As Donald Trump prepared to unveil a swathe of reciprocal tariffs, global markets braced and some Republican senators voiced their opposition to a strategy that critics warn risks a global trade war, provoking retaliation by major trading partners such as China, Canada and the European Union.

The US president said on Monday he would be “very kind” to trading partners when he unveils further tariffs this week, potentially as early as Tuesday night.

The Republican billionaire insists that reciprocal action is needed because the world’s biggest economy has been “ripped off by every country in the world”, promising “Liberation Day” for the US.

He could also unveil more sector-specific levies.

Asked for details, he told reporters on Monday: “You’re going to see in two days, which is maybe tomorrow night or probably Wednesday.”

But he added: “We’re going to be very nice, relatively speaking, we’re going to be very kind.”

Some Republican senators spoke out against Trump’s tariffs on Canada and are considering signing on their support for a resolution blocking them, CNN reported. Senator Susan Collins warned that tariffs on Canada would be particularly harmful to Maine and that she intended to vote for a resolution aimed at blocking tariffs against Canadian goods.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis also said he was considering backing the resolution, adding: “We need to fight battles with our foes first and then try to figure out any inequalities with our friends second.”

Already, China, South Korea and Japan agreed on Sunday to strengthen free trade between themselves, ahead of Trump’s expected tariff announcement.

But Trump said on Monday he was not worried that his action would push allies toward Beijing, adding that a deal on TikTok could also be tied to China tariffs.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the goal on Wednesday would be to announce “country-based tariffs”, although Trump remained committed to imposing separate sector-specific charges.

The uncertainty has jolted markets, with key European and Asian indexes closing lower, although the Dow and broad-based S&P 500 eked out gains.

Market nervousness intensified after Trump said on Sunday his tariffs would include “all countries”.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that advisers have considered imposing global tariffs of up to 20%, to hit almost all US trading partners. Trump has remained vague, saying his tariffs would be “far more generous” than ones already levied against US products.

Trump’s fixation on tariffs is fanning US recession fears. Goldman Sachs analysts raised their 12-month recession probability from 20% to 35%.

This reflects a “lower growth forecast, falling confidence and statements from White House officials indicating willingness to tolerate economic pain”. Goldman Sachs also lifted its forecast for underlying inflation at the end of 2025.

China and Canada have imposed counter-tariffs on US goods, while the EU unveiled its own measures to start mid-April. Other countermeasures could come after Wednesday.

For now, the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, said at a Reuters event on Monday that US tariffs were causing anxiety, although their global economic impact should not be dramatic.

Ryan Sweet of Oxford Economics said to “expect the unexpected”, anticipating that Trump would “take aim at some of the largest offenders”.

Besides reciprocal country tariffs, Trump could unveil additional sector-specific levies on the likes of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. He earlier announced car tariffs to take effect on Thursday.

Economists have expected the upcoming salvo could target the 15% of partners that have persistent trade imbalances with the US, a group that the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has dubbed a “Dirty 15”.

The US has some of its biggest goods deficits with China, the EU, Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada and India.

US trade partners are rushing to minimise their exposure, with reports suggesting India may lower some duties.

The European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde, said on Monday that Europe should move towards economic independence, telling France Inter radio that Europe faces an “existential moment”.

Separately, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, spoke with Trump on “productive negotiations” towards a UK-US trade deal, while the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said the EU would respond firmly to Trump but was open to compromise.

It was “entirely possible” for fresh tariffs to be swiftly reduced or put on hold, said Greta Peisch, a partner at law firm Wiley Rein.

In February, Washington paused steep levies on Mexican and Canadian imports for a month as the North American neighbours pursued negotiations.

With Agence France-Presse

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly gained access to a payroll system over the weekend that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across various government agencies, despite warnings from senior staff about the potential risks.

According to two people familiar with the situation who spoke with the New York Times, Doge employees had spent about two weeks trying to obtain administrative access to the program, known as the Federal Personnel and Payroll System.

Then, toward the end of last week, senior career officials at the interior department reportedly issued a memo highlighting the unusual nature of the request and the associated risks with granting it.

The memo, reviewed by the Times, stated that “such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single [Department of Interior] official presently has access to all HR, payroll and credentialing systems.”

The senior employees reportedly warned that granting Doge employees this level of access would allow them to be able to view highly sensitive personal information that is subject to controls under the Privacy Act and cautioned that individuals given this elevated access could become targets for cybersecurity attacks by terrorists, nations or other malicious actors.

The memo emphasized that gaining administrative access to the system “typically requires training and certification”.

“Without formal qualifications, the Department may experience significant failure because of operator error,” the memo said.

On Friday, the federal employees reportedly asked the Doge workers to deliver the memo to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, for his signature, thereby assuming the legal responsibility for the associated risks.

However, Burgum reportedly never signed the memo.

But on Saturday, interior department officials reportedly granted at least two Doge employees the access they had requested, the two people told the Times.

With this access, the Doge employees now have visibility into sensitive employee information, like social security numbers, and are able to more easily hire and fire federal workers, according to the Times, citing the two people with knowledge who spoke with the newspaper on condition of anonymity due to fear of retribution.

Meanwhile, Tyler Hassan, the recently named interior department’s acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget and a former Doge employee, reportedly placed two of the IT officials who had resisted the Doge employees on administrative leave and under investigation for their “workplace behavior”, according to the two sources.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the interior department said: “We are working to execute the President’s directive to cut costs and make the government more efficient for the American people and have taken actions to implement President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

The reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood said the Trump administration would cut federal family planning funding as of Tuesday, affecting birth control, cancer screenings and other services for low-income people.

Planned Parenthood said that nine of its affiliates received notice that funding would be withheld under a program known as Title X, which has supported healthcare services for the poor since 1970.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week the US Department of Health and Human Services planned an immediate freeze of $27.5m in family planning grants for groups including Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood says more than 300 health centers are in the Title X network and Title X-funded centers received more than 1.5m visits in 2023. It not say how much funding would be halted by the Trump administration.

The White House and HHS did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. An HHS spokesperson said last week the department was reviewing grant recipients to ensure compliance with Donald Trump’s executive orders.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, predicted that cancers would go undetected, access to birth control would be severely reduced, and sexually transmitted infections would increase as a result.

“President Trump and Elon Musk are pushing their dangerous political agenda, stripping health care access from people nationwide, and not giving a second thought to the devastation they will cause,” McGill Johnson said in a statement.

Trump has named billionaire Musk, who helped the president get elected, to head up an initiative to target government agencies for spending cuts.

Conservatives have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood because it also provides abortions. However, US government funding for nearly all abortions has been banned since 1977.

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly gained access to a payroll system over the weekend that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across various government agencies, despite warnings from senior staff about the potential risks.

Senior career officials at the interior department reportedly issued a memo last week highlighting the unusual nature of the request to gain access to the Federal Personnel and Payroll System and the associated risks with granting it, the New York Times reported.

The memo, reviewed by the Times, stated that “such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single [Department of Interior] official presently has access to all HR, payroll and credentialing systems.”

Catching up? Here’s what happened on 30 March 2025.

The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has railed against a Paris court’s “political decision” to bar her from competing for the presidency in 2027, attacking the move to ban her from running for public office as “a denial of democracy”.

In a day of high political drama, Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement of European parliament funds on a vast scale, a conviction for which she was also handed a four-year prison sentence, with two of those years suspended and two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet. She was also ordered to pay a €100,000 (£84,000) fine.

A furious Le Pen announced she would lodge an appeal against the ruling, as nationalist and populist figures from around the world rushed to support her.

Donald Trump said the conviction was a “very big deal”.

“I know all about it, and a lot of people thought she wasn’t going to be convicted of anything,” the US president told reporters at the White House. “But she was banned for running for five years, and she’s the leading candidate. That sounds like this country, that sounds very much like this country,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to legal cases that Trump himself faced before he took office.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire owner, who has backed the far right in Germany and plays a major role in Trump’s administration, said the sentence against Le Pen would “backfire, like the legal attacks against president Trump”.

The judges’ decision, backed by more than 150 pages of legal justifications after a nine-week trial, was necessary because nobody was entitled to “immunity in violation of the rule of law”, the head judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis,​ said.

It was nonetheless considered a political earthquake in France as Le Pen had hoped to mount a fourth campaign to become president for her anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party.

Speaking for the first time in public about the verdict, Le Pen told TF1 television on Monday night that she would “pursue whatever legal avenues” she could to prevent herself from being “eliminated”. “I’m not going to submit to a denial of democracy this easily,” she said.

Le Pen, who was not found to have benefited personally from the embezzlement, insisted she had done nothing wrong. “I am going to appeal because I am innocent,” she said.

“I’m not going to let myself be eliminated like this. I’m going to pursue whatever legal avenues I can,” she added.

The RN, the single largest party in the French parliament, called the sentence a travesty.

The president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, 29, who could be considered a replacement presidential candidate despite his relative inexperience, said: “Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: French democracy was killed.”

He urged party supporters to “mobilise” peacefully to show “that the will of the people is stronger”, starting a petition in support of Le Pen and a leafleting campaign across the country to take place this weekend.

The ban on running for public office, to last five years, was ordered to kick in with immediate effect, meaning it will apply even though Le Pen, 56, is appealing against the verdict.

Neither the prison penalty nor fine will be applied until her appeals are exhausted, a process that could take years.

In the front row of the court, Le Pen showed no immediate reaction when the judge declared her guilty. But she grew more agitated and shook her head in disagreement as the judge said her party had illegally used European funds for its own benefit.

At one point, Le Pen whispered: “Incredible.” She then abruptly left without warning, before her sentence had been handed down.

Before Monday’s ruling, she had considered the 2027 presidential race as her best chance to gain more ground on an anti-immigration platform, while her opponents attacked her party’s policy platform as racist, xenophobic and anti-Islam.

The French Socialist party said in a statement that the “independence of the justice system and the rule of law” must be respected by all. The former Socialist president, François Hollande, said the judge’s decision was “based on law” for “serious” allegations. But Laurent Wauquiez, of the traditional right Les Républicains party, said it was a “very heavy and exceptional sentence” that was “not very healthy in democracy”.

Mathieu Lefèvre, a member of parliament for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, told BFMTV: “Marine Le Pen isn’t the victim of a political or judicial conspiracy. She’s perhaps first the victim of herself and a system of embezzlement.”

Le Pen and 24 party members, including nine former members of the European parliament and their 12 parliamentary assistants, were found guilty of a vast scheme over many years to embezzle European parliament funds, by using money earmarked for European parliament assistants to instead pay party workers in France.

The so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between 2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of €4.5m (£3.8m) to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the judges found had not been the case.

Le Pen will be able to retain her current post as a member of the French parliament for Pas-de-Calais, but will not be able to stand again in a future parliamentary election for the duration of her ban on running for office.

Le Pen took over the leadership of the Front National from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011 and began a drive to sanitise the party’s jackbooted, antisemitic image.

She renamed the party National Rally in 2018, wanting it to be viewed as a potential governing force, not just a protest movement, and has run for president three times, twice making it to the final run-off against Emmanuel Macron.

In 2022, Le Pen provided the far right with its highest-ever tally in a French presidential election, winning more than 13m votes.

An Ifop poll published by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper this weekend found Le Pen could have won 34-37% in the first round of the next presidential election and her fate in the run-off second round would depend on whether all her opponents united to vote against her.

The party will now have to decide who would take her place in the next French presidential race. Bardella, a member of the European parliament, is popular among voters but is seen as having little experience.

Nationalist and populist figures around the world, from Elon Musk to Viktor Orbán, have united in condemnation of a Paris court verdict barring Marine Le Pen from running in the country’s 2027 presidential elections.

In a bombshell ruling many believe could boost support for the party, the figurehead of France’s far-right National Rally (RN) was sentenced on Monday to four years’ imprisonment – half suspended – and banned from running for public office for five years, for embezzlement of European parliament funds.

Even if the legal evidence against her was substantial, the court’s ruling could prove highly divisive politically, potentially firing up Le Pen’s supporters – and even some of her opponents – just as Donald Trump’s legal problems motivated his.

The RN’s three-time presidential candidate, the frontrunner in many polls to succeed Emmanuel Macron in two years’ time, has said she will appeal against the decision, but her allies at home and abroad hit out as soon as the verdict was announced.

In the US, where the vice-president, JD Vance, has attacked centrist European governments for “running in fear” of voters and suppressing democracy, Musk, a close adviser to the US president, said: “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world.” He added: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.”

Trump himself said the conviction and ban from running for office was a “very big deal” adding, “that sounds like this country, that sounds very much like this country,” in an apparent reference to legal cases that he himself faced before he took office.

“Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine”), Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, posted in French on social media, referencing the rallying cry “Je suis Charlie” widely used in support after the 2015 Islamist attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine.

In the Netherlands, the far-right Freedom party (PVV) leader, Geert Wilders, said he was “shocked by the incredibly tough verdict”, adding: “I support and believe in her for the full 100% and I trust she will win the appeal and become president of France.”

Tom Van Grieken of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang called the decision “an attack on democracy”, while Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, posted: “They will never succeed to silence the voice of the French people.”

Many described the ruling as political. Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, told Reuters: “This ruling is clearly leftwing judicial activism. Wherever the right wing is present, the left and the system will work to get their opponents out of the game.”

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and the leader of the far-right League party, said: “Those who fear the judgment of the voters often find reassurance in the judgment of the courts.

“In Paris they condemned Marine Le Pen and would like to exclude her from political life,” he said. Salvini added that the decision was “a declaration of war by Brussels” and “a bad film that we are also seeing in other countries such as Romania”.

Earlier this month Romania’s constitutional court upheld a decision to ban the far-right presidential election frontrunner Călin Georgescu from standing in a rerun of the vote in May after the initial result was annulled because of suspected Russian interference.

George Simion, Georgescu’s far-right replacement – who is also ahead in the polls – said of the Paris verdict: “Targeting or annihilating your political opponent by any means is straight out of the instruction manual of totalitarian regimes.”

In Moscow, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said that “more and more European capitals” were “trampling over democratic norms” and showing themselves “not at all reluctant to go beyond democracy during the political process”.

Le Pen’s allies at home were equally damning. Jordan Bardella, the RN’s 29-year-old president and Le Pen’s likely replacement if she cannot stand, said she was the victim of an “unjust” verdict and claimed French democracy was being “executed”.

Some conservative politicians also expressed their reservations about the impact of the ruling. Laurent Wauquiez of the centre-right Les Républicains (LR) said it it was “not healthy” for an elected official to be prevented from running in an election.

“Political debates must be settled at the ballot box and it is the French people who must decide,” Wauquiez, his party’s likely presidential candidate, said, adding that the court decision would “weigh heavily on the functioning of the French democracy”.

On the radical left, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, said a “panicking illiberal establishment across the west” was “diving headlong into a totalitarian pit” and “France’s neofascists will only benefit from this”.

But Jürgen Hardt, a German conservative, said Le Pen had seen the EU as “a self-service store with which she could finance herself and her party”, adding that her fate “should be a warning to all corrupt politicians on the left and right fringes”.

And the German Green MEP Daniel Freund, the chair of the European parliament’s anti-corruption working group, said the court had “shown that the rule of law applies to everyone, regardless of polling numbers”.

The fallout from Myanmar’s earthquake has overwhelmed parts of the healthcare system, the World Health Organization has said, as the official death toll rose to more than 2,000, with many more missing.

Rescue operations faced “significant obstacles including damaged roads, collapsed bridges, unstable communications and the complexities related to civil conflict”, the WHO said in an update.

“The earthquake’s devastation has overwhelmed healthcare facilities in the affected areas, which are struggling to manage the influx of injured individuals. There is an urgent need for trauma and surgical care, blood transfusion supplies, anaesthetics, essential medicines, and mental health support,” the UN health agency added.

Later on Monday, Myanmar’s junta announced Friday’s major earthquake had led to the deaths of 2,056 people. A spokesperson said that 270 more people were still missing, with 3,900 people injured.

Predictive modelling estimates by the US Geological Survey, which monitors seismic activity, suggest the death toll could eventually reach well over 10,000.

The WHO said at least three hospitals were destroyed and 22 were partly damaged, while “the scale of deaths and injuries is not yet fully understood”. The agency had earlier issued an urgent flash appeal for $8m (£6.1m) for emergency support.

Myanmar has declared a week of national mourning, with national flags to fly at half mast.

Across central parts of the country, homes, religious sites, schools, universities, hotels and hospitals have all been damaged or destroyed. Rescue volunteers have spent days trying to free people from collapsed buildings.

In Mandalay, one of the worst-affected cities and the country’s second-largest, with more than 1.7 million inhabitants, people camped out in the streets for a third successive night. The city’s 1,000-bed general hospital had also been evacuated, with hundreds of patients being treated outside.

“The situation is so dire that it’s hard to express what is happening,” said Aung Myint Hussein, the chief administrator of Sajja North mosque in Mandalay.

At the U Hla Thein monastery in Mandalay, 270 monks were taking a religious exam at the time the earthquake struck. Rescue workers at the scene on Monday said 70 had been able to escape but 50 had been found dead, and 150 were still unaccounted for.

Communications with many of the affected areas are poor, partly due to the country’s continuing civil war, with much of the country out of the control of the military administration.

After a rare request by Myanmar’s isolated junta for international help – possibly due to the overwhelming magnitude of the impact – international assistance began to arrive over the weekend. China and Russia have sent aid and personnel, while India, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have also sent assistance.

A rescue team from Taiwan has also been standing ready to provide assistance to Myanmar but has not been called upon, amid speculation that the team was denied entry so as not to offend Taiwan’s enemy and Myanmar’s ally China.

The earthquake happened just as many humanitarian agencies were cutting back projects in Myanmar after Donald Trump’s cuts to the main US humanitarian group, USAID.

The US state department said on Monday, three days after the quake struck, that a USAid team was heading to Myanmar to help identify the country’s most pressing needs, a move that lagged far behind the aid efforts of other countries that are already on the ground.

State department spokesperson Tammy Bruce denied that funding and personnel cuts were impeding USAid’s response and said Washington was working with partners in Myanmar to get help to affected people.

Sarah Charles, who headed the agency’s humanitarian assistance bureau until February last year, said the response had been hurt by “a lot of internal confusion about capability to respond and willingness to respond”. Cuts by the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, had delayed what would have been the start of a US emergency response within 24 hours of the disaster, Charles said.

The UN representative in Myanmar, Marcoluigi Corsi, said: “Even before this earthquake, nearly 20 million people in Myanmar were in need of humanitarian assistance.

“This latest tragedy compounds an already dire crisis and risks further eroding the resilience of communities already battered by conflict, displacement and past disasters.”

Myanmar was already in crisis before the disaster, due to a spiralling conflict triggered when the military seized power in a coup in 2021. The junta is facing an armed resistance to its rule, formed of civilians who took up arms to fight for the return of democracy, and armed ethnic organisations that have long fought for independence.

It has lost swathes of territory and responded with relentless airstrikes, which continued after the devastating quake, even close to the epicentre.

In neighbouring Thailand, which was also affected by the quake, authorities were investigating possible factors that led to the devastating collapse of a Bangkok construction site, where dozens remain missing.

The Bangkok deputy governor Tavida Kamolvej has indicated it is unlikely that anybody else will be rescued from the building that collapsed. At least 19 people are known to have been killed in Thailand.

The country’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, has also called a meeting with government departments responsible for sending SMS alerts to the public, amid criticism of the response when the earthquake struck.

• Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report

As aid from China, Russia, India and the UK begins to flow into Myanmar, there is a conspicuous gap in global support from the world’s richest country: the US.

The powerful 7.7-magnitude quake that struck central Myanmar on Friday has caused widespread destruction, flattening swathes of the country’s second-largest city, Mandalay, and even a tower block in the Thai capital, Bangkok, more than 600 miles (1,000km) away.

The true picture of the crisis is yet to be fully revealed, given limited access to a nation that has been racked by a conflict since a 2021 military coup. The death toll, now at 1,700, is widely expected to rise.

Despite the logistical challenges, some countries have been quick to act. But Donald Trump has been accused of blowing up the US’s ability to respond to international disasters through cuts to foreign aid programmes.

China sent an 82-person team of rescuers into the country on Saturday. On Sunday, the state-run Xinhua news agency said a 118-member search and rescue team had also arrived. The team included earthquake experts, medical workers, field hospital workers and rescue dogs.

The Chinese government said on Monday that it has sent a first batch of relief supplies worth 100m yuan ($13.78m) to Myanmar, including tents, blankets and first aid kits, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Hong Kong has earmarked HK$30m ($3.8m) for emergency relief support, and sent in a 51-person team, with two search and rescue dogs and equipment, including life detectors. Russia’s emergency and health ministries said they had flown 120 rescuers, a medical team and supplies to Myanmar. And an aid flight from India landed in Myanmar on Saturday, with four more aircraft and two navy ships on the way, officials said.

The UK has pledged £10m ($12.9m) in humanitarian aid, with UK-funded local partners already mobilising on the ground. The EU has promised €2.5m ($2.7m) in initial emergency relief.

From south-east Asia, Indonesia will deploy logistical aid from Monday, including a hospital ship and several helicopters. The Philippines and Vietnam are sending teams of medics.

But the US, once among the biggest providers of foreign aid, has been slow to act, with a modest pledge of $2m announced on Sunday. “It’s a real bad one, and we will be helping. We’ve already spoken with the country,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday, describing the quake as “terrible”.

The US embassy in Myanmar added in a statement on Sunday that “a USAID emergency response team is deploying to Myanmar to identify the people’s most pressing needs, including emergency shelter, food, medical needs, and access to water”.

But Trump’s gutting of American foreign aid infrastructure and funding mean the three-person USAID assessment team is not expected to arrive in Myanmar until Wednesday, almost a week after the disaster, according to a report by the New York Times.

It was also unclear what aid would be sent, or how any money would be used, given that the systems needed to distribute aid had been dismantled, said Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates. “Maybe the embassy can do it, but they don’t have any of [USAID’s] specialists.”

Key among those specialists are USAID’s elite disaster assistance response teams (Darts), which are usually deployed as first responders to catastrophes worldwide to coordinate US relief efforts, direct aid and provide technical expertise. Those teams will probably vanish as USAID gets dismantled.

Robertson said the US had gone from “leader” to “laggard”.

A US rescue team arrived in Thailand on Sunday to assist with search efforts at the site of a building that collapsed in the capital, Bangkok.

Delivering help to neighbouring Myanmar, which is gripped by conflict, will be far more challenging. Rights groups have warned that assistance should be funnelled carefully to the country through community-based groups, and not the military junta, which has a history of weaponising aid.

“Donald Trump has completely blown up the US government’s ability to respond to international disasters. He unilaterally dismantled the pre-eminent aid agency,” Robertson said.

“It’s entirely appropriate that China and Russia are sending their teams faster than the US did. Because that’s the new reality … This is something we’re going to see time and time again over the coming years, every time there’s a disaster.”

The US had been “disarmed” in relation to its soft power, he added.

On Friday a three-judge panel lifted the injunction blocking Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from shuttering USAID, at roughly the same time the Trump administration notified Congress of plans to eliminate the agency entirely, despite pushback from some members of Congress, who say their permission is required first.

USAID staff worldwide have received termination notices effective in July or September which, if enacted, would leave a skeleton aid crew operating under the banner of the US Department of State.

Nether the state department nor a USAID-state coordinating office responded to a request for comment.

In the wake of a natural disaster, the swift deployment of aid was key, said humanitarian organisations such as Doctors Without Borders.

International organisations such as the World Health Organization – from which the US recently withdrew – has mobilised its logistics hub in Dubai to prepare trauma injury supplies and trigger its emergency management response. The agency is urgently seeking $8m to save lives and prevent disease outbreaks over the next 30 days.

The UN humanitarian agency Ocha is also mobilising emergency response efforts, alongside its partner organisations.

“A severe shortage of medical supplies is hampering response efforts, including trauma kits, blood bags, anaesthetics, assistive devices, essential medicines, and tents for health workers,” Ocha said in a statement on Saturday.

Criticisms that Doctor Who has become too “woke” prove the series is doing the right thing by being inclusive, its new star Varada Sethu has said.

Sethu plays the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, Belinda Chandra, in new episodes airing next month. With Ncuti Gatwa returning as the Doctor, the pairing marks the first time a Tardis team will comprise solely people of colour.

Speaking about the milestone, Sethu told the Radio Times: “Ncuti was like, ‘Look at us. We get to be in the Tardis. We’re going to piss off so many people.’”

At a time when representative casting in sci-fi and fantasy is prompting toxicity online, the actor, who recently appeared in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, said she had been encouraged by fans’ response to her joining the show.

“There’s been a couple of Doctor Woke [references] or whatever, but I just think we’re doing the right thing if we’re getting comments like that,” Sethu said.

“Woke just means inclusive, progressive and that you care about people. And, as far as I know, the core of Doctor Who is kindness, love and doing the right thing.”

Doctor Who celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2023, when some viewers criticised its introduction of transgender and non-binary characters, as well as a scene in which David Tennant’s Doctor realises he has a crush on Sir Isaac Newton.

Sethu, who was born in India and moved to the north-east of England at a young age, has also appeared in Jurassic World Dominion, Annika and Strike Back.

The 32-year-old made her first appearance in Doctor Who last year, playing an entirely different character in the episode Boom.

She told Radio Times that, after filming that episode, the Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies said he “kept seeing me and Ncuti on screen and thinking, ‘God, those two have such great chemistry’.”

She added: “We really are equals in the way that we interact with each other. Russell wanted someone who can push back and not be in awe of this all-powerful being.”

Sethu said the new Doctor Who episodes were “bright and energetic”, with one – The Interstellar Song Contest – including a cameo from the TV personality Rylan Clark.

She also spoke of the “whiplash”-inducing experience of taking on one of the most coveted and high-pressure roles on British television.

“I was dropped into [filming] within two weeks of being told I had it. So a lot of the confusion and stress that [Belinda is] going through is the confusion and stress that I was going through,” she said.

Criticisms that Doctor Who has become too “woke” prove the series is doing the right thing by being inclusive, its new star Varada Sethu has said.

Sethu plays the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, Belinda Chandra, in new episodes airing next month. With Ncuti Gatwa returning as the Doctor, the pairing marks the first time a Tardis team will comprise solely people of colour.

Speaking about the milestone, Sethu told the Radio Times: “Ncuti was like, ‘Look at us. We get to be in the Tardis. We’re going to piss off so many people.’”

At a time when representative casting in sci-fi and fantasy is prompting toxicity online, the actor, who recently appeared in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, said she had been encouraged by fans’ response to her joining the show.

“There’s been a couple of Doctor Woke [references] or whatever, but I just think we’re doing the right thing if we’re getting comments like that,” Sethu said.

“Woke just means inclusive, progressive and that you care about people. And, as far as I know, the core of Doctor Who is kindness, love and doing the right thing.”

Doctor Who celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2023, when some viewers criticised its introduction of transgender and non-binary characters, as well as a scene in which David Tennant’s Doctor realises he has a crush on Sir Isaac Newton.

Sethu, who was born in India and moved to the north-east of England at a young age, has also appeared in Jurassic World Dominion, Annika and Strike Back.

The 32-year-old made her first appearance in Doctor Who last year, playing an entirely different character in the episode Boom.

She told Radio Times that, after filming that episode, the Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies said he “kept seeing me and Ncuti on screen and thinking, ‘God, those two have such great chemistry’.”

She added: “We really are equals in the way that we interact with each other. Russell wanted someone who can push back and not be in awe of this all-powerful being.”

Sethu said the new Doctor Who episodes were “bright and energetic”, with one – The Interstellar Song Contest – including a cameo from the TV personality Rylan Clark.

She also spoke of the “whiplash”-inducing experience of taking on one of the most coveted and high-pressure roles on British television.

“I was dropped into [filming] within two weeks of being told I had it. So a lot of the confusion and stress that [Belinda is] going through is the confusion and stress that I was going through,” she said.

OpenAI said it had raised US$40bn in a funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at $300bn – the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup.

It comes in a partnership with the Japanese investment group SoftBank and “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,” OpenAI announced, adding it would “pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence)” for which “massive computing power is essential”.

SoftBank said it wanted to realise “artificial super intelligence” (ASI) surpassing human intelligence and OpenAI was the partner closest to achieving that goal.

SoftBank is to put $10bn at first into OpenAI and $30bn more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met.

Also on Monday, OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta.

OpenAI previously was a fierce defender of closed, proprietary models that do not allow developers to modify the basic technology to adapt AI to their goals. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” said the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman.

OpenAI and defenders of closed models – which include Google – have often decried open models as riskier and more vulnerable to malicious and non-US government use.

Elon Musk, a former OpenAI investor, has called on OpenAI to “return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was”.

Large companies and governments have proven reluctant to use AI models they have no control over, especially when data security is a concern. Meta and DeepSeek let companies download and modify their models.

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said this month that Llama had hit 1 bn downloads. DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 model in January rocked the world of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI has been riding on the success of its latest image-generation features in ChatGPT. Altman claimed the tool helped add “one million users” in one hour and overwhelmed OpenAI’s graphics processing units.

With Agence France-Presse

In the end, whatever Elon Musk and Donald Trump liked to insist, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were never stuck, nor stranded in space, and definitely not abandoned or marooned.

The world heard on Monday, for the first time since their return to Earth two weeks ago, from the two Nasa astronauts whose 10-day flight to the international space station (ISS) last summer turned into a nine-month odyssey. And their story was markedly at odds with the narrative painted from the White House.

Wilmore and Williams were speaking to reporters at a press conference in Houston, hours after a joint appearance on Fox News, and reaffirmed that they never felt neglected or in need of the rescue the president insisted was necessary.

Instead, they said, they calmly assumed duties as members of the space station crew – “planning for one thing, preparing for another”, Wilmore said – while a political firestorm over their status raged back on the ground.

If anything, the pair of veteran space flyers appeared slightly bemused by, or largely ignorant of the furore that followed their enforced and protracted stay on the orbiting outpost 250 miles above Earth, caused by technical failures on board their pioneering Boeing Starliner spacecraft that returned in September without them.

At the press conference Nasa had called to discuss the science activities the astronauts performed during their time in space, Williams and Wilmore gave diplomatic answers to questions designed to elicit their thoughts.

“The stuck and marooned narrative … yes, we heard about that,” Wilmore said, before reverting to a carefully worded explanation of how their training and preparations allowed them to pivot seamlessly from the roles of new spacecraft test pilots to routine ISS crew members who splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on 18 March on a routine crew rotation flight.

“The plan went way off for what we had planned. But because we’re in human spaceflight, we prepare for any number of contingencies. This is a curvy road. You never know where it’s going to go,” he continued.

Earlier, in the Fox interview, he pushed back on Musk’s false claim, amplified by Trump, that the astronauts were “abandoned in space by the Biden administration”. Had they felt stuck, stranded or marooned, the interviewer, Bill Hemmer, wondered.

“Any of those adjectives, they’re very broad in their definition,” Wilmore said.

“So in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects, maybe we were stranded, but based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten in orbit, we were nowhere near any of that at all.

“Stuck? OK, we didn’t get to come home the way we planned. But in the big scheme of things, we weren’t stuck. We planned and trained. Let me comment back on this other [claim], you know, ‘They failed you’. Who? Who’s they?”

Williams, too, was reluctant to kick the political football. In orbit, she said, her focus was solely on the work she needed to do.

“You sort of get maybe a little bit tunnel-visioned … you do your job type of thing, right, and so you’re not really aware of what else is going on down there,” she said.

“I hate to say that maybe the world doesn’t revolve around us, but we revolve around the world, something like that. But I think we were just really focused on what we were doing and trying to be part of the team. Of course, we heard some things … ”

The third US astronaut at the press conference, Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, who returned to Earth with Williams and Wilmore, backed up his crewmate.

“The politics, kind of, they don’t make it up there when we’re trying to make operational decisions,” he said. “As the commander [I’m] responsible for the safety of this crew and getting them back safely.”

Musk, the founder of SpaceX, a key Nasa contractor, has continued to push the story, with no evidence, that the astronauts were effectively held hostage in space by Biden for political advantage. It was a SpaceX Dragon capsule that eventually brought them back to Earth, but it was a spacecraft that had been attached to the ISS for months, not one Trump said he directed Musk to “go get the two brave astronauts”.

The billionaire became embroiled in a heated online dispute with Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen over the claims, and later attacked Mark and Scott Kelly, both retired astronauts and the former now Democratic senator for Arizona, for calling him out.

As for the troubled Starliner, whose future is questionable as Boeing and Nasa engineers continue to evaluate the helium leaks and thruster control issues that brought its maiden crewed mission to a premature end, both Williams and Wilmore said they would be happy to fly on it again.

Wilmore, as the Starliner mission commander, said there were questions he wished he’d asked during the flight that he believed might have brought a different outcome, and “some shortcomings in tests, shortcomings in preparation, that we did not foresee”. The astronauts will meet Boeing leadership on Wednesday to give first-hand testimony.

The whole experience, he said, was a learning curve familiar to those in “the difficult job we all take part in”.

“Could you point fingers? I don’t want to point fingers. I hope nobody wants to point fingers. We don’t want to look back and say, ‘shame, shame, shame’. We want to look forward and say, ‘Let’s make the future even more productive and better’.

“That’s the way that I look at it. And what I think the way the nation should look at.”

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of the disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein who once alleged she was sexually trafficked to Britain’s Prince Andrew, says she has just days to live after being involved in a vehicle accident.

“This year has been the worst start to a new year … I won’t bore anyone with the details, but I think it important to note that when a school bus driver comes at you driving 110km as we were slowing for a turn no matter what your car is made of it might as well be a tin can,” she wrote in a post on social media on Sunday, along with a photograph of herself lying in a hospital bed with a head injury.

“I’ve gone into kidney renal failure, they’ve given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology,” she said. “I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time, but you know what they say about wishes.”

“Thank you all for being the wonderful people of the world and for being a great part of my life,” she added.

Her father, Sky Roberts, commented on the post and said: “Virginia my daughter, I love you and [am] praying for you to get the correct treatment to live a long and healthy life.”

“If there is anything in this world I can do to help you, please let me know,” he added. “My spirit with you now and holding your hand.”

In a statement, Giuffre’s representative, Dini von Mueffling, told the Guardian that Giuffre had “been in a serious accident and is receiving medical care in the hospital”. She added: “She greatly appreciates the support and well wishes people are sending.”

Giuffre is one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, and also alleged she was abused by Prince Andrew. She was last reported to be living in Australia.

A social media post from four weeks ago suggested Giuffre was in Perth in early March. Western Australia police said on Tuesday there was “a report of a minor crash” between a school bus and a car in Neergabby, north of Perth, on 24 March at about 3pm.

“The collision was reported by the bus driver the following day,” a police spokesperson said. “The car sustained approximately A$2,000 worth of damage.”

WA police confirmed the driver of the car was a 41-year-old woman.

Giuffre had been living in a $A1.9m home in Ocean Reef – a northern suburb of Perth – with her husband Robert Giuffre, who purchased the property in late 2020.

In 2021, Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against Prince Andrew in federal court in New York, alleging he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17.

Andrew has repeatedly and strongly denied the accusations.

In the lawsuit, Giuffre alleged Epstein and his longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced her to Andrew in 2001, and alleged that Maxwell forced her to have sex with Andrew.

In 2022, Andrew and Giuffre agreed to an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum.

Maxwell, who has maintained her innocence, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for sex trafficking.

Epstein was arrested by federal authorities in July 2019 and charged with sex-trafficking counts. Shortly after, he died by suicide while awaiting trial.

Additional reporting Rafqa Touma

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of the disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein who once alleged she was sexually trafficked to Britain’s Prince Andrew, says she has just days to live after being involved in a vehicle accident.

“This year has been the worst start to a new year … I won’t bore anyone with the details, but I think it important to note that when a school bus driver comes at you driving 110km as we were slowing for a turn no matter what your car is made of it might as well be a tin can,” she wrote in a post on social media on Sunday, along with a photograph of herself lying in a hospital bed with a head injury.

“I’ve gone into kidney renal failure, they’ve given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology,” she said. “I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time, but you know what they say about wishes.”

“Thank you all for being the wonderful people of the world and for being a great part of my life,” she added.

Her father, Sky Roberts, commented on the post and said: “Virginia my daughter, I love you and [am] praying for you to get the correct treatment to live a long and healthy life.”

“If there is anything in this world I can do to help you, please let me know,” he added. “My spirit with you now and holding your hand.”

In a statement, Giuffre’s representative, Dini von Mueffling, told the Guardian that Giuffre had “been in a serious accident and is receiving medical care in the hospital”. She added: “She greatly appreciates the support and well wishes people are sending.”

Giuffre is one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, and also alleged she was abused by Prince Andrew. She was last reported to be living in Australia.

A social media post from four weeks ago suggested Giuffre was in Perth in early March. Western Australia police said on Tuesday there was “a report of a minor crash” between a school bus and a car in Neergabby, north of Perth, on 24 March at about 3pm.

“The collision was reported by the bus driver the following day,” a police spokesperson said. “The car sustained approximately A$2,000 worth of damage.”

WA police confirmed the driver of the car was a 41-year-old woman.

Giuffre had been living in a $A1.9m home in Ocean Reef – a northern suburb of Perth – with her husband Robert Giuffre, who purchased the property in late 2020.

In 2021, Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against Prince Andrew in federal court in New York, alleging he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17.

Andrew has repeatedly and strongly denied the accusations.

In the lawsuit, Giuffre alleged Epstein and his longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced her to Andrew in 2001, and alleged that Maxwell forced her to have sex with Andrew.

In 2022, Andrew and Giuffre agreed to an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum.

Maxwell, who has maintained her innocence, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for sex trafficking.

Epstein was arrested by federal authorities in July 2019 and charged with sex-trafficking counts. Shortly after, he died by suicide while awaiting trial.

Additional reporting Rafqa Touma

Iran has reacted with outrage after Donald Trump said the country will be bombed if it does not accept US demands to constrain its nuclear programme.

The US president said on Sunday that if Iran “[doesn’t] make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”.

Trump’s latest threat – more explicit and violent than any made before – came after he sent a letter to Iran, as yet undisclosed, offering to hold talks on its nuclear programme. Iran had sent a reply to the US stating it was willing to hold indirect talks, officials confirmed.

Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, said of Trump’s threat: “The explicit threat of bombing Iran by the head of a country is clear contradiction to the essence of international peace and security.

“Such a threat is a gross violation of the United Nations charter and a violation of the International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards regime. Violence brings violence and peace creates peace, America can choose.”

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a sceptic about talks with the US, said Iran was “not overly concerned” by Trump’s words. “We consider it unlikely that such harm would come from outside. However, if any malicious act does occur, it will certainly be met with a firm
and decisive response,” he said.

Brig Gen Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace force, said: “Someone in glass houses does not throw stones at anyone,” adding: “The Americans have at least 10 bases with 50,000 troops in the region, meaning they are sitting in a glass house.”

But the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, clearly had authority to keep the prospect of talks alive, saying Iran had already replied to the Trump letter through intermediaries in Oman and adding he knew the Iranian letter had now reached the US. Araghchi said direct talks were not possible while the US continued to threaten and bully Iran.

Trump sent his original letter proposing talks through the United Arab Emirates’ senior diplomatic envoy, Anwar Gargash.

The choice of Gargash as an intermediary was seen as a sign that the letter was intended to give negotiations a genuine chance, rather than leave Iran no option but to reject the offer of talks.

Trump has set a deadline of mid-May for progress to be made, but a longer deadline also exists of mid-August, by which time the original 2015 nuclear agreement will largely expire and a European response will be required. Trump took the US out of that agreement in 2018, a move widely seen as a mistake since it led Iran to speed up its uranium enrichment programme.

That Iran sent its reply through Oman, its traditional chosen mediator, rather than the UAE may suggest Iran does not want the UAE – which has normalised relations with Israel – to act as intermediaries. The US and Iran had held indirect talks on reviving the nuclear agreement under the Biden administration in Vienna from 2021, but they fizzled out, and all sides agreed the indirect nature of the talks ate up time, something Trump is reluctant to offer Iran.

Some of the ground will have been covered in four rounds of parallel talks held between Iranian and European negotiators in Geneva.

Tehran has not commented on how broadly the Trump letter went in demanding concessions from Iran. But the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Mohammad Kazem al-Sadegh, indicated the US was seeking talks that went wider than the nuclear programme, saying the letter called for the disbandment of the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces militia.

The US administration has been divided over whether to simply demand Iran expose its civil nuclear programme to fuller international inspection, or make a wider set of demands including a complete end to its nuclear programme and an Iranian commitment to stop bankrolling resistance groups in the Middle East such as Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen.

The US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has called for the “full dismantlement” of the Iranian nuclear programme, something Tehran rejects. By contrast, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, spoke only of restricting Iran’s nuclear programme, something Iran has been willing to accept since 2015 so long as it leads to a lifting of sanctions on the Iranian economy. Some inside the Trump administration believe an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will produce regime change.

Trump will want assurances, at the very least, that a revived Iranian economy will not just lead to extra funds for Iranian-backed militia. Kamal Kharazi, the head of Iran’s strategic council on foreign relations and sometimes touted as a chief negotiator, has accused the US of operating a psychological war by adopting a policy of “either war or negotiation”.

Widespread rejection in the Gulf of a US-inspired attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a relatively new factor in the equation, and Trump’s plan to reportedly visit Saudi Arabia on his first overseas trip means he may personally hear strong opposition to an attack on Iran from the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The Gulf’s opposition to an attack on Iran is based not on close ideological affinity with Iran, but on a sense the region must avoid further political instability, and with the current Iranian leadership already weakened, regime change is not something they welcome.

Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one” and buried in a mass grave eight days ago in southern Gaza, the UN has said.

According to the UN humanitarian affairs office (Ocha), the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) and civil defence workers were on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been shot at earlier in the day, when their clearly marked vehicles came under heavy Israeli fire in Rafah city’s Tel al-Sultan district. A Red Crescent official in Gaza said that there was evidence of at least one person being detained and killed, as the body of one of the dead had been found with his hands tied.

The shootings happened on 23 March, one day into the renewed Israeli offensive in the area close to the Egyptian border. Another Red Crescent worker on the mission is reported missing.

“Seven days ago, civil defence and PRCS ambulances arrived at the scene,” the head of Ocha in Palestine, Jonathan Whittall, said in a video statement. “One by one, [the paramedics and civil defense workers] were hit, they were struck. Their bodies were gathered and buried in this mass grave.

“We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on. They were here to save lives. Instead, they ended up in a mass grave,” Whittall said. “These ambulances have been buried in the sand. There’s a UN vehicle here, buried in the sand. A bulldozer – Israeli forces bulldozer – has buried them.”

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, said that one of its employees was among the dead found in Rafah.

“The body of our colleague killed in Rafah was retrieved yesterday, together with the aid workers from [the Palestinian Red Crescent] – all of them discarded in shallow graves – a profound violation of human dignity,” Lazzarini wrote in a social media post.

Israel’s military said its “initial assessment” of the incident had found that its troops had opened fire on several vehicles “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”.

It added that the movement of the vehicle had not been coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in advance, and that the area was an “active combat zone”. The Red Crescent said the Tel al-Sultan district had been considered safe, and movement there was normal, “requiring no coordination”.

On Monday the IDF issued evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation, eight days after the paramedics and rescue workers were killed.

The IDF did not reply on Monday to a request for comment on the reports that the paramedics and rescue workers had been buried in a mass grave at the scene of the shooting. It earlier claimed to have killed nine militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on 23 March, but its statement did not make clear whether it was alleging the militants had been in the Red Crescent ambulances, or had been hit by an airstrike on Rafah earlier in the night.

According to the Red Crescent, an ambulance was dispatched to pick up the casualties from the airstrike in the early hours of 23 March and called for a support ambulance. The first ambulance arrived at hospital safely but contact was lost with the support ambulance at 3.30am. An initial report from the scene said it had been shot at and the two paramedics inside had been killed.

A convoy of five vehicles, including ambulances, civil defence trucks and two cars from the health ministry, were sent to retrieve the bodies. That convoy then came under fire, and the Red Crescent said most of the dead were from that attack. Eight of the dead were from the Red Crescent, six from civil defence and one was a UN employee.

Dr Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes, said one of the paramedics in the convoy had been on a call to his colleagues at the ambulance station when the attack took place.

“He informed us that he was injured and requested assistance, and that another person was also injured,” Murad said. “A few minutes later, during the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew. The conversation was about gathering the team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent president, Younis al-Khatib, said the IDF had impeded the collection of the bodies for several days. The IDF said it had facilitated the evacuation of bodies as soon as “operational circumstances” allowed.

“The bodies were recovered with difficulty as they were buried in the sand, with some showing signs of decomposition,” the Red Crescent said.

Their burial had been put off pending autopsies, Murad said. “What is certain and very clear is that they were shot in the upper parts of their bodies, then gathered in a hole one on top of another, with sand thrown over them and buried,” he said. He said the body of one of the victims was recovered from the grave with his hands still tied. The claim could not be independently confirmed.

Whittall described the mission to recover the bodies as fraught. “While travelling to the area on the fifth day we encountered hundreds of civilians fleeing under gunfire,” he said. “We witnessed a woman shot in the back of the head. When a young man tried to retrieve her, he too was shot. We were able to recover her body using our UN vehicle.”

“It’s absolute horror what has happened here,” he added. “This should never happen. healthcare workers should never be a target.”

Jens Lærke, an Ocha spokesperson in Geneva, said: “The available information indicates that the first team was killed by Israeli forces on 23 March, and that other emergency and aid crews were struck one after another over several hours as they searched for their missing colleagues.

“They were buried under the sand, alongside their wrecked emergency vehicles – clearly marked ambulances, a fire truck and a UN car.”

The Red Crescent named the employees killed on 23 March as Mustafa Khafaja, Ezzedine Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Rifaat Radwan, Mohammed Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Labda, Mohammed Hilieh, and Raed Al-Sharif. The incident was the single most deadly attack on Red Cross or Red Crescent workers anywhere since 2017, the IFRC said.

“I am heartbroken. These dedicated ambulance workers were responding to wounded people. They were humanitarians,” said the IFRC secretary general, Jagan Chapagain. “They wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked.”

According to the United Nations, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza. That began after Hamas fighters stormed communities in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing 1,200 people. The global body is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third owing to staff safety concerns.

• European foreign ministers have called out Moscow for delaying a ceasefire in Ukraine as the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it would be “a drawn-out process”. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said on Monday: “Russia is playing games and not really wanting peace. So our question is, how can we put more pressure on Russia.” There should be some kind of deadline for Russia accepting a ceasefire in Ukraine, the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said on Monday in Madrid where like Kallas he was attending an EU foreign ministers’ meeting.

• The French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, said in Madrid that Russia owed a clear response to the US on whether it wants to go on a peace path at all. Donald Trump, the US president, has threatened sanctions against the remaining buyers of Russian oil if Vladimir Putin does not agree to a ceasefire soon. Russia has effectively rejected a US proposal for a 30-day general ceasefire; Moscow instead wants a partial ceasefire on the Black Sea but has sought to impose far-reaching conditions.

• The Institute for the Study of War, in an assessment on Monday, said there were “continued Russian efforts to hold the temporary ceasefire in the Black Sea hostage to stall efforts toward a general ceasefire and extract additional concessions from the west”. The thinktank added it was “unlikely that the United States, Ukraine, and Russia could negotiate the terms of a general ceasefire within the next three weeks”.

• British, French and Ukrainian military leaders will meet again in the coming days to build on “real momentum” in efforts to boost Ukraine’s security, said the office of Keir Starmer, the British prime minister. The meeting to “drive forward the next stage of detailed planning” was agreed on a call between Starmer and Zelenskyy. Britain and France are spearheading a “coalition of the willing” plan that includes putting troops in Ukraine as what have been variously described as a peacekeepers, ceasefire monitors or a reassurance force.

• Russian forces shelled a frontline settlement in Ukraine’s south-east Zaporizhzhia region on Monday, killing a 66-year-old woman and injuring five, said the regional governor, Ivan Fedorov. Zaporizhzhia is one of four regions partly occupied by Russian forces. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, came under another Russian drone attack overnight, injuring three people, the Ukrainian interior ministry said on Monday. Russia said its air defences shot down 66 Ukrainian drones early on Monday over three Russian regions.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Monday for Russia to be punished for more than 183,000 alleged war crimes. Zelenskyy, with first lady Olena Zelenska and visiting European officials, paid tribute in Bucha to victims of Russia’s month-long occupation of the town which lies north-west of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. It was invaded in February 2022 by Russian troops who were expelled by Ukrainian defenders the next month.

• Russian troops are accused of atrocities including executions, rapes and torture during the Bucha occupation. The Russian forces committed more than 9,000 crimes in the area around Bucha including 1,800 killings, according to Ukraine’s acting prosecutor general, Oleksiy Khomenko. Khomenko said on Monday that Ukrainian authorities had so far charged 178 individuals and convicted 21. He said Kyiv was continuing to work with the ICC and 25 other countries that were carrying out their own investigations. “Ukraine will not stop on the path of bringing those responsible to justice.”

• Ukraine said it was working on changes to a draft agreement with the US over sweeping access to Ukrainian natural resources, referred to as critical minerals or by Donald Trump as “rare earths”. Trump has warned Kyiv of “big problems” if it rejects the US proposal. “We will try to pass on Ukrainian proposals sometime by the end of this week,” said a Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity. They said talks had been held online with the US side on Friday and that the Ukrainian team would report to Zelenskyy “today or tomorrow … then we will prepare our position and send it to [the US]”.

• The Kyiv source also told the Agence France-Presse news agency that Europe was taking an interest in the agreement, following reports that some of its provisions could contravene Kyiv’s commitments to the EU, which it is seeking to join. “The agreement must take into account our obligations in the context of association with the EU and Ukraine’s movement towards the EU,” the source said.

• Sweden will donate 16 billion kronor (€1.4bn) in fresh military aid to Ukraine, the government said on Monday – the largest such package from the Nordic country since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Most of it would go towards the acquisition of newly produced materials, “mainly from the Swedish, but also the European defence industrial base”, said the Swedish government. It is the 19th batch of military aid that Sweden has provided to Ukraine, with the total estimated at 80 billion kronor, according to the government.

• When it announced a previous aid package in January, Sweden said it was moving from donating weapons from stockpiles to purchasing new arms. Earlier in March it said it would donate 18 of its home-developed Archer mobile artillery systems to Ukraine, of which it had previously donated eight. It has sent 50 of its CV90 armoured combat vehicles and “around 10” Leopard 2 tanks, as well as anti-air missile systems.

• Vladimir Putin has ordered 160,000 servicemen be drafted by 15 July, a higher figure than previous conscription drives. Russian men are liable to be drafted for mandatory military service through bi-annual call-ups. The Kremlin and defence ministry say they are not sent into combat; however, Kyiv has said throughout the conflict that it has taken Russian conscripts captive.

Three of the four US soldiers missing in Lithuania since last week have been found dead, the US army said after rescuers recovered their armoured vehicle from a peat bog. The fourth soldier is still missing.

The Lithuanian authorities received a report on Tuesday that the soldiers went missing on an expansive training ground in the eastern city of Pabradė, near the border with Belarus. The soldiers were on a tactical training exercise when they and their vehicle were reported missing, the US army said.

“We stand in grief with the families and loved ones of these extraordinary ‘dogface soldiers’ during this unimaginable time,” said Maj Gen Christopher Norrie, 3rd infantry division commander. “But the search isn’t finished until everyone is home. Words cannot express our gratitude to those still working around the clock during these extensive search and recovery efforts and your unwavering commitment not to rest until all are found.”

The bodies of the three soldiers were recovered after a massive six-day effort by US, Polish and Lithuanian armed forces and authorities to dig the M88 Hercules armoured recovery vehicle out of a peat bog.

Search and rescue teams worked with heavy equipment and excavators to remove silt from the water before eventually towing the vehicle out early on Monday.

“Three US army soldiers assigned to 1st Armored brigade combat team, 3rd infantry division were found deceased in Lithuania today, 31 March,” US Army Europe and Africa’s public affairs office said in a statement. The soldiers’ identities were being “withheld pending notification of next of kin”, it added.

Hundreds of local and foreign troops and other rescue workers, including engineers and divers, were involved in the rescue operation to recover the armoured vehicle.

Lithuanian armed forces provided military helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, unmanned aerial systems and search-and-rescue personnel. They brought in additional excavators, sluice and slurry pumps, other heavy construction equipment, technical experts and several hundred tonnes of gravel and earth to help the recovery.

US navy divers were able to manoeuvre through thick layers of mud, clay and sediment “with zero visibility” to reach the 63-tonne vehicle on Sunday evening and find two points to attach steel cables, according to the command.

The command said that during the effort to pull the vehicle out, it began to lose traction, so additional heavy bulldozers were brought in and attached to provide additional grip. The vehicle was pulled free after about two hours.

The US navy dive team is searching the area using radar for the missing fourth soldier.

Maj Gen Curtis Taylor, commander of Task Force Iron and the 1st Armored division, thanked the “heroic efforts” of those involved in the search and recovery. The US army and Lithuanian authorities are investigating what caused the incident.

Lithuania, a Nato and EU member, hosts more than 1,000 US troops stationed on a rotational basis.

• Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report