Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Americans have grown used to high drama and rapid-fire headlines, as executive orders from the Oval Office have reshaped the US, from stripping back LGBTQ rights to gutting environmental regulations amid a sense that America is slipping into authoritarianism.

But even against that backdrop, last week stood out, as Trump launched a fierce global trade war, imposed tariffs on its trading partners and triggered a global market meltdown, including on Trump’s own cherished Wall Street, where hundreds of billions of dollars of stock values evaporated.

Now, with all eyes nervously on Monday’s markets amid fears that the calamitous drops will continue, recession fears are mounting in America. JP Morgan analysts last week boosted their odds on a global recession to 60% and Americans are bracing for a return of inflation – the thing that above all else likely doomed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

But Trump remained unmoved by market drops and the global political condemnation – and even rare criticism from his own Republican party – saying now is a “great time to get rich” and that “China played it wrong – they panicked”.

On the streets of New York too, there was panic among some. In Washington Square Park, two sisters from Detroit were sitting on a park bench nearby the magnolia trees now in bloom. Kathleen, a primary school teacher, said she worried about whether there was a plan in place before changes are made.

“I want to be optimistic, but I live under an umbrella of worry with this administration,” Kathleen said. “I worry about the leadership, worry about a lack of continuity within the leadership, and so many changes at once without a plan.”

Her sister, Elizabeth, said she’d grown so anxious she’d stepped back from the news. “Our mum definitely had a huge jump in anxiety over this past week over her investments. She worked hard for those and she lives on them – a retired schoolteacher, and the drop in stocks very much impacts her day-to-day feeling of security.”

But Leo Ezekiel, 39, had a different perspective. As a financier, he wasn’t so worried about the stock markets. “It’s mostly that big corporations are deciding to sell off, and that will affect people, but in the long run, if stocks go down, it gives room for them to move up. It’s part of the game – and it’s always been like that in the United States.”

Trump made his move because he dreams of a return of American manufacturing might, convinced that tariffs will force factories home to the US, even though almost all economists think that is highly unlikely.

Yet, for such a momentous decision which has rattled the entire world economy, Trump reportedly only made up his mind at the last minute. According to the Washington Post, Trump didn’t arrive on an exact plan until just three hours before the Rose Garden announcement.

The “liberation day” announcement from the White House was a choreographed event, and his speech drew cheers from audience, largely made up cabinet members and blue-collar workers from manufacturing sectors that have for decades been economically pummeled by foreign competition. He offered up a vision that tariffs would bring back an older American economy, reopening factories and returning prosperity to ordinary workers.

“Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump complained “But it is not going to happen any more.”

Vice-President JD Vance said: “We’ve seen closing factories, we’ve seen rising inflation. We’ve seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can’t afford to buy a home right now,” Vance said. “President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction.”

America’s largest trading partners, Mexico, Canada, China, Germany, and Japan, were less enthusiastic, to say the least. China has announced retaliatory duties of 34%; the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced a limited set of counter-measures and called the US moves a “tragedy” for 80 years of “free and open exchange of goods and services”, led by the US.

The British PM Keir Starmer said nothing would be “off the table” when it came to the UK’s response to the tariffs – the UK imports $76.2bn in US services – but that “just as with defence and security” the world was “entering a new era” in economy and trade.

It is one where answers to even the most basic questions remain unknown. Will Trump’s tariffs on US trade partners go down as an act of economic self-sabotage? Or are tariffs merely a negotiating ploy to influence other nations – war by other means? Or is Trump finally getting to express his long-held economic view that the US has been making bad deals for decades?

The next few months may provide some clues. But, in an effort to get ahead of the US tariffs coming into effect next week, some effects were already being felt. The cost of flying goods into the US from China are reported to have risen 40% in four weeks. One car factory in Canada has already shuttered.

On Friday, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, warned that Trump risked stoking even higher inflation and slower growth. “It is now becoming clear that the tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected,” he said. “The same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.”

As the financial markets continued to convulse on Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump is unbowed by negative headlines, criticism from foreign leaders, and was determined to listen to a single voice to secure what he views as his political legacy. That voice was of course his own.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told the newspaper. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

But even some former Trump economic officials privately expressed doubts that returning the US to an era of manufacturing self-sufficiency was likely impossible.

The author Michael Wolff, who has published four books about Trump in power, says the US president will now be keenly gauging how his interruption into global trade norms is going down, with updates and live-action replays provided by aides. Trump, Wolff says, is likely caught between two opposing instincts.

“It’s great for him – he’s dominating the news once again. Nobody is talking about anything else except tariffs. Suddenly, tariffs, an arcane piece of trade policy, are the most dramatic thing in the world that he’s imbued with reality-show stuff. He’ll be really pleased with that.”

But on the other hand, Wolff predicts, Trump will be watching the financial markets. “He’ll have the business guys calling up saying: what the fuck are you doing? I’m sure he hasn’t come to any conclusion. So on the one hand it’s great – he’s the world’s leading guy again. On the other, it might collapse in on him.”

And that, he adds, is the essence of Trump. “He’s fundamentally self-destructive, but that self-destructive impulse is exactly what keeps him at the forefront of the news.”

Keir Starmer is preparing to rethink key elements of the government’s economic policy in an emergency response to Donald Trump’s tariff blitz, amid growing concern in Downing Street that the US president’s trade war could do lasting damage to the UK.

The prime minister believes, say allies, that “old assumptions should be discarded” in the UK’s response, suggesting he and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, may be preparing to raise taxes again – despite having promised not to do so – or even possibly change their “iron clad” fiscal rules to allow more borrowing and fire up economic growth at home in the event of recession.

Almost $5tn (£4tn) was wiped off the value of global stock markets after Trump launched his tariff offensive last Wednesday on the rest of the world, including a 10% base tariff on imports into the US from the UK.

On Friday, the FTSE 100 closed more than 7% lower than last Monday, after what was its worst week since the height of panic over the Covid pandemic in March 2020.

Underlining the potential impact on UK businesses of a global trade war, Britain’s luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) said on Saturday that it would “pause” shipments to the US in April as it considered how to respond. “As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans,” said JLR.

This week, Starmer, who has refused to criticise Trump or his tariffs directly, will focus on how to frame an economic response to a global economic shock that protects working people, and their incomes and jobs – as well as the UK’s public services.

He believes that the last few days have ushered in a “new era”, that the “world has changed” and that a global trade war risks “undermining a proud, hard-working nation”.

The kind of language now emanating from Starmer’s circles will be seen by economists – and politicians at Westminster – as preparing the ground for big potential shifts in economic policy on the basis that emergency times may require emergency measures.

Speaking to the Observer, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “To the extent that this does change the economic situation in ways that could not have been predicted, that does give permission to do things that were not politically doable otherwise.”

He added “And if this is an economic crisis, it changes what is the appropriate policy response.”

On Friday, China, the world’s second-largest economy, hit back at Trump by announcing a punitive 34% of additional tariffs on imports into China of US goods, mirroring the levy imposed on Beijing by Washington on Wednesday.

The EU has yet to announce its response, while the UK said it is keeping all options available.

Starmer spoke with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Saturday to “share their concerns about the global economic and security impact”, said a Downing Street spokesperson. “They agreed that a trade war was in nobody’s interests, but nothing should be off the table.”

In an interview with the Observer, former World Trade Organization head Pascal Lamy, who is also an ex-EU trade commissioner in Brussels, said the EU “can use its big trade firepower to threaten the US with strong and well-targeted countermeasures, and hit the US if they do not move back”.

Lamy said there was a danger that European countries could be flooded with cheap goods from nations such as China that could no longer sell them into the US. But he added: “We have both a trade defence arsenal with anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and safeguard systems in case of import surges.”

Referring to Trump’s tactics, Lamy said it was best to respond robustly in a way the US president understood: “I think Mr Trump learned to do business in the New York mafia-influenced real estate market and that his tactics are based on extortion – you hit and keep hitting for as long as you do not get a good price for stopping. Showing your muscle, it seems to me, is the way to transact with him and his people.”

In a sign of growing concern in the US about the direction of the country after Trump’s election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Washington and other big cities on Saturday in a show of defiance against the president’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda”.

The “Hands Off” protests – of which more than 1,000 events are planned across the country – were expected to be the largest single day of action since Trump was sworn into office for a second term.

On Thursday evening, towards the end of a long week at a textiles factory on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Thi Dieu and her husband were watching the news. More than 8,700 miles away, US president Donald Trump was announcing sweeping, unprecedented tariffs on every country around the world. Nowhere was safe, even the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands off the western coast of Australia that, for some unexplained reason, were hit with a 10% tariff.

His announcement launched a fierce global trade war and triggered a global market meltdown, including on Trump’s own cherished Wall Street, where hundreds of billions of dollars of stock values evaporated.

And for Dieu and her husband, it could mean they lose their jobs. They both work for a Taiwanese company making footwear in Vietnam for an American company, that exports them around the world. It is hard to find a better example of modern globalisation – and now, as the US enters a new age of protectionism, a speech in the White House Rose Garden means that Dieu doesn’t know how her family will survive.

“Nothing is clear,” said Dieu on Saturday night, as she browsed a roadside market in one of Ho Chi Minh City’s industrial zones, home to tens of thousands of people who work in the city’s factories. “I feel confused and worried that my job may not be stable.”

Officials in Vietnam are concerned. The US is Vietnam’s biggest market, with exports making up 30% of the country’s GDP and fuelling its economic growth. Hours after the announcement, Vietnam’s prime minister ordered the creation of a “rapid response team” and said the deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, would head to the US for a “working visit”.

Every country around the world has had a similar reaction. In Europe, leaders condemned Trump’s tariffs as “fundamentally wrong” (Olaf Scholz), “brutal and unfounded” (Emmanuel Macron) and “contrary to the interests of millions of people, on both sides of the Atlantic” (Pedro Sánchez).

European media were similarly brutal. “Filled with paranoia, vengeance and coerciveness” was the verdict of Le Monde, while Italy’s Corriere della Sera urged the EU to threaten “counter-tariffs … to bring the US to the table. Clearly, the EU is being put through what amounts to a stress test. It will need to demonstrate unity.”

But while Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief, said Europeans felt “let down by their oldest ally” and warned the tariffs were “a major blow to the world economy” with “dire consequences”, the EU did not immediately respond.

Partly, that is because – in the words of Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia group consultancy – the bloc’s “ultimate aim is to prevent a further escalation, bring the US to the table, and explore paths to mutually rolling back transatlantic trade barriers”.

Brussels still hopes that over the coming weeks, “a combination of counter-duties, threats and offers” will bring results, Rahman said, limiting the damage to an EU-US trade relationship that was worth more than €1.6tn (£1.3tn) in 2023.

There is a lot for Europe to lose if it doesn’t. Trump’s “liberation day” tariff of 20% on almost all EU exports to the US came after 25% levies on steel, aluminium, cars and car parts. In total, about 70% – or €380bn – of EU exports to the US will be affected.

EU officials calculate that would raise about €80bn for the US treasury if trade remained unchanged, which it most probably won’t: economists have estimated that in the medium term, EU exports to the US could fall by 50% because of the tariffs.

But if Brussels hopes a staggered approach to retaliation will encourage the US to negotiate, there is another reason it is not rushing to respond: getting 27 member states, each with national interests to defend, to agree on a single strategy is not easy.

The EU’s response to Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs, which were announced six weeks ago, will probably include levies on emblematic American products such as orange juice, blue jeans, bourbon whiskey and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Due to be unveiled in mid-April, however, its exact details have still not been decided. Still less, the bloc’s retaliatory response to the 25% duties on EU cars and car parts that came into force on 3 April – let alone the latest liberation day tariffs.

Member states are nervous. France, Italy and Ireland, for example, are campaigning hard to have bourbon removed from the list – because Trump has threatened to hit European wines and spirits with a 200% duty if the EU includes it.

Targeting the US whiskey, they argue, would do more economic harm than good: EU countries import barely €500m of bourbon annually, but export €8bn of wine and spirits to the US – and some EU winemakers rely on the US for up to 20% of sales.

“What matters,” said Ignacio García Bercero, a former senior EU trade negotiator, “is that you maximise the political impact [on the US], and limit the economic impact [to the EU]”. It is a delicate balancing act.

The EU does, however, have one strong hand to play in services. Trump is obsessed with the $236bn US trade deficit with the EU in goods, but less well known is that the US runs a trade surplus in services with the EU of €109bn.

If necessary, limiting US companies’ access to EU public procurement tenders or to European markets ranging from banking and other financial services to big tech could prove a powerful riposte. For the time being, though, it has not come to that.

“We are buying the space we need to negotiate, and looking at targeting our response in the most effective way possible,” an EU official said: not just “how we impact the US”, but also “saving our member states and our industry the pain wherever possible”.

As Europe reeled from the shock of the tariffs, the unspoken message from Beijing was: welcome to our world. “There are no winners in trade wars, and there is no way out for protectionism,” the commerce ministry said on Thursday.

For Xi Jinping’s government, there was no Brussels-style hesitancy – they immediately hit back. On Friday, China announced that it would be imposing retaliatory tariffs of 34% on US imports, starting on 10 April. China also added US entities to its export control list, restricting their ability to do business in China.

Chinese companies have been figuring out how to circumnavigate Trump’s tariffs since 2018, when Trump’s first US-China trade war started. Companies have been moving their supply chains to south-east Asia, while the government has been signing trade deals with global south countries with increasing gusto.

Even with countries without a free trade agreement, such as Brazil, Chinese bilateral trade has soared in the past seven years. In 2023, China-Brazil trade reached a record $157.5bn.

Economists noted that the US tariffs on Chinese goods did not change the fact that the US is a net importer of products that China produces, such as fast fashion, electronics and clean energy equipment. “If the US shifts around its importing pattern without changing its net imports, it’s not going to make much of a difference to the world,” said Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University. “You’ll see trade shift around, but the basic imbalances will remain there.”

Trump and his team have tried to tackle this problem by imposing tariffs on the countries that have been used by Chinese companies to reroute their supply chains, such as Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. Those countries are being hit with even higher tariffs than China, at 46%, 36% and 49%, respectively.

Whether or not the tariffs have the desired effect from the US perspective, there is one clear strategic victory – for China. China, once again, can present itself as the stable global partner for third countries, in contrast to the capricious US.

Back in Washington, Trump was claiming on social media that “China played it wrong – they panicked”, insisting that despite the market drops, global political condemnation and even rare criticism from his own Republican party, his tariffs had made it a “great time to get rich”.

But with all eyes nervously on Monday’s markets amid worries that the calamitous drops will continue, recession fears are mounting in America. JP Morgan analysts last week boosted their odds on a global recession to 60% and Americans are bracing for a return of inflation – the thing that above all else probably doomed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

On the streets of New York too, there was panic among some. In Washington Square Park, two sisters from Detroit were sitting on a park bench nearby the magnolia trees now in bloom. Kathleen, a primary school teacher, said she worried about whether there was a plan in place before changes are made.

“I want to be optimistic, but I live under an umbrella of worry with this administration,” Kathleen said. “I worry about the leadership, worry about a lack of continuity within the leadership, and so many changes at once without a plan.”

Her sister, Elizabeth, said she’d grown so anxious she’d stepped back from the news. “Our mum definitely had a huge jump in anxiety during this past week over her investments. She worked hard for those and she lives on them … a retired schoolteacher, and the drop in stocks very much affects her day-to-day feeling of security.”

Trump made his move because he dreams of a return of American manufacturing might, convinced that tariffs will force factories home to the US, even though almost all economists think that is highly unlikely.

Yet, for such a momentous decision which has rattled the entire world economy, Trump reportedly only made up his mind at the last minute. According to the Washington Post, Trump didn’t arrive on an exact plan until just three hours before the Rose Garden performance.

The “liberation day” announcement from the White House was a choreographed event, and his speech drew cheers from the audience, largely made up cabinet members and blue-collar workers from manufacturing sectors that have for decades been economically pummelled by foreign competition. He offered up a vision that tariffs would bring back an older American economy, reopening factories and returning prosperity to ordinary workers.

“Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump complained “But it is not going to happen any more.”

Vice-president JD Vance said: “We’ve seen closing factories, we’ve seen rising inflation. We’ve seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can’t afford to buy a home right now. President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction.”

Most observers would probably agree that the US economy was heading in a “different direction”, but would not be quite as enthusiastic as the vice-president.

On Friday, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, warned that Trump risked stoking even higher inflation and slower growth. “It is now becoming clear that the tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected,” he said. “The same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.”

As the financial markets continued to convulse on Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump was unbowed by negative headlines, criticism from foreign leaders, and was determined to listen to a single voice to secure what he views as his political legacy. That voice was his own.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told the newspaper. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

But even some former Trump economic officials privately expressed doubts that returning the US to an era of manufacturing self-sufficiency was probably impossible.

The author Michael Wolff, who has published four books about Trump in power, says the US president will now be keenly gauging how his interruption to global trade norms is going down, with updates and live-action replays provided by aides. Trump, Wolff says, is probably caught between two opposing instincts.

“It’s great for him – he’s dominating the news once again. Nobody is talking about anything else except tariffs. Suddenly, tariffs, an arcane piece of trade policy, are the most dramatic thing in the world that he’s imbued with reality-show stuff. He’ll be really pleased with that.”

But on the other hand, Wolff predicts, Trump will be watching the financial markets. “He’ll have the business guys calling up saying: what the fuck are you doing? I’m sure he hasn’t come to any conclusion. So on the one hand it’s great – he’s the world’s leading guy again. On the other, it might collapse in on him.”

And that, he adds, is the essence of Trump. “He’s fundamentally self-destructive, but that self-destructive impulse is exactly what keeps him at the forefront of the news.”

Back in Vietnam, Trump’s image as a successful businessman chimed with many in the country, where entrepreneurship is prized. Several of his books have been translated into Vietnamese, including The Art of the Deal. During his first term, many Vietnamese also welcomed his tough stance on China, and polling suggests Vietnam was one of the few countries where most of the population was confident in his leadership.

“I view him all the time on TV,” said Dieu, who adds that she also likes him. Will her mind change after his tariff announcement? There’s a pause. “It’s hard to say.”

Additional reporting by Nguyen Thanh Hue in Ho Chi Minh City

Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz included a journalist in the Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen after he mistakenly saved his number months before under the contact of someone else he intended to add, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The mistake was one of several missteps that came to light in the White House’s internal investigation, which showed a series of compounding slips that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month.

Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system like Signal.

But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term. Trump was also mollified by the findings of the internal investigation.

The disclosures nonetheless triggered a “forensic review” by the White House information technology office, which found that Waltz’s phone had saved Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then-Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.

According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.

The White House did not comment on this story, and the investigation did not resolve the extent of Waltz’s relationship with Goldberg, if any. Reached by phone on Saturday, Goldberg said: “I’m not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz beyond saying I do know him and have spoken to him.”

Trump was briefed on the findings of the forensic review last week around the time he decided to keep Waltz, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump accepted Waltz’s mea culpa and has publicly defended him in recent weeks since the group chat situation became public.

When Trump left the White House on Thursday, he was joined aboard Marine One by his chief of staff Susie Wiles, his personnel chief Sergio Gor and Waltz, which aides took as a show of support for the embattled national security adviser.

Waltz also appears to have also engendered some sympathy from inside Trump’s orbit over the group chat because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.

Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.

The Israeli military has backtracked on its account of the killing of 15 Palestinian medics by its forces last month after phone video contradicted its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on when troops opened fire on them in the Gaza Strip.

The military said initially it opened fire because the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” on nearby troops without headlights or emergency signals. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations late on Saturday, said that account was “mistaken”.

The almost seven-minute video, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Saturday was recovered from the phone of Rifat Radwan, one of the men killed, appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle. It shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.

The vehicle stops beside another that has driven off the road. Two men get out to examine the stopped vehicle, then gunfire erupts before the screen goes black.

Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one UN employee, were killed in the incident in Rafah on 23 March, in which the UN says Israeli forces shot the men “one by one” and then buried them in a mass grave.

The IDF said the incident was still under investigation and that “all claims, including the documentation circulated about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation”.

The official said the initial report received from the field did not describe lights but that investigators were looking at “operational information” and were trying to understand if this was due to an error by the person making the initial report.

“What we understand currently is the person who gives the initial account is mistaken. We’re trying to understand why.”

According to the UN humanitarian affairs office (Ocha), the 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’s Tel al-Sultan district. A Red Crescent official in Gaza said 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 one day into the renewed Israeli offensive in the area close to the Egyptian border after the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Another Red Crescent worker on the mission, Assad al-Nassasra, is still reported missing and the organisation has asked the Israeli military for information on his whereabouts.

A survivor of the incident, the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic Munther Abed, has said he saw al-Nassasra being led away blindfolded by Israeli troops.

The 27-year-old volunteer who was detained for several hours before being released, was in the back of the first ambulance to arrive on the scene of an airstrike in the Hashashin district of Rafah before dawn on 23 March when it came under intense Israeli fire.

His two Red Crescent colleagues sitting in the front were killed but he survived by throwing himself to the floor of the vehicle. “The door opened, and there they were – Israeli special forces in military uniforms, armed with rifles, green lasers and night-vision goggles,” Abed told the Guardian. “They dragged me out of the ambulance, keeping me face down to avoid seeing what had happened to my colleagues.”

The UN and Palestinian Red Crescent have demanded an independent inquiry into the killing of the paramedics.

Israeli media briefed by the military have reported that troops had identified at least six of the 15 dead as members of militant groups and killed a Hamas figure named Mohammed Amin Shobaki.

None of the 15 killed medics has that name and no other bodies are known to have been found at the site. The official declined to provide any evidence or detail of how the identifications were made, saying he did not want to share classified information.

“According to our information, there were terrorists there but this investigation is not over,” he told reporters.

Abed – a volunteer for 10 years – was adamant there were no militants travelling with the ambulances.

Jonathan Whittall, the interim head in Gaza of the UN humanitarian office OCHA, dismissed allegations that the medics who died were Hamas militants, saying staff had worked with the same medics previously in evacuating patients from hospitals and other tasks.

“These are paramedic crews that I personally have met before,” he said. “They were buried in their uniforms with their gloves on. They were ready to save lives.”

The official said the troops had informed the UN of the incident on the same day and initially covered the bodies with camouflage netting until they could be recovered, later burying them when the UN did not immediately collect the bodies.

The UN confirmed last week that it had been informed of the location of the bodies but that access to the area was denied by Israel for several days. It said the bodies had been buried alongside their crushed vehicles – clearly marked ambulances, a fire truck and a UN car.

Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a last-minute visit to Washington to meet with Donald Trump, where the Israeli leader is expected to discuss Iran, the war in Gaza, and tariffs with the US president.

The Washington visit, Netanyahu’s second since Trump was inaugurated in January, comes after the resumption of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, and underlines the strong relationship between the two men.

Trump has pressed Tehran for a new deal on its nuclear programme, although little progress has been made. There is widespread speculation that Israel, possibly with US help, might launch a military strike on Iranian facilities if no agreement is reached.

Al Hadath, a Saudi television channel, reported on Saturday that the US transferred a second THAAD battery and two Patriot batteries to Israel amid rising tensions. Flight tracking websites showed that a C-5M Super Galaxy, a large US air force transport plane, landed at an airbase in southern Israel on Saturday for about eight hours, the Times of Israel reported.

The Biden administration sent one THAAD battery, an advanced anti-missile system, to Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack in October 2023. It has been used since to intercept missile attacks from Iran and the Tehran-allied Houthi group in Yemen.

The US president said on Thursday that he expected a visit soon from Netanyahu – “maybe even next week” – though the Axios website said the timing caught Israeli officials and even some in the Trump administration by surprise.

Monday’s meeting will make Netanyahu the first foreign leader to travel to Washington in an attempt to negotiate a better deal with Trump after his administration’s decision last week to impose sweeping global tariffs that have shaken stock markets, wiping out $5tn (£3.87tn) in value from S&P 500 index companies by Friday’s close in a record two-day decline.

Israel had attempted to duck the shock 17% tariff on Israeli imports by moving preemptively on Tuesday – a day before the tariffs were announced – to drop all remaining duties on the 1% of American goods still affected by them. But Trump moved ahead with the tariffs, saying the US had a significant trade deficit with its Middle East ally and leading beneficiary of military aid.

The US is Israel’s closest ally and largest single trading partner. The two countries signed a free trade agreement 40 years ago and about 98% of goods from the US are tax-free.

An Israeli finance ministry official said on Thursday that Trump’s latest tariff announcement could affect Israel’s exports of machinery and medical equipment.

Netanyahu will travel to the US on Sunday from Hungary, after a four-day official visit in which the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, had made clear he would defy the ICC arrest warrant for the Israeli leader. During the trip, Orbán announced that Hungary would withdraw from the court, which he said had become too “political”.

Other thorny issues in the meeting on Monday include Israel-Turkey relations and “the fight against the international criminal court”, which has accused the Israeli leader of war crimes, Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Saturday night.

Trump and Netanyahu had spoken by phone on Thursday about Hungary’s decision to withdraw from the ICC, of which the US is not a member. The possibility of the Washington visit apparently arose at that time.

Agencies contributed to this report

Emergency services are continuing to battle a wildfire that started in Galloway, south of Scotland, and has spread north into East Ayrshire, forcing the evacuation of walkers and wild campers.

The blaze started in the Newton Stewart area on Friday, then spread northwards over the weekend after a change in wind direction to reach Loch Doon. Residents living nearby were advised to keep windows and doors closed and police told people to avoid the area.

Stewart Gibson, the team leader at Galloway Mountain Rescue, told BBC Scotland fire crews had employed four helicopters to drop water on the flames from above, with the fire front several miles wide at one stage.

Rising temperatures across the UK earlier this week led to wildfire warnings being put in place, with the Scottish fire and rescue service saying there was a “very high to extreme risk” of fires spreading because of warm, dry conditions.

The service has warned the public to avoid outdoor fires and barbecues, and to dispose of cigarettes and glass safely.

Further north in the Highlands, crews were tackling another wildfire north of Ullapool on Sunday with roads closed and heavy smoke hampering visibility.

Six crews were in attendance, with personnel travelling almost 70 miles to offer assistance and firefighters at the scene reporting a firewall stretching more than 3 miles and large plumes of smoke descending over the area.

Earlier on Sunday morning, a significant wildfire that broke out on Saturday and triggered a major incident in Northern Ireland was extinguished. One man was arrested by police.

More than 100 firefighters and 15 fire appliances were deployed on Saturday to Sandbank Road, Hilltown, to tackle the blaze, which was believed to have been caused deliberately, fire chiefs said.

Northern Ireland fire and rescue service said the fire had a front of approximately 2 miles “including a large area of forestry close to property”.

Demonstrators estimated to be in the tens of thousands gathered in Washington on Saturday in a display of mass dissent against Donald Trump’s policies that organizers hoped would snowball into a rolling cycle of protests that could eventually stymie the US president in next year’s congressional elections.

Anger with Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, the SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk, was expressed in a sea of placards and banners on the Washington mall, in the shadow of the Washington monument. Multiple messages denounced the two men for shuttering government agencies, cutting jobs and services and – in often graphic terms – for threatening the survival of US democracy.

“Resist like it’s 1938 Nazi Germany” and “Fascism is alive and well and living in the White House”, read two slogans at the Hands Off gathering, organized by the civil society group Indivisible and featuring speeches from a host of other organizations as well as Democratic members of Congress.

The rally, which coincided with roughly 1,000 other similarly themed events across the country, was punctuated by a fusillade of barbs aimed at Trump as well as Musk, whose infiltration into government agencies through the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, without congressional approval, and cash-fueled interventions in election races have been seen as anti-democratic affronts.

“They believe democracy is doomed and they believe regime change is upon us if only they can seize our payments system,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland who is the party’s top figure on the House judiciary committee.

He added: “If they think they are going to overthrow the foundations of democracy, they don’t know who they are dealing with.”

Saturday’s events followed weeks of anxiety among anti-Trump forces that the president had railroaded through his agenda in the absence of adequate resistance from congressional Democrats and minus the displays of popular mass opposition that appeared early in his first presidency.

But they also came days after the Democrats drew encouragement from victory in a race for a vacant supreme court seat in Wisconsin into which Musk had unsuccessfully ploughed $25m of his own money to support the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate.

It also followed the roll-out of Trump’s flagship policy of import tariffs, which triggered massive plunges in international stock markets and fueled fears of an economic downturn.

Multiple speakers and attendees said they hoped the rallies would embolden other American disillusioned by Trump’s policies to join future rallies, giving a fledgling protest movement much-needed momentum.

“We want to send a signal to all people and institutions that have been showing anticipatory obedience to Trump and showing they are willing to bend the knee that there is, in fact, a mass public movement that’s willing to rise up and stop this,” said Leah Greenberg, Indivisible’s executive director.

“If our political leaders stand up, we will have their backs. We want them to stand up and protect the norms of democracy and want them to see that there are people out there who are willing to do that. The goal of this is building a message.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights advocacy group, told the crowd: “There’s only one thing that can face down the authoritarian moment we are facing, and that’s the movement we see here today.”

Asked by the Guardian whether the mass demonstrations were sufficient to stop Trump, he said: “It’s not a one-time thing. It’s got to be a sustaining phenomenon. There’s been a lot of criticism of the Democrats for not standing up in Congress, so an event like this will stiffen their spine.

“It’s about making the Democrats better and giving them courage – and it will. That’s also true for ordinary people, because Trump’s authoritarian playbook is designed to make people think it’s useless to resist. This demonstrates power and it will bring in more people.”

Several congressional Democrats predicted the rally would inspire more protests, ultimately fueling an electoral triumph in next year’s congressional midterms, when control of the House of Representatives and the Senate will be up for grabs.

“This is what freedom fighting against fascism looks like,” said Eric Swalwell, a representative for California. “This is not the last day of the fight, it’s the first day. When it all comes to [be] written about, you will see that April 5 is when it all came alive. Energy and activism beget energy and activism.”

Several members acknowledged that protests were rarely enough to supplant authoritarian governments, as demonstrated in countries like Turkey and Hungary, whose strongman leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Viktor Orbán respectively, have survived in office despite repeated episodes of street protests.

“We invited some historians in to discuss that question,” said Raskin. “They said, in some countries there was just a legislative parliamentary strategy, and that only succeeded about one-third of the time.

“In other countries, there was just a popular-resistance strategy, and that succeeded a little bit more than a third of the time. But when you have a popular-resistance strategy and an effective legislative strategy, it wins more than two-thirds of the time. It’s not a guarantee, but you need to have national mass popular action at the same time that you’ve got an effective legislative strategy, too.”

Representative Don Beyer, whose northern Virginia district – home to 75,000 federal workers – has been disproportionately affected by Musk’s assault on government agencies, compared the effect of Trump’s actions to the upheaval wrought by Mao Zedong in the Chinese cultural revolution.

But, he said, Trump would be derailed by next year’s election, which he said he was “somewhat confident” would be ‘“free and fair”.

“They’re not perfect [but] the people do have a chance to speak,” Beyer said. “Elections are very much decentralized and organized precinct by precinct. There are lots of chances to push back. We just saw that in Wisconsin.”

The US is revoking the visas of all South Sudanese passport-holders and will stop any more of its citizens entering the country.

The Department of State said South Sudan was “taking advantage of the United States” by failing to comply with US efforts to return people to the east African country, adding that the measures would come into effect immediately.

“Every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner when another country, including the United States, seeks to remove them,” it said.

Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, said the dispute related to one alleged South Sudanese national and claimed efforts to engage diplomatically with the South Sudanese government had been rebuffed.

“All visa appointments are cancelled, no new visas will be issued, no existing visas will be effective, and hence NO ONE from South Sudan will be entering the United States on a visa until this matter is resolved,” he said in a social media post.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said Washington would “be prepared to “review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation”.

Donald Trump, who campaigned during the US election on an anti-immigration platform, has pursued various methods to remove foreign nationals from the US since returning to the White House, but the move against US-based South Sudanese is the first time he has targeted a group by citizenship with such a blanket measure.

South Sudan nationals in the US were granted “temporary protected status” by the Obama administration in 2011 on the grounds that the country was unsafe because of fighting that started after it declared independence from Sudan. A TPS designation means individuals cannot be removed from the US and are granted the right to work and the ability to travel.

The designation was extended by the Biden administration last September but is set to expire next month. The Department of Homeland Security said 133 people from South Sudan were on the TPS programme last year.

Trump has been pushing to end TPS designations for a handful of countries including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, potentially affecting half a million people. A judge last month paused plans to end the legal protections for Venezuelans.

What was a simmering conflict in South Sudan has threatened to intensify, with forces loyal to President Salva Kiir facing off with backers of his rival, vice-president Riek Machar.

Conflict between Kiir and Machar, who come from the country’s largest ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer, cost 400,000 lives during a five-year civil war which begun in 2013. Uganda and Sudan mediated a ceasefire in 2018 with cabinet and state positions distributed between their factions.

“South Sudan has been in a state of civil conflict since its creation and the only difference is whether the conflict has been open or smouldering beneath the surface,” said Mukesh Kapila, an academic who was the UN head in Sudan in 2004. He added that the underlying issues between the two leaders were never properly resolved.

The agreement faced a major stress test when the civil war in Sudan halted South Sudan’s oil exports, which account for about 70% of its budget. More than 600,000 people from Sudan have also sought refuge in South Sudan further straining the country’s limited resources.

The country’s financial challenges, which meant many in the public sector were not paid for close to a year, have been compounded by renewed hostilities between the supporters of Kiir and Machar.

Machar was placed under house arrest last month along with his wife, Angelina Teny, who is the interior minister. Officials from his party said this effectively ended the 2018 peace agreement. In the weeks leading up to Machar’s arrest several of his associates were removed from office.

Kapila warned it was a dangerous situation but “with the other problems in the world, I’m not sure anyone is currently bothered to stop the momentum toward conflict”.

A Briton held captive by the Taliban for more than nine weeks has said he is living in dire conditions in a prison in Kabul, describing it as “the nearest thing to hell I can imagine”.

In a recording of a phone call from Pul-e-Charkhi prison, Peter Reynolds, 79, also spoke of his fears for the safety of his wife, Barbie, who is being held in the women’s section of the the maximum-security jail.

“I’ve been joined up with rapists and murderers by handcuffs and ankle cuffs, including a man who killed his wife and three children, shouting away, a demon-possessed man,” Reynolds said in recordings shared with the Sunday Times.

Reynolds said he was living in “a cage rather than a cell”, but described his circumstances as “VIP conditions” compared with where his wifewas being held. He said he had lost weight and received only one meal a day.

The couple have been running projects in schools in Afghanistan for 18 years and decided to stay in the country after the Taliban seized power in 2021. The Reynolds were detained at the start of February when they travelled to their home in Bamiyan province in a small plane rented by their Chinese-American friend, Faye Hall.

Hall was also detained, but she was released last weekend after the Trump administration lifted bounties worth $10m (£7.8m) from the heads of senior Taliban figures including Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister.

Peter Reynolds said that when he was detained, he was initially told the plane lacked proper landing permission and they would be released. Instead, their phones were confiscated and they were transferred to the interior ministry in Kabul, where the couple were separated then locked up in Pul-e-Charki prison.

Reynolds said he was told by the Taliban that they had confiscated 59 books from their home that were “against Islam”. He was asked why they had them. “I asked: ‘Can you tell me any part of those books which is against Islam?’” he said. “No one has been able to, so I think it’s an outrage.

“They have interrogated more than 30 people who worked with us in Yakawlang and Kabul, including our accountant and tax people, and we had to put our thumbprint on a nine-page-long CID [criminal investigation department] report and they said they could find no crime. That was three weeks ago but still they haven’t released us.

“These things are an utter disgrace and shame. The Taliban have made a mistake and need to face up to it.”

Pope Francis has made a surprise appearance in St Peter’s Square during a special jubilee mass for the sick and health workers, marking his first public appearance at the Vatican since his discharge from hospital two weeks ago.

The pontiff waved at the crowd that stood and applauded as he was appeared unannounced, assisted in a wheelchair to the front of the altar in the square.

“Good Sunday to everyone,’’ Francis said, speaking into a microphone, which he tapped to make sure it was working on a second attempt. “Thank you very much.”

The pontiff’s voice sounded stronger than when he addressed wellwishers outside Gemelli hospital on the day of his release on 23 March, after being diagnosed with life-threatening pneumonia during a five-week hospital stay. He has just completed two weeks of at least two months of doctor-ordered rest as he continues physical, respiratory and speech therapy, as well as treatment for a lingering lung infection.

The pope referred to his experience with illness in both the traditional Sunday blessing and the homily read by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organiser of the Holy Year, which is expected to attract 30 million pilgrims to Rome.

Addressing the sick among the crowd, the pope said in the homily read by Fisichella: “In this moment of my life I share a lot: the experience of infirmity, feeling weak, depending on the others for many things, needing support.

“It is not easy, but it is a school in which we learn every day to love and to let ourselves be loved, without demanding and without rejecting, without regretting, without despairing, grateful to God and to our brothers for the good that we receive, trusting for what is still to come.”

He also urged the faithful not to push the fragile from their lives “as unfortunately a certain mentality” did today. “Let’s not ostracise pain from our surroundings. Let’s instead make it an opportunity to grow together, to cultivate hope,” he added.

In the traditional Sunday blessing, pope offered prayers for doctors, nurses and health care workers who were “not always helped to work in inadequate conditions, at times the victims of aggression. Their mission is not easy and must be supported and respected.”

The British artist called “truly the worst” by the US president, Donald Trump, after he derided a portrait she created of him, has said the criticism called her “integrity into question” and is threatening her career.

Sarah A Boardman painted Trump’s official portrait for the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, where it hung for six years from 2019.

In March, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform that the portrait had been “purposefully distorted”. Trump said Boardman’s portrait of the former US president Barack Obama was “wonderful”, but “the one on me is truly the worst”.

In her first comment since the incident, Boardman said Trump’s comments meant that her “intentions, integrity and abilities were, in my opinion, called into question”.

Boardman rebuked the president’s claims in a statement, saying she had “completed the portrait accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion’, political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied”.

The artist said that while she acknowledged Trump’s right to comment, the “additional allegations that I ‘purposefully distorted’ the portrait, and that I ‘must have lost my talent as I got older’ are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years, which now is in danger of not recovering”.

Discussing her work with the Colorado Times Recorder in 2019, she acknowledged that there would “always be anger at a president from one side or the other. It is human nature.”

In response to Trump’s criticism, officials said the portrait would be removed, and it has been since. Boardman says that for the first six years after she painted the portrait, she “received overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback”, but that since Trump’s comments “that has changed for the worse”.

Boardman was born in Britain, and her website says she spent years travelling around Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Middle East, Europe and the US while “conducting a successful career in airline travel and business”.

In 1985, she began studying techniques of the old masters in Germany and built a successful career as an artist, eventually winning a nationwide “call for artists” by Colorado’s state capital of Denver, to paint the official portraits of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Trump guards his image closely. In January 2025, before his inauguration, he released a portrait that was variously described by critics as serious or ominous, and seemed to reference his 2023 mugshot.

That image was taken after he was charged with attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden in the state of Georgia – a charge Trump denied.

After Trump’s criticism of Boardman, his envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed the White House had been sent a new work from Moscow, which was a gift from Vladimir Putin. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described it as a “personal gift”.

Witkoff described the picture as a “beautiful portrait” by a “leading Russian artist”.