him about the call to disarm before the announcement.

While he hoped the PKK’s disarmament would quell Turkish airstrikes on territory that the SDF controls, he said, “to be clear, this only concerns the PKK and is nothing related to us here in Syria”.

Ziya Meral, a lecturer in diplomatic studies at Soas in London, and an expert on Turkish affairs, said the broader geopolitical context for the PKK today was different from the initial peace process in 2015, creating greater incentives for the group to explore talks with Ankara.

“From 2018 until now, Turkish security operations have really suffocated the PKK’s operational space, and this has expanded to Syria and Iraq,” said Meral, adding that in 2015, the PKK and its aligned group in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, felt more emboldened as they were a key partner for the US in the fight against Isis.

“Today Bashar al-Assad a former ally of the PKK is now gone in Syria and pressure is growing for the SDF to disband too, so a change in approach was needed.”

A Kurdish militia has declared a ceasefire in its 40-year insurgency against Turkey after its imprisoned leader called for the group to disarm and dissolve earlier this week.

“We are declaring a ceasefire to be effective from today on. None of our forces will take armed action unless attacked,” the executive committee of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) said in a statement.

The announcement followed a call from the jailed PKK founding member Abdullah Öcalan earlier this week, signalling a desire to end an armed insurgency that has lasted for more than 40 years across south-eastern Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq and into neighbouring Iran. Öcalan, 75, has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul since being captured by Turkish security forces in Kenya in 1999.

“I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,” he said in a letter read out to a jubilant crowd of allies in Istanbul. “All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”

The announcement rippled across the Middle East, and may affect an array of Kurdish militia groups with long-held but varied ties to the PKK. The group, which is classified as terrorist in Turkey, the US and the UK, called Öcalan’s announcement part of “a new historic process” for the Middle East.

The group’s executive committee also called for Öcalan to be freed from his island prison, in order to “personally direct” a meeting that would prompt them to lay down their weapons. “In order for this to happen, a suitable security environment must be created,” it said.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, also called Öcalan’s message the start of a new phase for peace efforts, although his government has publicly rebuffed suggestions that Öcalan’s call could be followed by peace talks.

“There is an opportunity to take a historic step toward tearing down the wall of terror that has stood between [the Turkish and Kurdish people’s] 1,000-year-old brotherhood,” he said.

Erdoğan’s administration has instead sought a unilateral ceasefire from the PKK, after his rightwing nationalist coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, suggested last October in the Turkish parliament that Öcalan could be granted a form of parole if the group were to lay down its arms and disband.

An earlier ceasefire between the PKK and Ankara broke down in 2015, prompting a period of violent attacks and reprisals across northern Iraq, Turkey and Syria that claimed thousands of lives. The International Crisis Group estimates that 7,152 people have since been killed in clashes or terror attacks in Turkey and northern Iraq, including 646 civilians, 1,494 members of the Turkish security forces and 4,786 militants.

The PKK executive committee said it agreed with the contents of Öcalan’s call, adding that “we will fully comply with and implement the requirements of the call on our part”. Even so, the group echoed the statements of Kurdish politicians, campaigners and leaders in adding that “democratic politics and legal grounds must also be secured for its success”.

Amid months of shuttle negotiations involving Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party before Öcalan’s announcement, Turkish authorities arrested dozens of its members.

In a series of dawn raids across 51 Turkish cities last month, Turkish forces detained at least 282 people including members of DEM, journalists and academics. The interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, accused those arrested of being “suspected members of a terrorist organisation”, later mentioning the PKK.

Despite the wave of arrests, some observers believe Erdoğan and his allies could seek the group’s support for constitutional changes to allow him to remain in power.

“There will be a series of meetings next week, including state officials and politicians, and many things will become clearer and more concrete. We hope that everything will be arranged in the next three months,” said Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a member of DEM who visited Öcalan in prison and brought his letter back to Istanbul.

Öcalan’s announcement has the potential to affect Kurdish-led forces in north-eastern Syria that are negotiating their future position with Damascus, as well as battling Turkish-backed militias in the area.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed coalition of militia groups that has fought Islamic State militants in Syria for a decade, are under increasing pressure from Damascus and Ankara despite their efforts to remain in control of swaths of north-eastern Syria including two major cities.

The group said Turkish forces conducted airstrikes and bombardments near the Tishrin dam, a frequent flashpoint of conflict between the SDF and Turkish-backed militias since the overthrow of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last December.

Gen Mazloum Abdi, the commander-in-chief of the SDF, said earlier this week that Öcalan had written and informed him about the call to disarm before the announcement.

While he hoped the PKK’s disarmament would quell Turkish airstrikes on territory that the SDF controls, he said, “to be clear, this only concerns the PKK and is nothing related to us here in Syria”.

Ziya Meral, a lecturer in diplomatic studies at Soas in London, and an expert on Turkish affairs, said the broader geopolitical context for the PKK today was different from the initial peace process in 2015, creating greater incentives for the group to explore talks with Ankara.

“From 2018 until now, Turkish security operations have really suffocated the PKK’s operational space, and this has expanded to Syria and Iraq,” said Meral, adding that in 2015, the PKK and its aligned group in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, felt more emboldened as they were a key partner for the US in the fight against Isis.

“Today Bashar al-Assad a former ally of the PKK is now gone in Syria and pressure is growing for the SDF to disband too, so a change in approach was needed.”

More than a thousand people have been evacuated as Japan battles its largest wildfire in more than three decades.

The flames are estimated to have spread over about 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) in the forest of Ofunato in the northern region of Iwate since a fire broke out on Wednesday, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency.

“We’re still examining the size of the affected area, but it is the biggest since the 1992 wildfire [in Kushiro, Hokkaido],” an agency spokeperson said.

That fire burned 1,030 hectares, the previous record. About 1,700 firefighters were being mobilised from across the country, the agency said.

Aerial footage from the public broadcaster NHK showed white smoke billowing up and covering an entire mountain.

Local police found the body of one person who had been burned, while more than 1,000 nearby residents have been evacuated and more than 80 buildings had been damaged as of Friday, according to the Ofunato authorities.

The cause of the blaze remained unknown.

Two other fires were also burning on Saturday, one in Yamanashi and another elsewhere in Iwate.

There were about 1,300 wildfires across Japan in 2023, concentrated in the February to April period when the air dries out and winds pick up. The number of wildfires has declined since the peak in the 1970s, according to government data.

Ofunato has had only 2.5mm (0.1 inches) of rain in February – far below the previous record low for February of 4.4mm in 1967.

Last year was Japan’s hottest since records began, mirroring other countries as ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions fuel the climate crisis.

A precociously talented artist, scarcely out of his teens, was in 1620 commissioned to paint the portrait of an intrepid nun passing through his home city of Seville on her way to one of the farthest outposts of Spain’s vast empire.

His painting reveals a shrewd, formidable woman in late middle age, who clasps a book in her left hand while wielding a crucifix, almost as if it were a weapon, in her right.

Christ is turned towards the viewer, his left leg crossed slightly over his right and his body fixed to the instrument of his death by four nails: one through each palm; one through each foot.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez would go on to become the most famous artist of Spain’s golden age. The 66-year-old nun, Mother Jerónima de la Fuente, would sail to Mexico and traverse the country to take another ship across the Pacific Ocean, founding the first convent in the Philippines, where she would die 10 years later after a long life of devotion and physical penance.

More than 400 years on, Velázquez’s portrait of Mother Jerónima is to be displayed in public for the first time. Alongside it will be a bronze cast of the body of Christ, thought to have been modelled by Michelangelo, which inspired the crucifix brandished by the nun. The works will go on show from 15 March at the TEFAF art fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where they will be offered for sale.

The 25cm-high bronze corpus has been priced at €1.8m (£1.5m). Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, the company behind the sales, is not giving any estimates on the price of the Velázquez, which was kept in a convent in Toledo until it came into the hands of a Madrid family in the 1940s. But past prices tell their own story. Velázquez’s portrait of Saint Rufina sold for £8.4m in 2007, while his painting of the Spanish queen Isabel de Borbón was valued at about £27.8m before it was withdrawn from auction early last year.

Dizzying as the likely prices are, Stuart Lochhead says the aim of the side-by-side exhibition is to look beyond the marquee names of Velázquez and Michelangelo, and to explore the stories behind the two works, not least those of the two women who helped inspire them.

Lochhead believes that Michelangelo’s close, platonic relationship with the poet and noblewoman Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, may have informed his design for the tender, anatomically detailed bronze of Christ. The pair bonded over their shared faith and love of art, and, in 1540, Colonna gave him an edition of her poetry. One of its verses – a reflection on how the sacred can inform the creative – may have resonated deeply with her friend: “Let the holy nails from now on be my quills, and the precious blood my pure ink, my lined paper the sacred lifeless body.”

While Michelangelo​’s best-known sculptures were made from marble, he also used wood and bronze. The Christ statue – which was discovered in a private collection in San Sebastián a few years ago – mirrors many of his designs, not least the bronze corpus on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which is described as being “after a model by Michelangelo”.

“It’s also very similar to the large wooden corpus he does in Santo Spirito when he’s very young,” says Lochhead. “I think it’s a theme and an idea that he’s been developing all his life and it sort of coalesces around his relationship with Vittoria Colonna and his investigation of spirituality and religion at that moment in his life. He keeps returning to that motif.”

A bronze cast of Michelangelo’s corpus – possibly made in the Rome workshop of one of the artist’s pupils, the bronze founder Guglielmo della Porta – arrived in Seville in 1597, courtesy of a well-known Spanish silversmith. It proved wildly popular and numerous casts were made from it in bronze and silver, some of which were painted.

The Seville artist Francisco Pacheco, who mentions the cast three times in his writings and painted a polychromatic version of it, was Velázquez’s teacher and father-in-law, making it likely that the younger man would have come across the model many times in his workshop.

The link raises a tantalising question: where did the crucifix in Mother Jerónima’s hand come from? “Was it hers that she brought?” asks Lochhead. “Or was it Pacheco’s? Was it always there in the workshop, so was it something she was handed?”

Given the nun’s demeanour and devotion, the dealer doubts she would have been steered into doing anything that she did not want to do. “She has this strength and this power,” he says of the portrait, another version of which is on display at the Prado in Madrid. “She’s on this epic voyage. But no one knew if she’d ever get there – or what she’d do – before she left.”

The fact that she has the crucifix in her hand and turned towards the viewer makes Lochhead think she was keen to show it.

He is loath to do more than fantasise about whether the corpus held in the nun’s grip in 1620 was the same cast that arrived in Seville 23 years earlier: “It would be lovely to think that our corpus is the one on the cross, but … ”

All he can say for certain is that the cast going on display in Maastricht is too good to have been made in Spain at the time and must have come from a workshop in Rome, probably Della Porta’s. The design, with its four nails, would echo throughout Spain and its empire, recurring in works by artists including Francisco de Zurbarán, José de Ribera and Francisco de Goya.

Lochhead thinks it unlikely the two works will stay together. “I’m slightly worried that someone will say: ‘I’ll buy the Velázquez and you can throw in the Michelangelo,’” he says. “I don’t think the owner of the Michelangelo would be too happy about that. It would be fantastic if [they were bought together], but the painting is such a powerful thing on its own that I probably don’t see that happening.”

Whatever happens at the fair, the dealer hopes that the works’ brief time together in a specially constructed stand later this month will remind visitors that art – and the faith and iconography transmitted in it – is deeply personal and seldom static. It transcends its creators and also belongs, in part, to those who inspire it.

“We’re able to understand why these things were made – their backstory and who influenced them,” says Lochhead. “So we’re bringing in the influence of Vittoria Colonna and Jerónima into the creation of two works of art, which normally you’d look at and say: ‘Well, these were made by the great artists and that’s the end of the story.’ But it’s not.”

The rise of “0 to 100” killers who go from watching torture, mutilation and beheading videos in their bedrooms to committing murder suggests there could be a link between extreme violence online and in real life, experts have said.

Criminal justice experts advocated a new approach, inspired by counter-terrorism, to identify an emerging type of murderer with no prior convictions, after cases such as Nicholas Prosper, who killed his mother and siblings and planned a primary school massacre.

Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said there was a “new threat cohort” combining terrorists who were radicalised online and those who had “gone down a rabbit hole and into a dark world”.

He said: “There are quite a lot of similarities: they are isolated loners, boys rather than girls; the internet is obviously central; quite a high proportion have neurodivergence.

“We have to be stark about this – this behaviour couldn’t have existed without the internet because it is the source of the idea that certain types of violence are the solution.”

Hall is writing a report for the Home Office that was commissioned after the Southport attack, looking at whether to treat mass-casualty attack planning as terrorism.

He disagreed with stretching the definition of terrorism, but added: “The question is what lessons can you learn from the management of one cohort to apply to the other.”

David Wilson, an emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said research into whether online violence led to violence in real life was an “emerging field”.

Although earlier research challenged previous generations’ moral panic over violence in video games and films, Wilson thought that social media was different because it was more absorbing, was consumed alone, and algorithms led people to content that became “more and more extreme”.

Wilson said that for the past five years he had asked 300 first-year criminology students to raise their hand if they had watched a beheading video online. “All of them have,” he said, adding that this prevalence was reflected in an increase in these crimes.

He observed the rise of “0 to 100” killers, who diverged from the norm of offences escalating gradually and instead moved straight to murder. This was connected to the rise of “mixed ideology” motives, which included “incel” culture, the “alt-right” and mass-killing manifestos. The problem was compounded by cuts to youth clubs and mental health provision, he said.

Greg Stewart, a criminal lawyer and former youth justice lead for the Law Society, said successful reforms to the youth justice system picked up youngsters behaving badly in communities but missed “exceptional children”.

“The escalator, which was the old way of looking at things, has been disabled, so you’re more likely to go from a low base to very high seriousness,” he said, adding that there was an overlap between autism, obsessive behaviour and becoming radicalised online.

He recommended a Prevent-style response, in which teachers and lecturers picked up “thinking patterns and views”. For example, Nasen Saadi, who stabbed a woman, alarmed a lecturer by asking questions about murder.

Julia Davidson, a professor of criminal justice and cybercrime at the University of East London, said there was a “huge body of evidence” on young people’s exposure to violent content, which she feared had become a “public health problem”, though “the science is difficult” in establishing a link with offline violence.

Young people felt pressure “to watch violent acts and it being a test of belonging to a group” and this dovetailed with the toxic masculinity promoted by influencers such as Andrew Tate, she said.

Davidson said conversations in 2017 over the Online Safety Act, which required platforms to prevent children from seeing harmful content, originally focused on child sexual abuse, cyberbullying and pornography, but police were sharing growing concerns about online violence – for example, in the Olly Stephens murder case.

Almudena Lara​, the Ofcom policy director for child safety, agreed that children were subject to a “perfect storm of violent content, content that promotes abuse and hate, and often very misogynistic content and por​nographic content​, all being fed to them in a way that almost makes it unavoidable​”.

​Ofcom is seeking to balance freedom of speech with child safety, and requires platforms not to proactively push violent content to children, though Lara said “the bar is not complete elimination​” but rather tackling the “cumulative impact” that was linked to “attitudes towards real-life violence​”.

Prof Lorna Woods, a legal adviser to the Online Safety Act Network, said she feared that self-regulation by social media platforms was “not going to be enough” to tackle the problem, particularly where it relied on content takedowns, and platforms must instead move towards safety by design.

New research has identified four types of romantic lover, including one that has sex up to 20 times a week.

The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, categorised lovers as mild romantic, moderate romantic, intense romantic, and libidinous romantic.

Lead author, Australian National University PhD candidate in biological anthropology Adam Bode, defined romantic love as “a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual” – and one “that arose some time during the recent evolutionary history of humans”.

“It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioural, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions.”

Bode said that definition was “not perfect” but was “the scientifically most useful and most precise”. He plans to update it to include the age of the onset of romantic love, to note that it “doesn’t have all its features until puberty”, and that it is associated with the early stages of a romantic relationship.

According to the study, the romantic love stage can be measured through changes in hormones and blood neurotransmitter levels and is thought to last up to two years, after which it transitions to “companionate love”.

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In some cases it persists longer.

Bode said this was “the first paper to empirically show that we don’t all love the same”.

“That seems pretty obvious, but science just hasn’t shown it before,” he said.

The researchers, including experts from the University of Canberra and the University of South Australia as well as ANU, used the Romantic Love Survey 2022 of 1,556 people, the world’s largest dataset of people in love.

This longitudinal study across 33 countries selected 809 people aged 18 to 25, who self-reported being in love. And among them, Bode’s team identified four major “clusters”.

• Mild: About one in five – 20.02% – fell into this cluster, characterised by “the lowest intensity, lowest obsessive thinking, lowest commitment, and lowest frequency of sex”. This group also had the lowest proportion of people who thought their partner was “definitely” in love with them – just 25.31% – and the lowest proportion having sex, at 82.72%.

• Moderate: About four in 10 – 40.91% – landed in this category, which Bode described as “fairly stock-standard” – or in the words of the journal article, “entirely unremarkable”. Those in this category were more likely to be male, and less likely to have children. This group had “relatively low intensity, relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex”.

• Intense: This category described about one in three – 29.42% – of survey respondents, who Bode described as “crazy in-love” types. They were characterised by “the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex”. About six in 10 people in this group were female.

• Libidinous: About one in 10 – 9.64% – were libidinous romantic lovers, who had sex an average of 10 times a week and up to 20 times. They were characterised as “relatively high intensity, relatively high obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and exceptionally high frequency of sex”. This group were slightly more likely to be male, and had the highest proportion of people in a committed relationship but not living together.

The team’s research measured people’s romantic intensity, obsessive thinking, commitment and sexual frequency to come up with the categories. Bode noted other interesting associations, including that libidinous lovers were also more likely to want to smoke cigarettes, travel and spend more money.

The study measured the intensity of romantic love by the Passionate Love Scale (or PLS), a “robust measure of the cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of romantic love” used cross-culturally, developed in 1986.

The research noted that obsessive thinking about a loved one has been recognised in theories about the understanding and mechanisms of romantic love. It cited previous research positing that obsessive thinking helps with bonding and faithfulness, that commitment plays a role in forming bonds, and that sex is a function of romantic love (the 2022 survey participants were told to define sex by “whatever they thought it meant”).

The authors of the new study suggested it might “be fruitful” to further explore variables of sex, gender and sexual orientation, as well as the impact on mood of romantic love, and its effect on relationships over time. They also recommended future research focus on cultural or ethnic variations in the expression of romantic love, as well as the role of gender inequality.

The study noted that the survey at its heart was limited to young, English speaking adults, many of them from Weird (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) countries.

“Romantic love is under-researched given its importance in family and romantic relationship formation, its influence on culture, and its proposed universality and we want to help world researchers understand it,” Bode said.

“These findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love.

“Humans may still be evolving in terms of how they express [it].”