Activists say Israeli troops have boarded a yacht trying to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade.

“Connection has been lost” on the Madleen, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) campaign group said on the Telegram app.

It posted a photo showing people in life jackets sitting with their hands up.

Appearing to confirm that the ship had been boarded, Israel’s foreign ministry said the yacht was “safely making its way to the shores of Israel” and its passengers were “expected to return to their home countries”.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg is among those aboard the vessel, which was reported to be off the Egyptain coast.

Israel says its blockade is necessary to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas militants in Gaza.

After reporting that the yacht had been boarded, the FFC posted short, pre-recorded videos of some of the activists, including Thunberg.

In the footage, activists say “if you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped” by the Israeli military or forces supporting Israel.

The FFC earlier said the vessel, which left Italy’s island of Sicily on Friday, was carrying humanitarian aid and had been “prepared for the possibility of an Israeli attack”.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had warned that the yacht should turn back and that Israel would act against any attempt to breach the blockade.

He wrote in a post on X on Sunday: “I have instructed the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to act to prevent the ‘Madeleine’ [sic] hate flotilla from reaching the shores of Gaza – and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end.”

Katz says the purpose of Israel’s blockade, which has been in place since 2007, is to “prevent the transfer of weapons to Hamas” and is essential to Israel’s security as it seeks to destroy Hamas.

The FFC has argued that the sea blockade is illegal, characterising Katz’s statement as an example of Israel threatening the unlawful use of force against civilians and “attempting to justify that violence with smears”.

“We will not be intimidated. The world is watching,” FFC press officer Hay Sha Wiya said.

“The Madleen is a civilian vessel, unarmed and sailing in international waters, carrying humanitarian aid and human rights defenders from across the globe… Israel has no right to obstruct our effort to reach Gaza.”

The Madleen is carrying a symbolic quantity of aid, including rice and baby formula, the group said.

Citizens of Brazil, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey are onboard.

In 2010, Israeli commandos killed 10 people when they boarded Turkish ship Mavi Marmara that was leading an aid flotilla towards Gaza.

Israel recently began to allow limited aid into Gaza after a three-month land blockade, prioritising distribution through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel and the US but widely condemned by humanitarian groups.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, said last week Palestinians were being presented with the “grimmest of choices: die from starvation or risk being killed while trying to access the meagre food that is being made available”.

But in a post on X early on Monday, the Israeli foreign ministry said: “While Greta and others attempted to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity – and which included less than a single truckload of aid – more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza from Israel within the past two weeks, and in addition, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has distributed close to 11 million meals directly to civilians in Gaza.

“There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip – they do not involve Instagram selfies.”

It is almost 20 months since Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented Hamas-led cross-border attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,880 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.

If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.

That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.

At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.

The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza.

Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.

It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.

Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.

I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.

In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.

As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.

Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined a request for an interview.

Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party, repeated his leader’s positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder.

Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.

It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away.

It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.

He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel’s security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.

Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead.

Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached.

The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.

According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services.

When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates.

A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.

Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive “total victory” over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023.

Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.

A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.

Weaponising food is a war crime.

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.

After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”.

• Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC

We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe’s most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif.

But for Ms Spoljaric, constantly aware of the ICRC’s role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice since 7 October and says that it is worse than hell on earth.

“Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Ms Spoljaric told me. “It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”

More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity.

“It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.”

I asked her about Israel’s justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October.

“It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions,” she said. “Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention.

“A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”

Mirjana Spoljaric spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides.

She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.

On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel’s troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world.

Speaking from Israel’s military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism.

The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. “We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.

“All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.”

Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their “unreserved support”. He had spoken to them, he said, “to ensure freedom of action”.

But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected.

“You’re never entitled to break the law,” says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School.

“How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either.

“So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn’t give you additional licence to use additional violence.

“The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war.”

What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada.

Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

“I’m shaken to my core,” Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. “I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare.

“It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened.”

But now the UK, France and Canada want an immediate halt to Israel’s latest offensive.

On 19 May, prime ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, and President Emmanuel Macron, stated, “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.”

Sanctions may be coming. The UK and France are actively discussing the circumstances in which they would be prepared to recognise Palestine as an independent state.

Netanyahu quoted from a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, in his TV speech to the Israeli people on 7 October as they wrestled with fear, anger and trauma.

He chose the line: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan.”

It comes from In the City of Slaughter, which is widely regarded as the most significant Hebrew poem of the 20th Century. Bialik wrote it as a young man in 1903, after he had visited the scene of a pogrom against Jews in Kishinev, a town then in imperial Russia and now called Chişinǎu, the capital of present-day Moldova. Over three days, Christian mobs murdered 49 Jews and raped at least 600 Jewish women.

Antisemitic brutality and killing in Europe was a major reason why Zionist Jews wanted to settle in Palestine to build their own state, in what they regarded as their historic homeland. Their ambition clashed with the desire of Palestinian Arabs to keep their land. Britain, the colonial power, did much to make their conflict worse.

By 1929 Vincent Sheean, an American journalist, was describing Jerusalem in a way that is grimly familiar to reporters there almost a century later. “The situation here is awful,” he wrote. “Every day I expect the worst.”

He added that violence was in the air, “The temperature rose – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.”

Sheean’s account of the 1920s illustrates the conflict’s deep root system in the land that Israelis and Palestinians both want and have not found a way, or a will, to share or separate.

Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent, which they call the Catastrophe. But Netanyahu, and many other Israelis and their supporters abroad connected the October attacks to the centuries of persecution Jews suffered in Europe, which culminated with Nazi Germany killing six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Netanyahu used the same references to hit back when Macron said in May that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was “shameful” and “unacceptable”.

Netanyahu said that Macron had “once again chosen to side with a murderous Islamist terrorist organisation and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels”.

The blood libel is a notorious antisemitic trope that goes back to medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of killing Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals.

After a couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC were shot dead, the gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” Netanyahu connected the murders with the criticisms of Israel’s conduct made by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada.

In a video posted on X, he declared: “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history.

“For 18 years, we had a de facto Palestinian state. It’s called Gaza. And what did we get? Peace? No. We got the most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu has also referred to the long history of antisemitism in Europe when warrants calling for his arrest, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who was defence minister for the first 13 months of the war, were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The court had also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind 7 October. All three have since been killed by Israel.

A panel of ICC judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility. “As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In a defiant statement, Netanyahu rejected “false and absurd charges”. He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island for treason in 1894. Dreyfus, who was innocent, was eventually pardoned but the affair caused a major political crisis.

“The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial – and will end the same way,” the statement said.

“No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organisation launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism.

“We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.”

But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.

“You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.”

Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”.

The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, believes Israel should have learned from its own history.

“The terrible Jewish experience of persecution and mass killing in the past should give Israel a horror of inflicting the same things on other peoples.”

History is inescapable in the Middle East, always present, a storehouse of justification to be plundered.

Israel could not wage war in Gaza using its chosen tactics without American military, financial and diplomatic support. President Donald Trump has shown signs of impatience, forcing Netanyahu to allow a few cracks in the siege that has brought Gaza to the edge of famine.

Netanyahu himself continues to express support for Trump’s widely condemned proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Mediterranean”, by emptying it of Palestinians and turning it over to the Americans for redevelopment. That is code for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, which would be a war crime. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist allies want to replace them with Jewish settlers.

Trump himself seems silent about the plan. But the Trump administration’s support for Israel, and its actions in Gaza, looks undiminished.

On 4 June, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire, the release of all the hostages and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. The other 14 members voted in favour. The next day the Americans sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was protecting the sovereignty of the US and Israel against “illegitimate actions”.

“I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel.”

Instead the ICC has had statements of support and solidarity from European leaders. A broad and increasingly bitter gap has opened up between the US and Europe over the Gaza war, and over the legitimacy of criticising Israel’s conduct.

Israel and the Trump administration reject the idea that the laws of war apply equally to all sides, because they claim it implies a false and wrong equivalence between Hamas and Israel.

Jan Egeland can see the split between Europe and the US growing.

“I hope now that Europe will grow a spine,” he says. “There have been new tones, finally, coming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, from Brussels, after all these months of industrial-scale hypocrisy where they didn’t see that there was a world record in killed aid workers, in killed nurses, in killed doctors, in killed teachers, in killed children, and all while journalists like yourself have been denied access, denied to be witnessing this.

“It’s something that the West will learn to regret really — that they were so spineless.”

The question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza outrages Israel and its supporters, led by the United States. Lawyers who believe the evidence does not support the accusation have stood up to oppose the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide against Palestinians.

But it will not go away.

The Netanyahu loyalist Boaz Bismuth answered the genocide question like this.

“How can you accuse us of genocide when the Palestinian population grew, I don’t know how many times more? How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them? How can you accuse me when I lose soldiers in order to protect my enemies?”

It is hard to prove genocide has happened; the legal bar prosecutors have to clear has been set deliberately high. But leading lawyers who have spent decades assessing matters of legal fact to see if there is a case to answer believe it is not necessary to wait for the process started in January last year by South Africa to make a years-long progress through the ICJ.

We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion.

“Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part.

“Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

South Africa based much of its genocide case against Israel on inflammatory language used by Israeli leaders. One example was the biblical reference Netanyahu used when Israel sent troops into Gaza, comparing Hamas to Amalek. In the Bible God commands the Israelites to destroy their persecutors, the Amalekites.

Another was Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration just after the Hamas attacks when he ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of international law, also believes there is proof of genocide. “Unfortunately, yes, and there is now no doubt legally as to that, and indeed that has been the case for some time.”

He points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. Prof Wilde compares Western governments’ responses to the war in Gaza to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“There has been no court decision as to the illegality of Russia’s action in Ukraine. Nonetheless, states have found it possible already to make public proclamations determining the illegality of that action. There is nothing stopping them doing that in this case.

“And so, if they are suggesting that they are going to wait, the question to ask them is, why are you waiting for a court to tell you what you already know?”

Helena Kennedy KC is “very anxious about the casual use of the word genocide and I avoid it myself because I do think that there has to be a very high level in law, a very high level of intent necessary to prove it”.

“Are we saying that it’s not genocide but it is crimes against humanity? You think that makes it sound okay? Terrible crimes against humanity? I think we’re in the process of seeing the most grievous kind of crimes taking place.

“I do think we’re on a trajectory that could very easily be towards genocide, and as a lawyer I think that there’s certainly an argument that is being made strongly for that.”

Baroness Kennedy says her advice to the British government if it was asked for would be, “We’ve got to be very careful about being complicit in grievous crimes ourselves.”

Eventually, a ceasefire will come. It will not end the conflict, or head off the certainty of a long and bitter epilogue. The genocide case at the ICJ guarantees that. So do the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Once journalists and war crimes investigators can get into the Gaza Strip, they will emerge with more hard facts about what has happened.

Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble.

I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland

He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

The Israeli military has said it has located and identified the body of Mohammed Sinwar, the military leader of Palestinian armed group Hamas in Gaza.

His body was discovered in a tunnel underneath the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Sunday.

It said it had verified the body’s identity through DNA checks – though Hamas has not publicly confirmed his death.

Sinwar, 49, was killed in an air strike on 13 May, which the Hamas-run civil defence agency said killed 28 people and injured dozens.

Sinwar’s body was found alongside that of Mohammad Sabaneh, the commander of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, the IDF said.

It added that “several items belonging to Sinwar and Sabaneh were located, along with additional intelligence findings that were transferred for further investigation”.

The IDF said other bodies were found, which it was looking to identify.

It took a small group of foreign journalists into Gaza to Khan Younis to show them the tunnel on Sunday.

It also published video of the small entrance to the tunnel, accessible through freshly dug earth just in front of the European Hospital.

The footage shows a long, narrow underground corridor that leads to several rooms.

Inside some of them, piles of clothes and plastic chairs are visible, with a rifle leaning up against the wall. One video also shows a shrouded body being pulled from the tunnel by a rope.

IDF spokesperson Brig Gen Effie Defrin said that in one of the rooms they found the Sinwar’s body.

“This is another example of the cynical use by Hamas, using civilians as human shields, using civilian infrastructure, hospitals, again and again,” he said.

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of using hospitals as hiding places for weapons and command centres, which the group denies.

The IDF has mounted sieges and attacks on hospitals in Gaza, or ordered their evacuation, leaving the territory’s health system on the verge of total collapse.

Such attacks have caused widespread international concern, as many hospitals and medical facilities have been put out of action – and the lives of patients and staff put at risk.

In a statement after an Israeli strike on al-Ahli hospital in April, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed his deep alarm and declared that, under international humanitarian law, the “wounded and sick, medical personnel and medical facilities, including hospitals, must be respected and protected”.

Hospital staff in Gaza have also repeatedly denied that Hamas is using their facilities as a base.

The IDF will point to this latest footage as vindication of its claims and its military strategy.

As with so much in Gaza, however, full independent verification is not possible.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023 , in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,880 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

The renewed fighting in Gaza comes following the collapse of a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal a few months ago.

Since then, Israel has restated its aim to destroy Hamas and recover the hostages, of whom 54 remain in captivity and 23 are thought to still be alive.

Mohammed Sinwar joined Hamas shortly after its founding in the late 1980s and became a member of the group’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

He rose through the ranks and by 2005 he was commander of the Khan Younis Brigade.

Sinwar was also reported to have been close to another of Hamas’s previous military chiefs, Mohammed Deif, and had been involved in the planning of the 7 October attack.

His brother and predecessor, Yahya Sinwar – believed to be the one of the masterminds behind the 7 October attack – was killed by Israeli troops last October.

A new round of talks aimed at resolving a trade war between the US and China is set take place in London on Monday.

US President Donald Trump announced on Friday that a senior US delegation would meet Chinese representatives. Over weekend, Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that Vice Premier He Lifeng will attend the talks.

The announcements came after Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping had a phone conversation last week, which the US president described as a “very good talk”.

Last month, the world’s two biggest economies agreed a temporary truce to lower import taxes on goods being traded between them, but since then both countries have accused the other of breaching the deal.

Writing on his Truth Social platform on Friday, Trump said US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer would meet Chinese officials in London on Monday.

On Saturday, China’s foreign ministry said Vice Premier He would be in the UK between 8 and 13 June, and that a meeting of the “China-US economic and trade mechanism” would take place.

The new round of negotiations came after Trump said his phone conversation with Xi on Thursday mainly focused on trade and had “resulted in a very positive conclusion for both countries”.

According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Xi told Trump that the US should “withdraw the negative measures it has taken against China”.

The call was the first time the two leaders had spoken since the trade war erupted in February.

When Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from a number of countries earlier this year, China was the hardest hit. Beijing responded with its own higher rates on US imports, and this triggered tit-for-tat increases that peaked at 145%.

In May, talks held in Switzerland led to a temporary truce that Trump called a “total reset”.

It brought US tariffs on Chinese products down to 30%, while Beijing slashed levies on US imports to 10% and promised to lift barriers on critical mineral exports.

The agreement gave both sides a 90-day deadline to try to reach a trade deal.

But since then, relations appeared to have soured. Last month, Trump said China had “totally violated its agreement with us”, and then a few days later China said the US had “severely violated” the agreement.

The US accused China of failing to restart shipments of critical minerals and rare earth magnets vital to car and computer industries.

On Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said it had approved some applications for rare earth export licences, although it did not provide details of which countries involved.

The announcement came after Trump said on Friday that Xi had agreed to restart trade in rare earth materials.

Bu speaking on Sunday, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CBS News that “those exports of critical minerals have been getting released at a rate that is, you know, higher than it was, but not as high as we believe we agreed to in Geneva”.

During the mid-1970s, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s imposition of the Emergency, India entered a period where civil liberties were suspended and much of the political opposition was jailed.

Behind this authoritarian curtain, her Congress party government quietly began reimagining the country – not as a democracy rooted in checks and balances, but as a centralised state governed by command and control, historian Srinath Raghavan reveals in his new book.

In Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India, Prof Raghavan shows how Gandhi’s top bureaucrats and party loyalists began pushing for a presidential system – one that would centralise executive power, sideline an “obstructionist” judiciary and reduce parliament to a symbolic chorus.

Inspired in part by Charles de Gaulle’s France, the push for a stronger presidency in India reflected a clear ambition to move beyond the constraints of parliamentary democracy – even if it never fully materialised.

It all began, writes Prof Raghavan, in September 1975, when BK Nehru, a seasoned diplomat and a close aide of Gandhi, wrote a letter hailing the Emergency as a “tour de force of immense courage and power produced by popular support” and urged Gandhi to seize the moment.

Parliamentary democracy had “not been able to provide the answer to our needs”, Nehru wrote. In this system the executive was continuously dependent on the support of an elected legislature “which is looking for popularity and stops any unpleasant measure”.

What India needed, Nehru said, was a directly elected president – freed from parliamentary dependence and capable of taking “tough, unpleasant and unpopular decisions” in the national interest, Prof Raghavan writes.

The model he pointed to was de Gaulle’s France – concentrating power in a strong presidency. Nehru imagined a single, seven-year presidential term, proportional representation in Parliament and state legislatures, a judiciary with curtailed powers and a press reined in by strict libel laws. He even proposed stripping fundamental rights – right to equality or freedom of speech, for example – of their justiciability.

Nehru urged Indira Gandhi to “make these fundamental changes in the Constitution now when you have two-thirds majority”. His ideas were “received with rapture” by the prime minister’s secretary PN Dhar. Gandhi then gave Nehru approval to discuss these ideas with her party leaders but said “very clearly and emphatically” that he should not convey the impression that they had the stamp of her approval.

Prof Raghavan writes that the ideas met with enthusiastic support from senior Congress leaders like Jagjivan Ram and foreign minister Swaran Singh. The chief minister of Haryana state was blunt: “Get rid of this election nonsense. If you ask me just make our sister [Indira Gandhi] President for life and there’s no need to do anything else”. M Karunanidhi of Tamil Nadu – one of two non-Congress chief ministers consulted – was unimpressed.

When Nehru reported back to Gandhi, she remained non-committal, Prof Raghavan writes. She instructed her closest aides to explore the proposals further.

What emerged was a document titled “A Fresh Look at Our Constitution: Some suggestions”, drafted in secrecy and circulated among trusted advisors. It proposed a president with powers greater than even their American counterpart, including control over judicial appointments and legislation. A new “Superior Council of Judiciary”, chaired by the president, would interpret “laws and the Constitution” – effectively neutering the Supreme Court.

Gandhi sent this document to Dhar, who recognised it “twisted the Constitution in an ambiguously authoritarian direction”. Congress president DK Barooah tested the waters by publicly calling for a “thorough re-examination” of the Constitution at the party’s 1975 annual session.

The idea never fully crystallised into a formal proposal. But its shadow loomed over the Forty-second Amendment Act, passed in 1976, which expanded Parliament’s powers, limited judicial review and further centralised executive authority.

The amendment made striking down laws harder by requiring supermajorities of five or seven judges, and aimed to dilute the Constitution’s ‘basic structure doctrine’ that limited parliament’s power.

It also handed the federal government sweeping authority to deploy armed forces in states, declare region-specific Emergencies, and extend President’s Rule – direct federal rule – from six months to a year. It also put election disputes out of the judiciary’s reach.

This was not yet a presidential system, but it carried its genetic imprint – a powerful executive, marginalised judiciary and weakened checks and balances. The Statesman newspaper warned that “by one sure stroke, the amendment tilts the constitutional balance in favour of the parliament.”

Meanwhile, Gandhi’s loyalists were going all in. Defence minister Bansi Lal urged “lifelong power” for her as prime minister, while Congress members in the northern states of Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh unanimously called for a new constituent assembly in October 1976.

“The prime minister was taken aback. She decided to snub these moves and hasten the passage of the amendment bill in the parliament,” writes Prof Raghavan.

By December 1976, the bill had been passed by both houses of parliament and ratified by 13 state legislatures and signed into law by the president.

After Gandhi’s shock defeat in 1977, the short-lived Janata Party – a patchwork of anti-Gandhi forces – moved quickly to undo the damage. Through the Forty-third and Forty-fourth Amendments, it rolled back key parts of the Forty Second, scrapping authoritarian provisions and restoring democratic checks and balances.

Gandhi was swept back to power in January 1980, after the Janata Party government collapsed due to internal divisions and leadership struggles. Curiously, two years later, prominent voices in the party again mooted the idea of a presidential system.

In 1982, with President Sanjiva Reddy’s term ending, Gandhi seriously considered stepping down as prime minister to become president of India.

Her principal secretary later revealed she was “very serious” about the move. She was tired of carrying the Congress party on her back and saw the presidency as a way to deliver a “shock treatment to her party, thereby giving it a new stimulus”.

Ultimately, she backed down. Instead, she elevated Zail Singh, her loyal home minister, to the presidency.

Despite serious flirtation, India never made the leap to a presidential system. Did Gandhi, a deeply tactical politician, hold herself back ? Or was there no national appetite for radical change and India’s parliamentary system proved sticky?

There was a hint of presidential drift in the early 1970s, as India’s parliamentary democracy – especially after 1967 – grew more competitive and unstable, marked by fragile coalitions, according to Prof Raghavan. Around this time, voices began suggesting that a presidential system might suit India better. The Emergency became the moment when these ideas crystallised into serious political thinking.

“The aim was to reshape the system in ways that immediately strengthened her hold on power. There was no grand long-term design – most of the lasting consequences of her [Gandhi’s] rule were likely unintended,” Prof Raghavan told the BBC.

“During the Emergency, her primary goal was short-term: to shield her office from any challenge. The Forty Second Amendment was crafted to ensure that even the judiciary couldn’t stand in her way.”

The itch for a presidential system within the Congress never quite faded. As late as April 1984, senior minister Vasant Sathe launched a nationwide debate advocating a shift to presidential governance – even while in power.

But six months later, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in Delhi, and with her, the conversation abruptly died. India stayed a parliamentary democracy.

Sonny Olumati was born in Rome and has lived in Italy all his life but the country he calls home does not recognise him as its own.

To Italy, Sonny is Nigerian, like his passport, and the 39-year-old is only welcome as long as his latest residence permit.

“I’ve been born here. I will live here. I will die here,” the dancer and activist tells me in what he calls “macaroni” Italian-English beneath the palm trees of a scruffy Roman park.

“But not having citizenship is like… being rejected from your country. And I don’t think this is a feeling we should have”.

That is why Sonny and others have been campaigning for a “Yes” vote in a national referendum on Sunday and Monday that proposes halving the time required to apply for Italian citizenship.

Any children under 18 would automatically be naturalised along with their parents.

Cutting the wait from 10 years to five would bring this country in line with most others in Europe and, proponents argue, improve integration.

The referendum was initiated by a citizens’ initiative and is supported by civil society groups. But for such a referendum to be valid, 50% of all voters in Italy have to turn up.

Giorgia Meloni, the country’s hard-right prime minister, has announced she will boycott the vote, declaring the citizenship law already “excellent” and “very open”.

Other parties allied to her are calling on Italians to go to the beach instead of the polling station.

Sonny will not be taking part either. Without citizenship, he is not entitled to vote.

The question of who gets to be Italian is a sensitive one.

Large numbers of migrants and refugees arrive in the country each year helped across the Mediterranean from North Africa by smuggling gangs.

Meloni’s populist government has made a big deal about cutting the number of arrivals.

But this referendum is aimed at those who have travelled legally for work to a country with a rapidly shrinking and ageing population.

The aim is limited: to speed up the process for getting citizenship, not ease the strict criteria.

“Knowledge of the Italian language, not having criminal charges, continuous residence et cetera – all the various requirements remain the same,” explains Carla Taibi of the liberal party More Europe, one of several backers of the referendum.

The reform would affect long-term foreign residents already employed in Italy and their families: from those on factory production lines in the north to those caring for pensioners in plush Rome neighbourhoods.

Up to 1.4 million people could qualify for citizenship immediately, with some estimates ranging higher.

“These people live in Italy, study and work and contribute. This is about changing the perception of them so they are not strangers anymore – but Italian,” argues Taibi.

The reform would also have practical implications.

As a non-Italian, Sonny cannot apply for a public sector job, and even struggled to get a driving licence.

When he was booked for hit reality TV show Fame Island last year, he ended up arriving two weeks late on set in Honduras because he had had so many problems getting the right paperwork.

For a long time, Meloni ignored the referendum entirely. Italy’s publicly owned media, run by a close Meloni ally, have also paid scant attention to the vote.

There is no substantive “No” campaign, making it hard to have a balanced debate.

But the real reason appears strategic.

“They don’t want to raise awareness of the significance of the referendum,” Professor Roberto D’Alimonte of Luiss University in Rome explains. “That’s rational, to make sure that the 50% threshold won’t be reached.”

The prime minister eventually announced she would turn up at a polling station “to show respect for the ballot box” – but refuse to cast a vote.

“When you disagree, you also have the option of abstaining,” Meloni told a TV chat show this week, after critics accused her of disrespecting democracy.

Italy’s citizenship system was “excellent”, she argued, already granting citizenship to more foreign nationals than most countries in Europe: 217,000 last year, according to the national statistics agency, Istat.

But about 30,000 of those were Argentines with Italian ancestry on the other side of the world, unlikely even to visit.

Meanwhile, Meloni’s coalition partner, Roberto Vannacci of the far-right League, accused those behind the referendum of “selling off our citizenship and erasing our identity”.

I ask Sonny why he thinks his own application for citizenship has taken over two decades.

“It’s racism,” he replies immediately.

At one point his file was lost completely, and he has now been told his case is “pending”.

“We have ministers who talk about white supremacy – racial replacement of Italy,” the activist recalls a 2023 comment by the agriculture minister from Meloni’s own party.

“They don’t want black immigration and we know it. I was born here 39 years ago so I know what I say.”

It is an accusation the prime minister has denied repeatedly.

Insaf Dimassi, 28, defines herself as “Italian without citizenship”.

“Italy let me grow up and become the person I am today, so not being seen as a citizen is extremely painful and frustrating,” she explains from the northern city of Bologna where she is studying for a PhD.

Insaf’s father travelled to Italy for work when she was a baby, and she and her mother then joined him. Her parents finally got Italian citizenship 20 days after Insaf turned 18. That meant she had to apply for herself from scratch, including proving a steady income.

Insaf chose to study instead.

“I arrived here at nine months old, and maybe at 33 or 34 – if all goes well – I can finally be an Italian citizen,” she says, exasperated.

She remembers exactly when the significance of her “outsider” status hit home: it was when she was asked to run for election alongside a candidate for mayor in her hometown.

When she shared the news with her parents, full of excitement, they had to remind her she was not Italian and was not eligible.

“They say it’s a matter of meritocracy to be a citizen, that you have to earn it. But more than being myself, what do I have to demonstrate?” Insaf wants to know.

“Not being allowed to vote, or be represented, is being invisible.”

On the eve of the referendum, students in Rome wrote a call to the polls on the cobbles of a city square.

“Vote ‘YES’ on the 8th and 9th [of June],” they spelled out in giant cardboard letters.

With a government boycott and such meagre publicity, the chances of hitting the 50% turnout threshold seem slim.

But Sonny argues that this vote is just the beginning.

“Even if they vote ‘No’, we will stay here – and think about the next step,” he says. “We have to start to talk about the place of our community in this country.”

Joe is somewhat shorter than the average American man, at 5ft 6in (1.67m) – but when Ashley came across his Tinder profile last year, the last thing she was thinking about was Joe’s height.

“We were talking about our hobbies and passions,” Ashley says, “not superficial things.”

News that the dating app where Ashley and Joe found love is trialling a new feature – allowing some premium users to filter potential matches according to their height – was met with mixed reactions earlier this week.

While daters like Ashley worry it might stifle possible connections, others say the feature might actually help shorter men find a match.

Tinder’s trial is running in “limited” parts of the world, excluding the UK, with the feature only available to those who pay for its two highest subscription tiers. Tinder has not told the BBC which countries it is being trialled in.

It works by informing the app’s matching algorithm based on a user’s stated preference, rather than filtering out certain users altogether. But online reaction to its launch has ranged from amusement to outrage.

“Tinder just declared war on short kings,” wrote one social media user, while another said they’d be “using the Tinder height filter to filter out all men taller than 5ft 9in”.

Another commented: “I don’t care what Tinder says – short kings are elite.”

Ashley, from Wisconsin, says she understands why height can be a deal-breaker for some daters – but that wasn’t the case for her.

“I’ve heard people talk: ‘I can’t wear heels or my partner will look shorter,'” the 24-year-old says, “but that’s never mattered to me”.

Joe is “just such an amazing person”, she says, it wouldn’t matter to her “if he was six feet tall or five feet tall”.

Using a height filter might actually have prevented her and Joe from ever meeting, she adds – and she reckons others could be missing out too.

Joe, meanwhile, says Tinder’s height filtering feature could actually make dating harder for shorter men.

“Limiting yourself to physical things about someone will lessen your opportunities and chances of finding a partner,” he says. “Height shouldn’t matter when you’re looking for forever.”

The 27-year-old says his own dating experience hadn’t “all been so bad” and that his matches had judged him based on his personality, rather than his height.

But he thinks the new Tinder filter might affect other users’ chances of meaningful connections.

Tinder is not breaking new ground here – seasoned swipers will be familiar with various kinds of filter, which are now common features of dating apps including in the UK.

Hinge, a key Tinder competitor, already allows paying users to filter matches according to their height. Other filters include education level, religion, and checking whether potential matches smoke, drink or take drugs.

Bumble allows premium users to avoid matches with certain star signs, while paying Grindr users can filter by body type.

But as the world’s largest dating app, Tinder’s experiment with height filtering still has huge significance, and has sparked discussion in Britain too.

At 5ft 9in, Matt Heal, from Manchester, says he feels jaded about the online dating scene.

Matt’s around average height for a man in the UK, but says some daters’ preferences for taller men have disadvantaged him on the apps.

“As someone who is neither very tall nor financially well off, I have definitely felt desensitised about dating [using apps],” he says.

The 28-year-old thinks it’s understandable that apps like Tinder try to optimise their matching algorithms, though.

“People have preferences based on all sorts of things,” Matt says, adding these features help people “see others they are interested in, rather than swiping for hours on people you don’t consider compatible”.

However, he thinks daters shouldn’t be too rigid about what they’re looking for.

“If you were into people who are over six feet, would you really not date someone who’s 5ft 11in” – if they were good looking and had similar interests?”

Matt feels it’s easier for men his height to meet people offline, explaining that meeting someone in person, through mutual friends, for example, can mean a less prescriptive approach.

But Beth McColl, 31, thinks the Tinder height filter may offer shorter men some reassurance. The London-based writer and podcaster says it could help people avoid “women who only want to date really tall men”.

Whether or not women will actually use this feature, Beth is uncertain.

“Women typically don’t have a problem with dating a shorter man,” Beth says, “but they do, maybe, have a problem with dating a shorter man who is really hung up on it.”

Aside from the filters, Beth believes the real problem of modern dating lies with the dating apps themselves.

“It encourages us to treat dating like picking something from the menu,” she says, adding, “there’s nothing in being a little bit taller that will make that man a better partner – but I think we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that there’s truth in that.”

As to whether the Tinder move will prove popular with users on a mass scale – that remains to be seen.

“Features like this capitalise on a well-known preference – some women desire taller partners,” says Lara Besbrode, managing director at MatchMaker UK. “They don’t address the deeper issues at the heart of online dating fatigue.”

But, she says, attraction is “not static” and can evolve over time.

“A man who is 5ft 7in (1.7m), but confident, kind, and emotionally attuned can be far more attractive than someone who ticks the 6ft (1.8m) box but lacks substance,” Lara says.

Tinder told the BBC its new filter demonstrates it is “building with urgency, clarity, and focus” and that it is “part of a broader effort to help people connect more intentionally” on the app.

A spokesperson said: “Not every test becomes a permanent feature, but every test helps us learn how we can deliver smarter, more relevant experiences and push the category forward.”

And that fleeting moment when stumbling across each other’s profiles on a dating app can be vital, as Ashley and Joe know.

Ashley worries that people who use Tinder’s new filter “might be cutting themselves off from people who’re a potential match for them, rather than someone who’s their preferred height”.

But for now her swiping days are over, and her relationship with Joe is blossoming. He’s “phenomenal”, Ashley says, “super sweet”.

Next year’s Brit Awards are to be held in Manchester – the first time the ceremony has taken place outside London since the awards began in 1977.

The ceremony will be held at the Co-op Live arena on Saturday 28 February.

A two-year deal means that the 2027 ceremony, which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Brit Awards, will also be held at the same venue.

It is the second major music ceremony to announce plans to leave London. Last month the BPI, which represents the British music industry and runs the Brit Awards, also revealed that this year’s Mercury Prize will be held in Newcastle in September after 32 years in the capital.

Dr Jo Twist, CEO of the BPI, told the BBC: “We’ve had a fantastic history in London for nearly 50 years, and we just feel that now is the time to make a bold leap into other parts of the UK to the fans.

“Manchester has such a rich musical heritage and it has a fantastic ecosystem of support there on the ground, including lots of amazing grassroots venues.”

Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham described the move as “a massive coup” for the area.

Hailing the city’s “unparalleled music heritage,” Burnham said Manchester would “pull out all the stops” to prove the BPI had made the right decision.

The past 15 Brit Award ceremonies have taken place at London’s O2 Arena. This year’s awards were dominated by Charli XCX, who won five including best artist, album and song of the year.

Back in 1977, when the awards started, they were called The British Record Industry Britannia Awards. As part of the celebrations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, they gave prizes to the best music released during her reign.

Best album went to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Best single was a tie between Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, who turned up to accept the award from host Michael Aspel.

The ceremony was held at the Wembley Conference Centre, which was demolished in 2006 and turned into flats.

The Brit Awards became an annual event in 1982, taking place at the Grosvenor House Hotel and other London venues including the Royal Albert Hall, the Dominion Theatre, Hammersmith Apollo, Alexandra Palace, Earls Court Exhibition Centre and London Arena.

Co-op Live has already held a major music award ceremony, the MTV Europe Music Awards (EMAs), in November last year, which attracted the likes of Teddy Swims, Benson Boone and Shawn Mendes.

Britain’s biggest indoor venue originally made headlines when its opening was delayed three times due to a series of highly-publicised problems.

These included part of a ventilation system falling from the ceiling, an event the boss of Co-op Live Tim Leiweke said could have been “catastrophic”.

Since then, the venue has held the only UK shows on The Eagles’ farewell tour, celebrated its first anniversary with three Bruce Springsteen gigs, and last November Charli XCX opened her Brat World Tour there.

Manchester has a serious Brit Awards pedigree.

Take That, who formed in the city, have won eight Brit Awards. Their former member Robbie Williams holds the record for the most Brit Award wins, with 18 including five while in the band.

Simply Red, Elbow and The 1975 have all been named best group. M People were best dance act in 1995 and The Chemical Brothers, who met at the University of Manchester, won the same award in 2000.

Two years ago, Aitch was named best hip hop, grime or rap act and in his acceptance speech said: “Not many people from my side of Manchester get the opportunity to stand up here and receive such an amazing gift or award.”

New Order, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Bee Gees, 10CC, Johnny Marr, Ian Brown, Doves, James, Blossoms and Badly Drawn Boy have all been nominated for Brit Awards over the years, but none of those acts have ever won.

The Smiths, one of the most influential indie bands of all time, were never nominated at the Brits.

One interesting potential storyline for 2026 is that if the Brit Awards were to bring back the best live act category (last presented in 2013 to Coldplay) then a possible winner might be one of the biggest Manchester bands of all time.

Oasis will start their reunion tour in Cardiff on 4 July. The thought of the Gallagher brother picking up a Brit in their hometown, is one that would certainly help bring in audiences.

Twist has a twinkle in her eye when she says: “Our categories are always under review, so we will be looking at that. We’re very excited to be part of that whole buzz.”

It is exactly 30 years since Oasis won the first of their six Brit Awards – British breakthrough act, beating fellow nominees Echobelly, Eternal, Portishead and PJ & Duncan.

A Colombian presidential candidate remains in intensive care after he was shot three times – twice in the head – at a campaign event in the capital, Bogotá.

Miguel Uribe Turbay, a 39-year-old senator, was attacked while addressing supporters in a park on Saturday. Police arrested a 15-year-old suspect at the scene, the attorney general’s office said.

Uribe’s wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, called on the nation to pray for his survival, saying: “Miguel is currently fighting for his life. Let us ask God to guide the hands of the doctors who are treating him.”

Uribe’s Centro Democratico party condemned the attack, calling it a threat to “democracy and freedom in Colombia”.

Footage shared online appears to show the moment when he was shot in the head mid-speech, prompting those gathered to flee in panic.

He was airlifted to the Santa Fe Foundation hospital where supporters gathered to hold a vigil.

Uribe was rushed into surgery while in a critical condition, Bogotá Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán said late on Saturday night.

The hospital said on Sunday morning that Uribe had undergone procedures to his head and left thigh, before being taken to be stabilised in intensive care.

He remains in an extremely serious condition, it added.

The 15-year-old suspect was shot in the leg as police and security officers pursued him following the attack, according to local media.

He was arrested carrying a “9mm Glock-type firearm”, a statement from the attorney general’s office said. An investigation is under way.

The government of left-wing President Gustavo Petro said it “categorically” condemned the attack as an “act of violence not only against his person, but also against democracy”.

Defence Minister Pedro Sanchez deplored the “vile attack” and offered a 3bn peso ($730,000; £540,000) reward for information about who may have been behind it.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also condemned the shooting as a “direct threat to democracy”.

He blamed the attack, without providing examples, on “violent leftist rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the Colombian government”. The suspect’s motivation remains unclear.

Many Colombians have condemned the hostile rhetoric increasingly used by the government and opposition parties alike.

The week before the shooting was particularly tense, with Petro seeking popular backing for his reforms in a move that opposition leaders – including Uribe – dubbed unconstitutional.

Petro urged Colombians to wish Uribe well, on what he described as a “day of pain” in a video address to the nation.

There was a “political difference” between Uribe and the government, but it was “only political”, he said.

“What matters most today is that all Colombians focus with the energy of our hearts, with our will to live… on ensuring that Dr Miguel Uribe stays alive,” the president added.

Uribe, a right-wing critic of Petro, announced his candidacy for next year’s presidential election in October. He has been a senator since 2022.

He is from a prominent political family in Colombia, with links to the country’s Liberal Party. His father was a union leader and businessman.

His mother was Diana Turbay, a journalist who was killed in 1991 in a rescue attempt after she had been kidnapped by the Medellin drugs cartel run at the time by Pablo Escobar.

For many, Saturday’s shooting harked back to Colombia’s violent history, when figures like Escobar attacked politicians to pressure the government.

“We cannot return to situations of political violence, nor to times when violence was used to eliminate those who thought differently,” Bogotá Mayor Galán said shortly after the attack.

Petro had been elected on a promise to bring “total peace” to the country.

He made early progress in talks with gangs and rebel groups, but his interior minister recently acknowledged that the strategy was “not going well”.

Dozens of soldiers and police officers were killed over a two-week span in April, in attacks the Colombian government blamed on armed groups.

Earlier in the year, more than 32,000 people fled their homes in the northern Catatumbo region, where to rival rebel groups engaged in bloody fighting despite a peace treaty.

On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump promised that he was not going to tolerate left-wing lawlessness on American streets and would use the full force of his presidential powers in response.

The protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts in California on Saturday night gave him an opening to follow through on that promise.

Never mind that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said that the protests were largely peaceful, or that local authorities said they could handle the clashes that did turn violent.

Trump administration officials said that immigration agents were being targeted and injured – and that local law enforcement had been too slow to respond.

• Follow updates as National Guard troops arrive in LA
• When can a president deploy National Guard on US soil?

“Waiting several hours for LAPD to show up – or them telling us that they’re not going to back us up until they have an officer in a dangerous situation – is something that just isn’t workable when you have violent protests going on,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirsty Noem told CBS News on Sunday morning.

The LAPD said it “acted as swiftly as conditions safely allowed” and began dispersing crowds within 55 minutes of receiving the call.

Over California Governor Gavin Newsom’s objection, Trump federalised the 2,000 California National Guard soldiers, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that US Marines were also on “high alert” to deploy – which would mark a rare use of the active duty military on US soil.

By Sunday morning, Trump was declaring victory and thanking the National Guard for restoring peace, even though the guard had yet to fully assemble.

The speed with which Trump reacted suggests that this is a fight his administration is prepared for – and even eager to have.

The White House believes that law and order, and aggressive immigration enforcement, are winning issues for him.

His actions will thrill his core base of supporters and could sway political independents concerned about public safety.

Noem, in her interview, said the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 in Minnesota were allowed to spread unchecked – and that the new Trump administration was going to handle things differently.

“We’re not going to let a repeat of 2020 happen,” she said.

Democrats, however, have said the administration’s use of masked immigration officers with military gear to arrest civilians in restaurants and shops has been inflammatory, and that the president’s eagerness to deploy trained soldiers was unwarranted.

“For the president to do this when it wasn’t requested, breaking with generations of tradition, is only going to incite the situation and make things worse,” said New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

“A lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings, who are trying to abide by the law.”

The US has a long tradition of summer protests, and it is only early June.

Five months into Trump’s second term, these California demonstrations may be an isolated event – or the start of greater civil unrest in the days ahead.

US President Donald Trump says he has deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to uphold “very strong law and order”, after violent protests against immigration raids erupted in America’s second-biggest city.

His decision to summon the National Guard overruled the authority of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the move “purposefully inflammatory”.

At least 118 immigrants have been arrested in operations across the city over the past week, which led to clashes as demonstrators gathered outside businesses that were thought to have been raided.

The LA County Sheriff’s Department said crowds “became increasingly agitated, throwing objects and exhibiting violent behaviour”, prompting police to use tear gas and stun grenades.

Governor Newsom, along with the LA mayor and a California congresswoman, said in separate comments they believed local police could handle the protests. Twenty-nine people were arrested, according to local officials.

• Follow live coverage here
• Trump’s quick intervention in LA may thrill his base but inflame tensions

To quell the growing unrest, Trump issued a directive under a rarely used federal law that allows the president to federalise National Guard troops under certain circumstances.

The National Guard acts as a hybrid entity that serves both state and federal interests. Typically, a state’s National Guard force is activated at the request of the governor.

In this case, Trump has circumvented that step by invoking a specific provision of the US Code of Armed Services titled 10 U.S.C. 12406, which lists three circumstances under which the president can federalise the National Guard.

If the US “is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation”; “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the government; or “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.

Trump said in his memorandum requesting the National Guard that the protests in Los Angeles “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”.

The National Guard’s role in Los Angeles will be to protect federal agents, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Homeland Security, as they carry out their duties.

The troops will not be conducting their own immigration raids or performing ordinary law enforcement activities against civilians.

The law generally prohibits domestic use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement, outside of some exceptions like the Insurrection Act.

Although Trump has threatened to invoke that act in the past, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for example, he has not done so here.

According to experts, this is the first time the National Guard has been activated without request of the state’s governor since 1965.

In 1992, the National Guard was federalised in LA during riots after police officers were acquitted for the beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Then-President George HW Bush sent troops at the request of California’s governor at the time, Pete Wilson.

In 2020, National Guard troops were deployed in some states in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd.

Senior figures in the Trump administration have backed the president’s decision to mobilise the National Guard. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media it was “COMMON SENSE”, adding: “Violence & destruction against federal agents & federal facilities will NOT be tolerated.”

Hegseth also said that active duty US Marines stationed at nearby Camp Pendleton would be sent if needed and were on “high alert”.

Senator Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, told CNN: “Does it look like it’s [the protests] under control? Absolutely not.”

However, several Californian officials insist city police are equipped to deal with the unrest, and the military’s involvement is unnecessary.

California congresswoman Nanette Barragán, a Democrat who represents the city of Paramount in LA’s suburbs where the protests have taken place, told CNN: “We don’t need the help.”

The National Guard is “only going to make things worse”, she said.

Her words echo Governor Newsom, who also spoke against National Guard troops being sent to his state.

“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles – not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Newsom wrote on X.

LA Mayor Karen Bass told ABC7 the National Guard was not needed.

Ice officers conducted raids in heavily Latino parts of LA on Friday, as part of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Forty-four people were arrested, said a spokesperson for Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.

The efforts are a part of the president’s aim to enact the “biggest deportation operation” in US history.

Los Angeles, where over one-third of the population is foreign-born, has been a big target.

In early May, Ice announced it had arrested 239 undocumented migrants during a weeklong operation in the LA area, as overall arrests and deportations lagged behind Trump’s expectations.

The following month, the White House increased its goal for Ice officials to make at least 3,000 arrests per day.

Authorities have expanded their search increasingly to include workplaces such as restaurants and retail shops. The LA raids that sparked the protests occurred at a wholesale clothing supplier and a Home Depot outlet.

“You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation,” Trump’s border official Thomas Homan said.

The ambitious deportation campaign has included rounding up migrants on military planes and sending them to Guantanamo Bay before bringing them back to Louisiana.

Other migrants have been deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, including at least one who was in the US legally. Some migrants have been sent to countries where they are not from.

Many of these actions have been met by legal challenges in court.

On Friday, protesters clashed with federal agents outside a clothing wholesaler. They threw objects at agents and attempted to block federal officials from carrying out their arrests. In response, officials in riot gear used flash bang grenades and pepper spray to subdue the crowd.

Outside a Home Depot store in Paramount, roughly 20 miles (32 km) south of downtown LA, tear gas and flash bangs were deployed against protesters that gathered again on Saturday.

In a social media post, Ice described the scene on Saturday, saying: “Our brave officers were vastly outnumbered – over 1,000 rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building.”

Responding to the protests, the LA Police Department said it made 29 arrests, almost all for failure to disperse, which is a misdemeanour, according to the BBC’s media partner CBS News.

On Sunday, day three of the protests, National Guard troops arrived to LA and were seen walling off protesters outside of a federal building that contains a detention centre.

In one of the more tense exchanges, federal officers with Department of Homeland Security badges fired what appeared to be tear gas and pepper spray and some kind of non-lethal round towards the crowd.

Two sisters whose mother went from being their best friend to stealing their £50,000 inheritance say they have been left feeling anxious and unable to trust anyone.

Katherine Hill, 53, from Alltwen in Pontardawe, Neath Port Talbot, and her 93-year-old father Gerald Hill from Fairwood in Swansea were found guilty of fraud by abuse of power after a trial last year.

They were sentenced to 30 months in prison and a 12-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, respectively. On Monday, [Katherine]Hill was ordered to repay the money, which was left to her daughters Gemma and Jessica Thomas by their grandmother Margaret Hill.

“I’ll never have a relationship with my mother now,” said Jessica.

Swansea Crown Court previously heard, due to inflation, the sum stolen by the “greedy and spiteful” Hills was now worth about £65,000.

Katherine Hill put the money in an instant access Barclays Everyday Saver account, despite being advised not to, and both she and her dad had cards to access it – draining the contents within a year.

Between March 2016 and March 2017, the account where the money was held was emptied in 10 withdrawals, with £35,000 withdrawn in three transactions alone, the court heard.

Gemma and Jessica grew up in Neath Port Talbot with their parents, and said Hill was a “good mother”.

“She was like my best friend,” said Gemma, now 26, adding “no-one saw this coming.”

She said Hill did not have a good relationship with her own mother Margaret Hill – who split from her father when Hill was a teenager – though the girls did not know why.

Margaret Hill died in 2014, while [Katherine] Hill was divorcing the girls’ father, Chris Thomas.

At the time Jessica was just 12 and not told about the inheritance, but Gemma, who was 15 “understood a little bit more”.

The £50,000 was placed in a trust fund with their mother as a trustee – to be accessed when they were 25.

Following the divorce, the girls stayed living with their mother for about six months, but say she would often leave them alone for long periods of time while she visited her new boyfriend.

“It would start where she was going on dates and stuff. And I think I was at that perfect age of ‘my mother’s going out for the night, I can have friends over’, and I was kind of loving it for a while,” said Gemma.

“But it got to the point where it was happening every weekend and people expected that I wasn’t going to have a parent at home, and I would be like, ‘please will you stay home this one time?’.”

Mr Thomas decided his daughters would be better living with him, so the girls moved out of their family home and with him, while Hill moved in with her current partner, Phillip Lloyd.

The sisters said their mum would sometimes take them out at the weekend, to a pub or McDonalds, but the conversation would often centre around their father and her upset that they left.

“I think she just could never get over the fact that we were choosing to live with him over her,” said Gemma.

Jessica said it was “clear from then that we weren’t really a very important thing to her”.

“I remember when she came to see me on my 13th birthday, and took me out for the day, saying she had to leave early because she was going out with [her boyfriend] and his family.

“It wasn’t like she’d spend a lot of money on us… not 50 grand’s worth, anyway.”

They said, looking back, there were signs of extravagance from Hill and her partner, such as building a back garden pub and hot tub, and going on holidays.

But nothing set off alarm bells, as Hill had also received her own money from her late mother.

Now, the girls said, they know it was really them paying for their mum’s lifestyle.

It was when Gemma phoned her mum to ask about accessing the money early, as she planned to buy their childhood home from their dad, that the claims the inheritance never existed began.

She said her mum told her “the money’s not yours” and blocked her number, before later claiming in court it had been posted through the girls’ letterboxes.

Jessica, who is now a nurse, recalled the shock of discovering the money existed, and then immediately that it was gone.

“How can you grieve something you never had? But [also] she’s robbed me of an opportunity not a lot of people get.”

She and her boyfriend currently live with his parents, and she said saving up to move out without her inheritance would take a very long time.

Gemma said she was angry, adding she found it frustrating the more time went on and the more Hill lied.

She said the initial confusion and hurt was hard, given their happy memories of their mum, and the woman she saw in court did not seem like the same person.

“I’d sit there and be like, ‘What if we’re all wrong? What if she hasn’t done it?’

“But I have to accept that she has.”

Gemma said giving evidence in court was stressful, but the relief came more from feeling validated, than from money or the sentences.

“When it actually was the case that she was being sent down… it was like we were being told that we’re not crazy,” she said.

The girls said they saw people on social media claiming they were in prison with their mum and she “was still saying that she was innocent”.

“And people would believe in her… that’s the most shocking thing to me,” said Jessica.

“Even though the relationship had started to break down before this, it could have possibly been fixed, whereas we’re at that point now that we’ll never go back to how we used to be.”

She added their mum had “showed no remorse for anything she did”.

“She would look at me while we were standing up giving evidence, and she was shaking her head as if I was the one telling lies,” she said.

“It’s like she’ll never take responsibility for what she’s done.”

Jessica said she had been going to counselling for many years, to address “massive issues with trust”, while Gemma said she became “very needy in friendships”.

“[I thought] ‘if my mother doesn’t love me, who the hell is going to love me?'”

Now a mother herself to a two-month-old boy, she said she saw the betrayal on a new level.

“I came home [after court] on Monday and I was feeding my son. I was looking at him, and I was like, I could not go 10 days, not even 10 hours really, without knowing how he was or what was going on in his life. Never mind the past 10 years.

“It doesn’t make any sense, she’s missing out on all of that.”

Jessica said still living and working in the same area as her mum brought her anxiety and she lived with a tic, which a doctor told her had been triggered by trauma.

“The whole thing has just had a massive effect on me, mentally and physically.”

She added she did not know how they would have coped without each other, or their father, who supported them emotionally and financially through the long legal process.

Now, with the result they wanted, they hope they will eventually see the money and “let go of this part of our lives”.

They say they want to forget their mother, and the end of court proceedings has brought a kind of closure, allowing them to “finally breathe”.

A wooden hunters’ toolbox inscribed with an ancient writing system from Zambia has been making waves on social media.

“We’ve grown up being told that Africans didn’t know how to read and write,” says Samba Yonga, one of the founders of the virtual Women’s History Museum of Zambia.

“But we had our own way of writing and transmitting knowledge that has been completely side-lined and overlooked,” she tells the BBC.

It was one of the artefacts that launched an online campaign to highlight women’s roles in pre-colonial communities – and revive cultural heritages almost erased by colonialism.

Another intriguing object is an intricately decorated leather cloak not seen in Zambia for more than 100 years.

“The artefacts signify a history that matters – and a history that is largely unknown,” says Yonga.

“Our relationship with our cultural heritage has been disrupted and obscured by the colonial experience.

“It’s also shocking just how much the role of women has been deliberately removed.”

But, says Yonga, “there’s a resurgence, a need and a hunger to connect with our cultural heritage – and reclaim who we are, whether through fashion, music or academic studies”.

“We had our own language of love, of beauty,” she says. “We had ways that we took care of our health and our environment. We had prosperity, union, respect, intellect.”

A total of 50 objects have been posted on social media – alongside information about their significance and purpose that shows that women were often at the heart of a society’s belief systems and understanding of the natural world.

The images of the objects are presented inside a frame – playing on the idea that a surround can influence how you look at and perceive a picture. In the same way that British colonialism distorted Zambian histories – through the systematic silencing and destruction of local wisdom and practices.

The Frame project is using social media to push back against the still-common idea that African societies did not have their own knowledge systems.

The objects were mostly collected during the colonial era and kept in storage in museums all over the world, including Sweden – where the journey for this current social media project began in 2019.

Yonga was visiting the capital, Stockholm, and a friend suggested that she meet Michael Barrett, one of the curators of the National Museums of World Cultures in Sweden.

She did – and when he asked her what country she was from, Yonga was surprised to hear him say that the museum had a lot of Zambian artefacts.

“It really blew my mind, so I asked: ‘How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'”

In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot.

There are close to 650 Zambian cultural objects in the museum, collected over the course of a century – as well as about 300 historical photographs.

When Yonga and her virtual museum co-founder Mulenga Kapwepwe explored the archives, they were astonished to find the Swedish collectors had travelled far and wide – some of the artefacts come from areas of Zambia that are still remote and hard to reach.

The collection includes reed fishing baskets, ceremonial masks, pots, a waist belt of cowry shells – and 20 leather cloaks in pristine condition collected during a 1911-1912 expedition.

They are made from the skin of a lechwe antelope by the Batwa men and worn by the women or used by the women to protect their babies from the elements.

On the fur outside are “geometric patterns, meticulously, delicately and beautifully designed”, Yonga says.

There are pictures of the women wearing the cloaks, and a 300-page notebook written by the person who brought the cloaks to Sweden – ethnographer Eric von Rosen.

He also drew illustrations showing how the cloaks were designed and took photographs of women wearing the cloaks in different ways.

“He took great pains to show the cloak being designed, all the angles and the tools that were used, and [the] geography and location of the region where it came from.”

The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks – and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.

So Yonga and Kapwepwe went to find out more from the community in the Bengweulu region in north-east of the country where the cloaks came from.

“There’s no memory of it,” says Yonga. “Everybody who held that knowledge of creating that particular textile – that leather cloak – or understood that history was no longer there.

“So it only existed in this frozen time, in this Swedish museum.”

One of Yonga’s personal favourites in the Frame project is Sona or Tusona, an ancient, sophisticated and now rarely used writing system.

It comes from the Chokwe, Luchazi and Luvale people, who live in the borderlands of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yonga’s own north-western region of Zambia.

Geometric patterns were made in the sand, on cloth and on people’s bodies. Or carved into furniture, wooden masks used in the Makishi ancestral masquerade – and a wooden box used to store tools when people were out hunting.

The patterns and symbols carry mathematical principles, references to the cosmos, messages about nature and the environment – as well as instructions on community life.

The original custodians and teachers of Sona were women – and there are still community elders alive who remember how it works.

They are a huge source of knowledge for Yonga’s ongoing corroboration of research done on Sona by scholars like Marcus Matthe and Paulus Gerdes.

“Sona’s been one of the most popular social media posts – with people expressing surprise and huge excitement, exclaiming: ‘Like, what, what? How is this possible?'”

The Queens in Code: Symbols of Women’s Power post includes a photograph of a woman from the Tonga community in southern Zambia.

She has her hands on a mealie grinder, a stone used to grind grain.

Researchers from the Women’s History Museum of Zambia discovered during a field trip that the grinding stone was more than just a kitchen tool.

It belonged only to the woman who used it – it was not passed down to her daughters. Instead, it was placed on her grave as a tombstone out of respect for the contribution the woman had made to the community’s food security.

“What might look like just a grinding stone is in fact a symbol of women’s power,” Yonga says.

The Women’s History Museum of Zambia was set up in 2016 to document and archive women’s histories and indigenous knowledge.

It is conducting research in communities and creating an online archive of items that have been taken out of Zambia.

“We’re trying to put together a jigsaw without even having all the pieces yet – we’re on a treasure hunt.”

A treasure hunt that has changed Yonga’s life – in a way that she hopes the Frame social media project will also do for other people.

“Having a sense of my community and understanding the context of who I am historically, politically, socially, emotionally – that has changed the way I interact in the world.”

• Grandma with chunky sunglasses becomes unlikely fashion icon
• How a mega dam has caused a mega power crisis
• Zambia made education free, now classrooms are crammed
• The $5m cash and fake gold that no-one is claiming

It is 1am on 3 June. A near gale force wind is blasting into Scotland. Great weather for the Moray East and West offshore wind farms, you would have thought.

The two farms are 13 miles off the north-east coast of Scotland and include some of the biggest wind turbines in the UK, at 257m high. With winds like that they should be operating at maximum capacity, generating what the developer, Ocean Winds, claims is enough power to meet the electricity needs of well over a million homes.

Except they are not.

That’s because if you thought that once an electricity generator – whether it be a wind farm or a gas-powered plant – was connected to the national grid it could seamlessly send its electricity wherever it was needed in the country, you’d be wrong.

The electricity grid was built to deliver power generated by coal and gas plants near the country’s major cities and towns, and doesn’t always have sufficient capacity in the wires that carry electricity around the country to get the new renewable electricity generated way out in the wild seas and rural areas.

And this has major consequences.

The way the system currently works means a company like Ocean Winds gets what are effectively compensation payments if the system can’t take the power its wind turbines are generating and it has to turn down its output.

It means Ocean winds was paid £72,000 not to generate power from its wind farms in the Moray Firth during a half-hour period on 3 June because the system was overloaded – one of a number of occasions output was restricted that day.

At the same time, 44 miles (70km) east of London, the Grain gas-fired power station on the Thames Estuary was paid £43,000 to provide more electricity.

Payments like that happen virtually every day. Seagreen, Scotland’s largest wind farm, was paid £65 million last year to restrict its output 71% of the time, according to analysis by Octopus Energy.

Balancing the grid in this way has already cost the country more than £500 million this year alone, the company’s analysis shows. The total could reach almost £8bn a year by 2030, warns the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), the body in charge of the electricity network.

It’s pushing up all our energy bills and calling into question the government’s promise that net zero would end up delivering cheaper electricity.

Now, the government is considering a radical solution: instead of one big, national electricity market, there’ll be a number of smaller regional markets, with the government gambling that this could make the system more efficient and deliver cheaper bills.

But in reality, it’s not guaranteed that anyone will get cheaper bills. And even if some people do, many others elsewhere in the country could end up paying more.

The proposals have sparked such bitter debate that one senior energy industry executive called it “the most vicious policy fight” he has ever known. He has, he says, “lost friends” over it.

Meanwhile, political opponents who claim net zero is an expensive dead end are only too ready to pounce.

It is reported that the Prime Minister has asked to review the details of what some newspapers are calling a “postcode pricing” plan. So is the government really ready to risk the most radical shake-up of the UK electricity market since privatisation 35 years ago? And what will it really mean for our bills?

The Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, is certainly in a fix. His net zero policy is under attack like never before. The Tories have come out against it, green politicians say it isn’t delivering for ordinary people, and even Tony Blair has weighed in against it.

Meanwhile Reform UK has identified the policy as a major Achilles heel for the Labour government. “The next election will be fought on two issues, immigration and net stupid zero,” says Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice. “And we are going to win.”

Poll after poll says cost of living is a much more important for most people, and people often specifically cite concerns about rising energy prices.

Miliband sold his aggressive clean energy policies in part on cutting costs. He said that ensuring 95% of the country’s electricity comes from low-carbon sources by 2030 would slash the average electricity bill by £300.

But the potential for renewables to deliver lower costs just isn’t coming through to consumers.

Renewables now generate more than half the country’s electricity, but because of the limits to how much electricity can be moved around the system, even on windy days some gas generation is almost always needed to top the system up.

And because gas tends to be more expensive, it sets the wholesale price.

Supporters of the government’s plan argue that, as long as prices continue to be set at a national level, the hold gas has on the cost of electricity will be hard to break. Less so with regional – or, in the jargon, “zonal” – pricing.

Think of Scotland, blessed with vast wind resources but just 5.5 million people. The argument goes that if prices were set locally, it wouldn’t be necessary to pay wind farms to be turned down because there wasn’t enough capacity in the cables to carry all the electricity into England.

On a windy day like 3 June, they would have to sell that spare power to local people instead of into a national market. The theory is prices would fall dramatically – on some days Scottish customers might even get their electricity for free.

Other areas with lots of renewable power – such as Yorkshire and the North East, as well as parts of Wales – would stand to benefit too. And, as solar investment increases in Lincolnshire and other parts of the east of England, they could also see prices tumble.

All that cheap power could also transform the economics of industry. Supporters argue that it would attract energy-intensive businesses such as data centres, chemical companies and other manufacturing industries.

In London and much of the south of England, the price of electricity would sometimes be higher than in the windy north. But supporters say some of the hundreds of millions of pounds the system would save could be used to make sure no one pays more than they do now.

And those higher prices could also encourage investors to build new wind farms and solar plants closer to where the demand is. The argument is that would lower prices in the long run and bring another benefit – less electricity would need to be carried around the country, so we would need fewer new pylons, saving everyone money and meaning less clutter in the countryside.

“Zonal pricing would make the energy system as a whole dramatically more efficient, slashing this waste and cutting bills for every family and business in the country,” argues Greg Jackson, the CEO of Octopus Energy, one of the biggest energy suppliers in the UK.

Research commissioned by the company estimates the savings could top £55 billion by 2050 – which it claims could knock £50 to £100 a year off the average bill. Octopus points out Sweden made the switch to regional pricing in just 18 months.

The supporters of regional pricing include NESO, Citizens Advice and the head of the energy regulator, Ofgem. Last week a committee of the House of Lords recommended the country should switch to the system.

There are, however, many businesses involved in building and running renewable energy plants that oppose the move.

“We’re making billions of pounds of investments in renewable power in the UK every year,” says Tom Glover, the UK chair of the giant German power company RWE. “I can’t go to my board and say let’s take a bet on billions of pounds of investment.”

He’s worried changing the way energy is priced could undermine contracts and make revenues more uncertain. And he says it risks undermining the government’s big push to switch to green energy.

The main cost of wind and solar plants is in the build. It means the price of the energy they produce is very closely tied to the cost of building and, because developers borrow most of the money, that means the interest rates they are charged.

And we are talking a lot of money. The government is expecting power companies to spend £40bn pounds a year over the next five years on renewable projects in the UK.

Glover says even a very small change in interest rates could have dramatic effects on how much renewable infrastructure is built and how much the power from it costs.

“Those additional costs could quickly overwhelm any of the benefits of regional pricing,” says Stephen Woodhouse, an economist with the consultancy firm AFRY, which has studied the impact of regional pricing for the power companies.

That would come as already high interest rates have combined with rising prices for steel and other materials to push up the cost of renewables. Plans for a huge wind farm off the coast of Yorkshire were cancelled last month because the developer said it no longer made economic sense.

And there’s another consideration, he says. The National Grid, which owns the pylons, substations and cables that move electricity around the country, is already rolling out a huge investment programme – some £60bn over the next five years – to upgrade the system ready for the new world of clean power.

That new infrastructure will mean more capacity to bring electricity from our windy northern coasts down south, and therefore also mean fewer savings from a regional pricing system in the future.

There are other arguments too. Critics warn introducing regional pricing could take years, that energy-intensive businesses like British Steel can’t just up sticks and move, and that the system will be unfair because some customers will pay more than others.

But according to Greg Jackson of Octopus, the power companies and their backers just want to protect their profits. “Unsurprisingly, it’s the companies that enjoy attractive returns from this absurd system who are lobbying hard to maintain the status quo,” he says.

Yet the power companies say Octopus has a vested interest too. It is the UK’s biggest energy supplier with some seven million customers, and owns a sophisticated billing system it licenses to other suppliers, so could gain from changes to the way electricity is priced, they claim.

And the clock is ticking. Whether the government meets its clean power targets will depend on how many new wind farms and solar plants are built.

The companies who will build them say they need certainty around the future of the electricity market, so a decision must be taken soon.

It’s expected in the next couple of weeks. Over to you, Mr Miliband.

This weekend, music fans have been soaking up the sun and the beats at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, one of Europe’s biggest festivals.

Headlining the festival were three mega stars: Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter, also known as the “Powerpuff Girls” of pop.

The stellar line-up also included Haim, Wolf Alice, Jamie xx and CMAT.

If you weren’t lucky enough to get tickets, here’s a flavour of what the weekend looked like…

Determined to avoid baggage fees for his holiday to Pisa, Benjamin Till trawled several different shops armed with a tape measure in search of the right suitcase.

Eventually, he found a case within the dimensions EasyJet allows for a free underseat bag – or so he thought.

When Mr Till arrived at London Gatwick Airport in December 2023, he discovered those measurements included wheels, meaning his bag was deemed slightly too big.

He protested, but eventually paid £48 to bring the bag on board. He says he was told to remove the wheels for the way back – which he did.

But at the gate on his way home, he was told the suitcase was still too large, so he sat on the floor, unpacking his dirty underwear and souvenirs into a bin bag.

“I don’t mind admitting that I actually burst into tears because it was so humiliating,” he says.

An EasyJet spokesperson told the BBC its ground crew had to ensure non-checked bags were within maximum dimensions “to safely and securely fit”, and that rules were made clear to customers when they booked.

Stories of passengers caught out by baggage rules they feel are inconsistent or confusing are common, with many customers complaining or seeking clarity from budget airlines on social media.

Different airlines have varying rules on the acceptable size and weight of an underseat personal item or an overhead cabin bag, with some charging customers to bring the latter.

For people who fall foul of these rules, some airlines charge hefty fees to upgrade a bag from a free personal item to an overhead cabin bag at the airport gate, or to stow an oversized cabin bag in the hold.

Passenger confusion has prompted the European Union’s largest consumer group to push for fairer and more consistent hand luggage rules, and caused one government to start cracking down on airlines over bag charges.

The EU is now looking at changing its laws – changes which would also affect UK passengers who are travelling to or from an EU destination using an EU-based airline.

On Thursday, EU transport ministers proposed standardised sizing for free underseat baggage on EU airlines, among other air travel and passenger rights’ changes – meaning this could become EU law if their position is accepted by the European Parliament.

Budget airlines say their baggage policies comply with the law while keeping fares low, but they have been facing mounting pressure and calls for change.

EU transport ministers proposed that passengers should be guaranteed one free personal item, measuring up to 40x30x15cm (including wheels and handles) – or which could reasonably fit under a plane seat.

These rules would apply to EU-based airlines (such as Ryanair, Wizz Air and EasyJet), including when they are carrying passengers from a non-EU country like the UK to an EU country and vice-versa, but not third-party airlines.

New rules would add clarity to an EU court ruling from 11 years ago, which stated hand baggage should not be subject to an extra fee, provided it met “reasonable” weight and dimensions, but did not say what reasonable was.

Currently, Ryanair allows a free carry-on bag of 40x20x25cm, while EasyJet’s dimensions for a free bag are a more generous 45x36x20 cm, including wheels and handles.

The ministers’ proposal was silent, however, on the issue of whether airlines could charge for overhead cabin bags – meaning that if their proposal was adopted into law, the current situation would not change and airlines could keep charging for that kind of hand baggage, which some in Europe have lobbied to stop.

The European Consumer Organisation, BEUC, an umbrella group for 45 independent consumer organisations from 32 countries, believes Thursday’s proposals do not go far enough, and legitimise “charging for reasonably sized hand luggage”.

In November, five airlines were fined a total of €179m (£150m) in Spain for “abusive” practices, including charging for hand luggage. Spain’s Consumer Rights Ministry said at the time that it planned to ban charging extra for carry-on luggage and other policies.

The airlines had said they would appeal the decision.

Regarding charges for overheard cabin bags, Ryanair said it fully complied with EU law in its policy, which allows one small bag on board free of charge.

“If airlines were forced to include additional carry-on bags as part of the basic fare, it would reduce choice and drive up air fares for all passengers, which would harm consumers,” the airline said.

Industry group Airlines For Europe said charging different amounts depending on baggage “allows passengers to choose the exact services that best suits their needs”.

Hand luggage dimensions should be universal, says Jane Hawkes, a consumer expert specialising in travel.

“I don’t really see why it can’t be, and why they can’t come to a voluntary agreement as to what those requirements should be for your baggage,” she tells the BBC.

“There have to be restrictions, obviously, but a one-size-fits-all kind of approach would make it a lot simpler for passengers,” she says.

BEUC said policymakers should define what “reasonable” size and weight was “to avoid surprises at the airport and ultimately reduce the number of disputes costing consumers and airlines time and money”.

Ms Hawkes suggests passengers make sure they measure their bag after it is packed, as it may expand when it is full and go over the limit.

She adds that consumers should not just be swayed by the fare price, as “if you’ve got an airline that encompasses [baggage] without you having to pay extra costs to start with, then that might be more of a better option for you”.

Mr Till would welcome a one-size-fits-all approach to underseat bags.

“It’s just really, really unfair and ridiculous and there should be one size that goes across all of the airlines,” he says.

He also criticises the permitted size of underseat cabin bags, saying “it was such a tiny, tiny size of luggage that you were allowed that it had taken me so long to find something that was so small”.

Still, he was grateful for the inexpensive air fare, and the place he had to stay in Italy, because “otherwise I wouldn’t be able to come to this beautiful country”.

Iranian officials have expanded a ban on dog walking to a swathe of cities across the country, citing public order and health and safety concerns

The ban – which mirrors a 2019 police order that barred dog walking in the capital, Tehran – has been extended to at least 18 other cities in the past week. Transporting dogs in vehicles has also been outlawed.

Dog ownership has been frowned upon in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with dogs viewed as “unclean” by authorities and a legacy of Western cultural influence.

But despite efforts to discourage it, dog ownership is rising, particularly among young people, and it is viewed as a form of rebellion against the restrictive Iranian regime.

Cities including Isfahan and Kerman have introduced bans in recent days, according to news agency AFP.

An official from the western city of Ilam, where a ban was implemented on Sunday, said “legal action” would be taken against people who violated the new rules, according to local media.

However, enforcing restrictions in the past has been patchy, while many dog owners continue to walk their dogs in public in Tehran and other parts of Iran.

There is no national law that outright bans dog ownership, but prosecutors often issue local restrictions that are enforced by police.

“Dog walking is a threat to public health, peace and comfort,” Abbas Najafi, prosecutor of the western city of Hamedan, told state newspaper Iran.

Owners have sometimes been arrested and dogs confiscated for being walked in public.

Many have taken to walking their dogs in secluded areas at night or driving them around to evade detection.

Politicians in the Islamic regime regard pet ownership as un-Islamic. Many religious scholars view petting dogs or coming into contact with their saliva as “najis” or ritually impure.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has previously described dog ownership – other than for the purposes of herding, hunting and security – as “reprehensible”.

In 2021, 75 lawmakers condemned dog ownership as a “destructive social problem” that could “gradually change the Iranian and Islamic way of life”.

Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance banned advertisements for pets or pet-related products in 2010 – and in 2014 there was a drive in parliament to fine and even flog dog-walkers, though the bill did not pass.

Following the recent crackdown, critics argue the police should focus on public safety at a time of growing concern over violent crime, rather than targeting dog owners and restricting personal freedoms.

Dog ownership, defying Iran’s mandatory hijab laws, attending underground parties and drinking alcohol have long been forms of quiet rebellion against Iran’s theocratic regime.

Tatyana Popovytch had contacted every agency she could think of. She had walked every step her son Vladislav could have taken after the Russians opened fire at his car, leaving him to flee with a bullet in his leg. She had looked in mass graves, reviewed pictures of the dead, watched exhumations. And after a month, she knew no more than when she had started.

Then a stranger called.

Serhii had just been released from a Russian prison in Kursk. At morning roll call, the prisoners could not see one another, but they could hear each person state their full name and home village. Serhii memorised as many names and places as he could – 10 in total, he said – and on 9 May 2022 he called Tatyana to say that he had heard her son’s voice.

Like Vladislav, Serhii was a civilian captured from Bucha at the start of the war, when hundreds of civilians were taken from this area. Vladislav was 29 at the time. Now 32, he is still in the prison in Kursk. Serhii couldn’t explain to Tatyana why he had been released and Vladislav hadn’t. Tatyana was just glad to hear that her son was alive. “I was so overjoyed I lost the stutter I’d had since he was taken,” she said.

Three years later, to the day, Tatyana was sitting in a café in Bucha, not far from where her son was abducted, looking over the scant evidence that he was still alive: two letters from him – short, boilerplate texts, written in Russian, telling her he was well fed and well looked after. Each letter had taken around three months to reach Tatyana, making it hard for her to feel very connected to her son at any point in time.

“My son is very gentle and sensitive,” she said, with the pained expression of a parent who cannot protect their child. She was looking at pictures of Vlad ballroom dancing – a hobby from a young age. “He is so vulnerable,” she said. “I worry that he will lose his sanity there.”

According to Ukrainian authorities, nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are still in captivity in Russian prisons after being abducted by the invading army – not counting the more than 20,000 Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken to Russia.

There are growing fears now among their many thousands of loved ones, amid the apparent progress towards peace talks, that they could be forgotten or lost in the process. And those fears appear to be justified.

Under the Geneva Convention, there is a recognised mechanism for exchanging prisoners of war, but no such mechanism exists for the return of captured civilians, leaving even top Ukrainian and international officials searching for an explanation as to how they might be brought home.

“When I attend official meetings, at the ombudsman’s office or elsewhere, no one talks about getting the civilians back in the event of a ceasefire,” said Yulia Hripun, 23, whose father was kidnapped early on in the war from a village just west of Kyiv.

In the weeks after learning of her father’s captivity, Yulia used Facebook to contact another daughter of an imprisoned Ukrainian and the pair launched a new organisation to campaign for all the civilians’ release.

The group has met representatives from the UN, the European Parliament, the governments of several EU countries and the US embassy in Ukraine.

“We spoke with them but it came down to the fact that they honestly don’t understand what’s going to happen,” Yulia said, of meeting the Americans.

“The only thing they said is that Trump is interested in the issue of deported children and that maybe civilians could somehow fit into that category. But they are actually different categories that can’t be combined.”

Worryingly for Yulia and other relatives of the captured civilians, top Ukrainian officials are not pretending to have a stronger idea.

“I do not see the real, effective approach to returning the civilian detainees to Ukraine,” said Dmytro Lubinets, the country’s human rights ombudsman. “We do not have a legal basis or the mechanisms for returning them,” he said, frankly.

Further complicating the problem is Russia levelling criminal charges against some of those captured during the invasion.

“And when you see these charges, it is often ‘actions against the special military operation’,” Lubinets said. “Can you imagine opening an investigation against a Ukrainian civilian for simply resisting the invading Russian army, on Ukrainian territory?”

In May, Russia released 120 civilian detainees as part of a larger swap of prisoners of war, and further exchanges are expected. But the numbers are still vanishingly small compared to the tens of thousands said to have been seized – adults and children. And great uncertainty remains over the path towards a negotiated peace.

“You want to believe he is coming home, at the same time you can’t believe it,” said Petro Sereda, 61, a bus driver from Irpin, near Kyiv, whose son Artem was taken prisoner more than three years ago. “It is extremely difficult.”

Petro and his wife live in shipping container-style temporary accommodation in Irpin, because their home was destroyed in the invasion. Even three years on, every time the phone rings Petro thinks it might be Artem.

“It is one thing to have a letter saying he is alive, but to hear his voice… That would be the joy that he is really alive.”

The families live like this, in desperate hope. The dream is that they get to see their loved ones again. It is not a straightforward dream, though – some fear that Russian captivity will have caused lasting damage.

Tatyana, whose ballroom-dancing son Vladislav was abducted from Bucha, said she shuddered to hear the Russian language now “because it is the language my son is being tortured in.”

There is also the issue of what is missed. During Vladislav’s detention, his father passed away unexpectedly at just 50, carrying a well of guilt that he was not able to protect his son.

All Tatyana can do is prepare mentally for Vladislav’s return. She expected to “feel every possible emotion,” she said. “It is all I think about. All the time, every day.”

The Prince of Wales has described the challenge of protecting the world’s oceans as “like none that we have ever faced before.”

In a speech delivered to the Blue Economy and Finance Forum in Monaco, Prince William said life on the ocean floor was “diminishing before our eyes” and called for ambitious action “on a global, national and local level”.

At the Grimaldi Forum, named after Monaco’s royal family, the Prince spoke in both English and French as he laid out what was at risk.

“The truth is that healthy oceans are essential to all life on earth. They generate half of the world’s oxygen, regulate our climate and provide food for more than three billion people,” he said.

Rising temperatures, pollution and overfishing are causing huge damage to the world’s oceans and the communities that rely on them.

The forum comes ahead of the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, this week, with the events looking at the role oceans play in global trade, food security and sustainable energy.

In Monaco on Sunday, the Prince was speaking to an audience of environmentalists, scientists and investors – many of whom have travelled there with a view to financing ocean protection projects.

Prince William acknowledged that investing in ocean work can be a tricky proposition for investors.

“All too often, it can feel distant and disconnected from our everyday lives, allowing us to forget just how vital it is,” he said. “We must realise the potential of the blue economy for our ecosystems, our economies and our communities.”

The Prince was speaking as founder of the Earthshot Prize, which gives out five £1m prizes each year for the best solutions to the greatest climate challenges.

Several Earthshot winners and past finalists were in the audience.

Enric Sala, of the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas project, was a finalist in 2021 and has pioneered work to protect marine life.

He is also part of the team that has produced Sir David Attenborough’s new film, Oceans, which Prince William described as “the most compelling argument for immediate action I have ever seen”.

“Watching human activity reduce beautiful sea forests to barren deserts at the base of our oceans is heartbreaking,” the Prince said.

“For many, it is an urgent wake up call to just what is going on in our oceans. But it can no longer be a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”

He ended his speech saying action was needed for future generations and quoted Sir David.

“If we save the sea, we save our world.”

The Prince interviewed Sir David at the premiere of Oceans last month, with the film described by its producer as “the greatest message [Sir David] has ever told”.

Kensington Palace described the speech as a “landmark intervention” by Prince William, using his platform to generate change and bring in investments to scale up ocean solutions.

While in southern France, the Prince met President Chavez of Costa Rica, France’s President Macron and Prince Albert of Monaco – a supporter of many oceans projects and a key player at the forum.

Prince William will also attend a closed session, held in private, with ocean experts and investors.

Rwanda says it is pulling out of a central African regional bloc after a diplomatic row over its involvement in the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The country was supposed to take up the chairman role of the Economic Community of Central African States (Eccas), which rotates between its 11 members.

But it was prevented from doing so at a meeting on Saturday in Equatorial Guinea.

Announcing its decision to leave Eccas, Rwanda said its right to take up the “chairmanship… was deliberately ignored in order to impose the DRC’s diktat”.

As a result, it saw “no justification for remaining in an organisation whose current functioning runs counter to its founding principles and intended purpose”.

The row comes as efforts to end the fighting in eastern DR Congo continue. Following US mediation, Rwanda and DR Congo are working on a draft peace plan that is expected to be signed later this month.

According to a statement from the Congolese presidency, the Eccas leaders at the summit “acknowledged the aggression against the Democratic Republic of Congo by Rwanda and ordered the aggressor country to withdraw its troops from Congolese soil”.

It added that until the dispute was resolved, it was decided that Equatorial Guinea would remain in the chairman role “to the detriment of Rwanda”.

In comments directed at Rwanda, Congolese government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said that “one cannot continually and voluntarily violate the principles that underpin our regional institutions and claim to want to preside over them”.

He added that the Eccas decision “should inspire other regional organisations to adopt a firmer stance against Rwanda”.

Rwanda has been accused of supporting M23 rebels in the east of DR Congo. The group has made major advances at the beginning of the year, taking the key regional cities of Goma and Bukavu.

DR Congo’s government, the US and France have identified Rwanda as backing the M23.

Last year, a UN experts’ report said that up to 4,000 Rwandan troops were fighting alongside the rebels.

But Rwanda has denied the accusations, saying instead that its troops were deployed along its border to prevent the conflict spilling over into its territory.

Rwanda has once before, in 2007, left Eccas, whose mission is to foster co-operation and strengthen regional integration in central Africa. It rejoined several years later.

• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?
• The evidence that shows Rwanda is backing rebels in DR Congo
• ‘We would vote for peace – if we had a vote’

Activists say Israeli troops have boarded a yacht trying to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade.

“Connection has been lost” on the Madleen, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) campaign group said on the Telegram app.

It posted a photo showing people in life jackets sitting with their hands up.

Appearing to confirm that the ship had been boarded, Israel’s foreign ministry said the yacht was “safely making its way to the shores of Israel” and its passengers were “expected to return to their home countries”.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg is among those aboard the vessel, which was reported to be off the Egyptain coast.

Israel says its blockade is necessary to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas militants in Gaza.

After reporting that the yacht had been boarded, the FFC posted short, pre-recorded videos of some of the activists, including Thunberg.

In the footage, activists say “if you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped” by the Israeli military or forces supporting Israel.

The FFC earlier said the vessel, which left Italy’s island of Sicily on Friday, was carrying humanitarian aid and had been “prepared for the possibility of an Israeli attack”.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had warned that the yacht should turn back and that Israel would act against any attempt to breach the blockade.

He wrote in a post on X on Sunday: “I have instructed the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to act to prevent the ‘Madeleine’ [sic] hate flotilla from reaching the shores of Gaza – and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end.”

Katz says the purpose of Israel’s blockade, which has been in place since 2007, is to “prevent the transfer of weapons to Hamas” and is essential to Israel’s security as it seeks to destroy Hamas.

The FFC has argued that the sea blockade is illegal, characterising Katz’s statement as an example of Israel threatening the unlawful use of force against civilians and “attempting to justify that violence with smears”.

“We will not be intimidated. The world is watching,” FFC press officer Hay Sha Wiya said.

“The Madleen is a civilian vessel, unarmed and sailing in international waters, carrying humanitarian aid and human rights defenders from across the globe… Israel has no right to obstruct our effort to reach Gaza.”

The Madleen is carrying a symbolic quantity of aid, including rice and baby formula, the group said.

Citizens of Brazil, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey are onboard.

In 2010, Israeli commandos killed 10 people when they boarded Turkish ship Mavi Marmara that was leading an aid flotilla towards Gaza.

Israel recently began to allow limited aid into Gaza after a three-month land blockade, prioritising distribution through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel and the US but widely condemned by humanitarian groups.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, said last week Palestinians were being presented with the “grimmest of choices: die from starvation or risk being killed while trying to access the meagre food that is being made available”.

But in a post on X early on Monday, the Israeli foreign ministry said: “While Greta and others attempted to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity – and which included less than a single truckload of aid – more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza from Israel within the past two weeks, and in addition, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has distributed close to 11 million meals directly to civilians in Gaza.

“There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip – they do not involve Instagram selfies.”

It is almost 20 months since Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented Hamas-led cross-border attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,880 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump promised that he was not going to tolerate left-wing lawlessness on American streets and would use the full force of his presidential powers in response.

The protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts in California on Saturday night gave him an opening to follow through on that promise.

Never mind that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said that the protests were largely peaceful, or that local authorities said they could handle the clashes that did turn violent.

Trump administration officials said that immigration agents were being targeted and injured – and that local law enforcement had been too slow to respond.

• Follow updates as National Guard troops arrive in LA
• When can a president deploy National Guard on US soil?

“Waiting several hours for LAPD to show up – or them telling us that they’re not going to back us up until they have an officer in a dangerous situation – is something that just isn’t workable when you have violent protests going on,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirsty Noem told CBS News on Sunday morning.

The LAPD said it “acted as swiftly as conditions safely allowed” and began dispersing crowds within 55 minutes of receiving the call.

Over California Governor Gavin Newsom’s objection, Trump federalised the 2,000 California National Guard soldiers, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that US Marines were also on “high alert” to deploy – which would mark a rare use of the active duty military on US soil.

By Sunday morning, Trump was declaring victory and thanking the National Guard for restoring peace, even though the guard had yet to fully assemble.

The speed with which Trump reacted suggests that this is a fight his administration is prepared for – and even eager to have.

The White House believes that law and order, and aggressive immigration enforcement, are winning issues for him.

His actions will thrill his core base of supporters and could sway political independents concerned about public safety.

Noem, in her interview, said the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 in Minnesota were allowed to spread unchecked – and that the new Trump administration was going to handle things differently.

“We’re not going to let a repeat of 2020 happen,” she said.

Democrats, however, have said the administration’s use of masked immigration officers with military gear to arrest civilians in restaurants and shops has been inflammatory, and that the president’s eagerness to deploy trained soldiers was unwarranted.

“For the president to do this when it wasn’t requested, breaking with generations of tradition, is only going to incite the situation and make things worse,” said New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

“A lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings, who are trying to abide by the law.”

The US has a long tradition of summer protests, and it is only early June.

Five months into Trump’s second term, these California demonstrations may be an isolated event – or the start of greater civil unrest in the days ahead.

Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.

If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.

That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.

At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.

The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza.

Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.

It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.

Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.

I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.

In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.

As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.

Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined a request for an interview.

Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party, repeated his leader’s positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder.

Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.

It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away.

It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.

He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel’s security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.

Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead.

Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached.

The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.

According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services.

When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates.

A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.

Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive “total victory” over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023.

Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.

A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.

Weaponising food is a war crime.

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.

After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”.

• Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC

We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe’s most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif.

But for Ms Spoljaric, constantly aware of the ICRC’s role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice since 7 October and says that it is worse than hell on earth.

“Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Ms Spoljaric told me. “It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”

More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity.

“It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.”

I asked her about Israel’s justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October.

“It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions,” she said. “Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention.

“A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”

Mirjana Spoljaric spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides.

She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.

On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel’s troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world.

Speaking from Israel’s military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism.

The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. “We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.

“All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.”

Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their “unreserved support”. He had spoken to them, he said, “to ensure freedom of action”.

But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected.

“You’re never entitled to break the law,” says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School.

“How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either.

“So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn’t give you additional licence to use additional violence.

“The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war.”

What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada.

Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

“I’m shaken to my core,” Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. “I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare.

“It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened.”

But now the UK, France and Canada want an immediate halt to Israel’s latest offensive.

On 19 May, prime ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, and President Emmanuel Macron, stated, “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.”

Sanctions may be coming. The UK and France are actively discussing the circumstances in which they would be prepared to recognise Palestine as an independent state.

Netanyahu quoted from a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, in his TV speech to the Israeli people on 7 October as they wrestled with fear, anger and trauma.

He chose the line: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan.”

It comes from In the City of Slaughter, which is widely regarded as the most significant Hebrew poem of the 20th Century. Bialik wrote it as a young man in 1903, after he had visited the scene of a pogrom against Jews in Kishinev, a town then in imperial Russia and now called Chişinǎu, the capital of present-day Moldova. Over three days, Christian mobs murdered 49 Jews and raped at least 600 Jewish women.

Antisemitic brutality and killing in Europe was a major reason why Zionist Jews wanted to settle in Palestine to build their own state, in what they regarded as their historic homeland. Their ambition clashed with the desire of Palestinian Arabs to keep their land. Britain, the colonial power, did much to make their conflict worse.

By 1929 Vincent Sheean, an American journalist, was describing Jerusalem in a way that is grimly familiar to reporters there almost a century later. “The situation here is awful,” he wrote. “Every day I expect the worst.”

He added that violence was in the air, “The temperature rose – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.”

Sheean’s account of the 1920s illustrates the conflict’s deep root system in the land that Israelis and Palestinians both want and have not found a way, or a will, to share or separate.

Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent, which they call the Catastrophe. But Netanyahu, and many other Israelis and their supporters abroad connected the October attacks to the centuries of persecution Jews suffered in Europe, which culminated with Nazi Germany killing six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Netanyahu used the same references to hit back when Macron said in May that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was “shameful” and “unacceptable”.

Netanyahu said that Macron had “once again chosen to side with a murderous Islamist terrorist organisation and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels”.

The blood libel is a notorious antisemitic trope that goes back to medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of killing Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals.

After a couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC were shot dead, the gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” Netanyahu connected the murders with the criticisms of Israel’s conduct made by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada.

In a video posted on X, he declared: “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history.

“For 18 years, we had a de facto Palestinian state. It’s called Gaza. And what did we get? Peace? No. We got the most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu has also referred to the long history of antisemitism in Europe when warrants calling for his arrest, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who was defence minister for the first 13 months of the war, were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The court had also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind 7 October. All three have since been killed by Israel.

A panel of ICC judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility. “As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In a defiant statement, Netanyahu rejected “false and absurd charges”. He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island for treason in 1894. Dreyfus, who was innocent, was eventually pardoned but the affair caused a major political crisis.

“The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial – and will end the same way,” the statement said.

“No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organisation launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism.

“We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.”

But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.

“You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.”

Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”.

The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, believes Israel should have learned from its own history.

“The terrible Jewish experience of persecution and mass killing in the past should give Israel a horror of inflicting the same things on other peoples.”

History is inescapable in the Middle East, always present, a storehouse of justification to be plundered.

Israel could not wage war in Gaza using its chosen tactics without American military, financial and diplomatic support. President Donald Trump has shown signs of impatience, forcing Netanyahu to allow a few cracks in the siege that has brought Gaza to the edge of famine.

Netanyahu himself continues to express support for Trump’s widely condemned proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Mediterranean”, by emptying it of Palestinians and turning it over to the Americans for redevelopment. That is code for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, which would be a war crime. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist allies want to replace them with Jewish settlers.

Trump himself seems silent about the plan. But the Trump administration’s support for Israel, and its actions in Gaza, looks undiminished.

On 4 June, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire, the release of all the hostages and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. The other 14 members voted in favour. The next day the Americans sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was protecting the sovereignty of the US and Israel against “illegitimate actions”.

“I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel.”

Instead the ICC has had statements of support and solidarity from European leaders. A broad and increasingly bitter gap has opened up between the US and Europe over the Gaza war, and over the legitimacy of criticising Israel’s conduct.

Israel and the Trump administration reject the idea that the laws of war apply equally to all sides, because they claim it implies a false and wrong equivalence between Hamas and Israel.

Jan Egeland can see the split between Europe and the US growing.

“I hope now that Europe will grow a spine,” he says. “There have been new tones, finally, coming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, from Brussels, after all these months of industrial-scale hypocrisy where they didn’t see that there was a world record in killed aid workers, in killed nurses, in killed doctors, in killed teachers, in killed children, and all while journalists like yourself have been denied access, denied to be witnessing this.

“It’s something that the West will learn to regret really — that they were so spineless.”

The question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza outrages Israel and its supporters, led by the United States. Lawyers who believe the evidence does not support the accusation have stood up to oppose the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide against Palestinians.

But it will not go away.

The Netanyahu loyalist Boaz Bismuth answered the genocide question like this.

“How can you accuse us of genocide when the Palestinian population grew, I don’t know how many times more? How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them? How can you accuse me when I lose soldiers in order to protect my enemies?”

It is hard to prove genocide has happened; the legal bar prosecutors have to clear has been set deliberately high. But leading lawyers who have spent decades assessing matters of legal fact to see if there is a case to answer believe it is not necessary to wait for the process started in January last year by South Africa to make a years-long progress through the ICJ.

We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion.

“Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part.

“Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

South Africa based much of its genocide case against Israel on inflammatory language used by Israeli leaders. One example was the biblical reference Netanyahu used when Israel sent troops into Gaza, comparing Hamas to Amalek. In the Bible God commands the Israelites to destroy their persecutors, the Amalekites.

Another was Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration just after the Hamas attacks when he ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of international law, also believes there is proof of genocide. “Unfortunately, yes, and there is now no doubt legally as to that, and indeed that has been the case for some time.”

He points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. Prof Wilde compares Western governments’ responses to the war in Gaza to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“There has been no court decision as to the illegality of Russia’s action in Ukraine. Nonetheless, states have found it possible already to make public proclamations determining the illegality of that action. There is nothing stopping them doing that in this case.

“And so, if they are suggesting that they are going to wait, the question to ask them is, why are you waiting for a court to tell you what you already know?”

Helena Kennedy KC is “very anxious about the casual use of the word genocide and I avoid it myself because I do think that there has to be a very high level in law, a very high level of intent necessary to prove it”.

“Are we saying that it’s not genocide but it is crimes against humanity? You think that makes it sound okay? Terrible crimes against humanity? I think we’re in the process of seeing the most grievous kind of crimes taking place.

“I do think we’re on a trajectory that could very easily be towards genocide, and as a lawyer I think that there’s certainly an argument that is being made strongly for that.”

Baroness Kennedy says her advice to the British government if it was asked for would be, “We’ve got to be very careful about being complicit in grievous crimes ourselves.”

Eventually, a ceasefire will come. It will not end the conflict, or head off the certainty of a long and bitter epilogue. The genocide case at the ICJ guarantees that. So do the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Once journalists and war crimes investigators can get into the Gaza Strip, they will emerge with more hard facts about what has happened.

Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble.

I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland

He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

The Israeli military has said it has located and identified the body of Mohammed Sinwar, the military leader of Palestinian armed group Hamas in Gaza.

His body was discovered in a tunnel underneath the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Sunday.

It said it had verified the body’s identity through DNA checks – though Hamas has not publicly confirmed his death.

Sinwar, 49, was killed in an air strike on 13 May, which the Hamas-run civil defence agency said killed 28 people and injured dozens.

Sinwar’s body was found alongside that of Mohammad Sabaneh, the commander of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, the IDF said.

It added that “several items belonging to Sinwar and Sabaneh were located, along with additional intelligence findings that were transferred for further investigation”.

The IDF said other bodies were found, which it was looking to identify.

It took a small group of foreign journalists into Gaza to Khan Younis to show them the tunnel on Sunday.

It also published video of the small entrance to the tunnel, accessible through freshly dug earth just in front of the European Hospital.

The footage shows a long, narrow underground corridor that leads to several rooms.

Inside some of them, piles of clothes and plastic chairs are visible, with a rifle leaning up against the wall. One video also shows a shrouded body being pulled from the tunnel by a rope.

IDF spokesperson Brig Gen Effie Defrin said that in one of the rooms they found the Sinwar’s body.

“This is another example of the cynical use by Hamas, using civilians as human shields, using civilian infrastructure, hospitals, again and again,” he said.

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of using hospitals as hiding places for weapons and command centres, which the group denies.

The IDF has mounted sieges and attacks on hospitals in Gaza, or ordered their evacuation, leaving the territory’s health system on the verge of total collapse.

Such attacks have caused widespread international concern, as many hospitals and medical facilities have been put out of action – and the lives of patients and staff put at risk.

In a statement after an Israeli strike on al-Ahli hospital in April, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed his deep alarm and declared that, under international humanitarian law, the “wounded and sick, medical personnel and medical facilities, including hospitals, must be respected and protected”.

Hospital staff in Gaza have also repeatedly denied that Hamas is using their facilities as a base.

The IDF will point to this latest footage as vindication of its claims and its military strategy.

As with so much in Gaza, however, full independent verification is not possible.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023 , in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,880 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

The renewed fighting in Gaza comes following the collapse of a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal a few months ago.

Since then, Israel has restated its aim to destroy Hamas and recover the hostages, of whom 54 remain in captivity and 23 are thought to still be alive.

Mohammed Sinwar joined Hamas shortly after its founding in the late 1980s and became a member of the group’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

He rose through the ranks and by 2005 he was commander of the Khan Younis Brigade.

Sinwar was also reported to have been close to another of Hamas’s previous military chiefs, Mohammed Deif, and had been involved in the planning of the 7 October attack.

His brother and predecessor, Yahya Sinwar – believed to be the one of the masterminds behind the 7 October attack – was killed by Israeli troops last October.

Joe is somewhat shorter than the average American man, at 5ft 6in (1.67m) – but when Ashley came across his Tinder profile last year, the last thing she was thinking about was Joe’s height.

“We were talking about our hobbies and passions,” Ashley says, “not superficial things.”

News that the dating app where Ashley and Joe found love is trialling a new feature – allowing some premium users to filter potential matches according to their height – was met with mixed reactions earlier this week.

While daters like Ashley worry it might stifle possible connections, others say the feature might actually help shorter men find a match.

Tinder’s trial is running in “limited” parts of the world, excluding the UK, with the feature only available to those who pay for its two highest subscription tiers. Tinder has not told the BBC which countries it is being trialled in.

It works by informing the app’s matching algorithm based on a user’s stated preference, rather than filtering out certain users altogether. But online reaction to its launch has ranged from amusement to outrage.

“Tinder just declared war on short kings,” wrote one social media user, while another said they’d be “using the Tinder height filter to filter out all men taller than 5ft 9in”.

Another commented: “I don’t care what Tinder says – short kings are elite.”

Ashley, from Wisconsin, says she understands why height can be a deal-breaker for some daters – but that wasn’t the case for her.

“I’ve heard people talk: ‘I can’t wear heels or my partner will look shorter,'” the 24-year-old says, “but that’s never mattered to me”.

Joe is “just such an amazing person”, she says, it wouldn’t matter to her “if he was six feet tall or five feet tall”.

Using a height filter might actually have prevented her and Joe from ever meeting, she adds – and she reckons others could be missing out too.

Joe, meanwhile, says Tinder’s height filtering feature could actually make dating harder for shorter men.

“Limiting yourself to physical things about someone will lessen your opportunities and chances of finding a partner,” he says. “Height shouldn’t matter when you’re looking for forever.”

The 27-year-old says his own dating experience hadn’t “all been so bad” and that his matches had judged him based on his personality, rather than his height.

But he thinks the new Tinder filter might affect other users’ chances of meaningful connections.

Tinder is not breaking new ground here – seasoned swipers will be familiar with various kinds of filter, which are now common features of dating apps including in the UK.

Hinge, a key Tinder competitor, already allows paying users to filter matches according to their height. Other filters include education level, religion, and checking whether potential matches smoke, drink or take drugs.

Bumble allows premium users to avoid matches with certain star signs, while paying Grindr users can filter by body type.

But as the world’s largest dating app, Tinder’s experiment with height filtering still has huge significance, and has sparked discussion in Britain too.

At 5ft 9in, Matt Heal, from Manchester, says he feels jaded about the online dating scene.

Matt’s around average height for a man in the UK, but says some daters’ preferences for taller men have disadvantaged him on the apps.

“As someone who is neither very tall nor financially well off, I have definitely felt desensitised about dating [using apps],” he says.

The 28-year-old thinks it’s understandable that apps like Tinder try to optimise their matching algorithms, though.

“People have preferences based on all sorts of things,” Matt says, adding these features help people “see others they are interested in, rather than swiping for hours on people you don’t consider compatible”.

However, he thinks daters shouldn’t be too rigid about what they’re looking for.

“If you were into people who are over six feet, would you really not date someone who’s 5ft 11in” – if they were good looking and had similar interests?”

Matt feels it’s easier for men his height to meet people offline, explaining that meeting someone in person, through mutual friends, for example, can mean a less prescriptive approach.

But Beth McColl, 31, thinks the Tinder height filter may offer shorter men some reassurance. The London-based writer and podcaster says it could help people avoid “women who only want to date really tall men”.

Whether or not women will actually use this feature, Beth is uncertain.

“Women typically don’t have a problem with dating a shorter man,” Beth says, “but they do, maybe, have a problem with dating a shorter man who is really hung up on it.”

Aside from the filters, Beth believes the real problem of modern dating lies with the dating apps themselves.

“It encourages us to treat dating like picking something from the menu,” she says, adding, “there’s nothing in being a little bit taller that will make that man a better partner – but I think we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that there’s truth in that.”

As to whether the Tinder move will prove popular with users on a mass scale – that remains to be seen.

“Features like this capitalise on a well-known preference – some women desire taller partners,” says Lara Besbrode, managing director at MatchMaker UK. “They don’t address the deeper issues at the heart of online dating fatigue.”

But, she says, attraction is “not static” and can evolve over time.

“A man who is 5ft 7in (1.7m), but confident, kind, and emotionally attuned can be far more attractive than someone who ticks the 6ft (1.8m) box but lacks substance,” Lara says.

Tinder told the BBC its new filter demonstrates it is “building with urgency, clarity, and focus” and that it is “part of a broader effort to help people connect more intentionally” on the app.

A spokesperson said: “Not every test becomes a permanent feature, but every test helps us learn how we can deliver smarter, more relevant experiences and push the category forward.”

And that fleeting moment when stumbling across each other’s profiles on a dating app can be vital, as Ashley and Joe know.

Ashley worries that people who use Tinder’s new filter “might be cutting themselves off from people who’re a potential match for them, rather than someone who’s their preferred height”.

But for now her swiping days are over, and her relationship with Joe is blossoming. He’s “phenomenal”, Ashley says, “super sweet”.

Sonny Olumati was born in Rome and has lived in Italy all his life but the country he calls home does not recognise him as its own.

To Italy, Sonny is Nigerian, like his passport, and the 39-year-old is only welcome as long as his latest residence permit.

“I’ve been born here. I will live here. I will die here,” the dancer and activist tells me in what he calls “macaroni” Italian-English beneath the palm trees of a scruffy Roman park.

“But not having citizenship is like… being rejected from your country. And I don’t think this is a feeling we should have”.

That is why Sonny and others have been campaigning for a “Yes” vote in a national referendum on Sunday and Monday that proposes halving the time required to apply for Italian citizenship.

Any children under 18 would automatically be naturalised along with their parents.

Cutting the wait from 10 years to five would bring this country in line with most others in Europe and, proponents argue, improve integration.

The referendum was initiated by a citizens’ initiative and is supported by civil society groups. But for such a referendum to be valid, 50% of all voters in Italy have to turn up.

Giorgia Meloni, the country’s hard-right prime minister, has announced she will boycott the vote, declaring the citizenship law already “excellent” and “very open”.

Other parties allied to her are calling on Italians to go to the beach instead of the polling station.

Sonny will not be taking part either. Without citizenship, he is not entitled to vote.

The question of who gets to be Italian is a sensitive one.

Large numbers of migrants and refugees arrive in the country each year helped across the Mediterranean from North Africa by smuggling gangs.

Meloni’s populist government has made a big deal about cutting the number of arrivals.

But this referendum is aimed at those who have travelled legally for work to a country with a rapidly shrinking and ageing population.

The aim is limited: to speed up the process for getting citizenship, not ease the strict criteria.

“Knowledge of the Italian language, not having criminal charges, continuous residence et cetera – all the various requirements remain the same,” explains Carla Taibi of the liberal party More Europe, one of several backers of the referendum.

The reform would affect long-term foreign residents already employed in Italy and their families: from those on factory production lines in the north to those caring for pensioners in plush Rome neighbourhoods.

Up to 1.4 million people could qualify for citizenship immediately, with some estimates ranging higher.

“These people live in Italy, study and work and contribute. This is about changing the perception of them so they are not strangers anymore – but Italian,” argues Taibi.

The reform would also have practical implications.

As a non-Italian, Sonny cannot apply for a public sector job, and even struggled to get a driving licence.

When he was booked for hit reality TV show Fame Island last year, he ended up arriving two weeks late on set in Honduras because he had had so many problems getting the right paperwork.

For a long time, Meloni ignored the referendum entirely. Italy’s publicly owned media, run by a close Meloni ally, have also paid scant attention to the vote.

There is no substantive “No” campaign, making it hard to have a balanced debate.

But the real reason appears strategic.

“They don’t want to raise awareness of the significance of the referendum,” Professor Roberto D’Alimonte of Luiss University in Rome explains. “That’s rational, to make sure that the 50% threshold won’t be reached.”

The prime minister eventually announced she would turn up at a polling station “to show respect for the ballot box” – but refuse to cast a vote.

“When you disagree, you also have the option of abstaining,” Meloni told a TV chat show this week, after critics accused her of disrespecting democracy.

Italy’s citizenship system was “excellent”, she argued, already granting citizenship to more foreign nationals than most countries in Europe: 217,000 last year, according to the national statistics agency, Istat.

But about 30,000 of those were Argentines with Italian ancestry on the other side of the world, unlikely even to visit.

Meanwhile, Meloni’s coalition partner, Roberto Vannacci of the far-right League, accused those behind the referendum of “selling off our citizenship and erasing our identity”.

I ask Sonny why he thinks his own application for citizenship has taken over two decades.

“It’s racism,” he replies immediately.

At one point his file was lost completely, and he has now been told his case is “pending”.

“We have ministers who talk about white supremacy – racial replacement of Italy,” the activist recalls a 2023 comment by the agriculture minister from Meloni’s own party.

“They don’t want black immigration and we know it. I was born here 39 years ago so I know what I say.”

It is an accusation the prime minister has denied repeatedly.

Insaf Dimassi, 28, defines herself as “Italian without citizenship”.

“Italy let me grow up and become the person I am today, so not being seen as a citizen is extremely painful and frustrating,” she explains from the northern city of Bologna where she is studying for a PhD.

Insaf’s father travelled to Italy for work when she was a baby, and she and her mother then joined him. Her parents finally got Italian citizenship 20 days after Insaf turned 18. That meant she had to apply for herself from scratch, including proving a steady income.

Insaf chose to study instead.

“I arrived here at nine months old, and maybe at 33 or 34 – if all goes well – I can finally be an Italian citizen,” she says, exasperated.

She remembers exactly when the significance of her “outsider” status hit home: it was when she was asked to run for election alongside a candidate for mayor in her hometown.

When she shared the news with her parents, full of excitement, they had to remind her she was not Italian and was not eligible.

“They say it’s a matter of meritocracy to be a citizen, that you have to earn it. But more than being myself, what do I have to demonstrate?” Insaf wants to know.

“Not being allowed to vote, or be represented, is being invisible.”

On the eve of the referendum, students in Rome wrote a call to the polls on the cobbles of a city square.

“Vote ‘YES’ on the 8th and 9th [of June],” they spelled out in giant cardboard letters.

With a government boycott and such meagre publicity, the chances of hitting the 50% turnout threshold seem slim.

But Sonny argues that this vote is just the beginning.

“Even if they vote ‘No’, we will stay here – and think about the next step,” he says. “We have to start to talk about the place of our community in this country.”

During the mid-1970s, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s imposition of the Emergency, India entered a period where civil liberties were suspended and much of the political opposition was jailed.

Behind this authoritarian curtain, her Congress party government quietly began reimagining the country – not as a democracy rooted in checks and balances, but as a centralised state governed by command and control, historian Srinath Raghavan reveals in his new book.

In Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India, Prof Raghavan shows how Gandhi’s top bureaucrats and party loyalists began pushing for a presidential system – one that would centralise executive power, sideline an “obstructionist” judiciary and reduce parliament to a symbolic chorus.

Inspired in part by Charles de Gaulle’s France, the push for a stronger presidency in India reflected a clear ambition to move beyond the constraints of parliamentary democracy – even if it never fully materialised.

It all began, writes Prof Raghavan, in September 1975, when BK Nehru, a seasoned diplomat and a close aide of Gandhi, wrote a letter hailing the Emergency as a “tour de force of immense courage and power produced by popular support” and urged Gandhi to seize the moment.

Parliamentary democracy had “not been able to provide the answer to our needs”, Nehru wrote. In this system the executive was continuously dependent on the support of an elected legislature “which is looking for popularity and stops any unpleasant measure”.

What India needed, Nehru said, was a directly elected president – freed from parliamentary dependence and capable of taking “tough, unpleasant and unpopular decisions” in the national interest, Prof Raghavan writes.

The model he pointed to was de Gaulle’s France – concentrating power in a strong presidency. Nehru imagined a single, seven-year presidential term, proportional representation in Parliament and state legislatures, a judiciary with curtailed powers and a press reined in by strict libel laws. He even proposed stripping fundamental rights – right to equality or freedom of speech, for example – of their justiciability.

Nehru urged Indira Gandhi to “make these fundamental changes in the Constitution now when you have two-thirds majority”. His ideas were “received with rapture” by the prime minister’s secretary PN Dhar. Gandhi then gave Nehru approval to discuss these ideas with her party leaders but said “very clearly and emphatically” that he should not convey the impression that they had the stamp of her approval.

Prof Raghavan writes that the ideas met with enthusiastic support from senior Congress leaders like Jagjivan Ram and foreign minister Swaran Singh. The chief minister of Haryana state was blunt: “Get rid of this election nonsense. If you ask me just make our sister [Indira Gandhi] President for life and there’s no need to do anything else”. M Karunanidhi of Tamil Nadu – one of two non-Congress chief ministers consulted – was unimpressed.

When Nehru reported back to Gandhi, she remained non-committal, Prof Raghavan writes. She instructed her closest aides to explore the proposals further.

What emerged was a document titled “A Fresh Look at Our Constitution: Some suggestions”, drafted in secrecy and circulated among trusted advisors. It proposed a president with powers greater than even their American counterpart, including control over judicial appointments and legislation. A new “Superior Council of Judiciary”, chaired by the president, would interpret “laws and the Constitution” – effectively neutering the Supreme Court.

Gandhi sent this document to Dhar, who recognised it “twisted the Constitution in an ambiguously authoritarian direction”. Congress president DK Barooah tested the waters by publicly calling for a “thorough re-examination” of the Constitution at the party’s 1975 annual session.

The idea never fully crystallised into a formal proposal. But its shadow loomed over the Forty-second Amendment Act, passed in 1976, which expanded Parliament’s powers, limited judicial review and further centralised executive authority.

The amendment made striking down laws harder by requiring supermajorities of five or seven judges, and aimed to dilute the Constitution’s ‘basic structure doctrine’ that limited parliament’s power.

It also handed the federal government sweeping authority to deploy armed forces in states, declare region-specific Emergencies, and extend President’s Rule – direct federal rule – from six months to a year. It also put election disputes out of the judiciary’s reach.

This was not yet a presidential system, but it carried its genetic imprint – a powerful executive, marginalised judiciary and weakened checks and balances. The Statesman newspaper warned that “by one sure stroke, the amendment tilts the constitutional balance in favour of the parliament.”

Meanwhile, Gandhi’s loyalists were going all in. Defence minister Bansi Lal urged “lifelong power” for her as prime minister, while Congress members in the northern states of Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh unanimously called for a new constituent assembly in October 1976.

“The prime minister was taken aback. She decided to snub these moves and hasten the passage of the amendment bill in the parliament,” writes Prof Raghavan.

By December 1976, the bill had been passed by both houses of parliament and ratified by 13 state legislatures and signed into law by the president.

After Gandhi’s shock defeat in 1977, the short-lived Janata Party – a patchwork of anti-Gandhi forces – moved quickly to undo the damage. Through the Forty-third and Forty-fourth Amendments, it rolled back key parts of the Forty Second, scrapping authoritarian provisions and restoring democratic checks and balances.

Gandhi was swept back to power in January 1980, after the Janata Party government collapsed due to internal divisions and leadership struggles. Curiously, two years later, prominent voices in the party again mooted the idea of a presidential system.

In 1982, with President Sanjiva Reddy’s term ending, Gandhi seriously considered stepping down as prime minister to become president of India.

Her principal secretary later revealed she was “very serious” about the move. She was tired of carrying the Congress party on her back and saw the presidency as a way to deliver a “shock treatment to her party, thereby giving it a new stimulus”.

Ultimately, she backed down. Instead, she elevated Zail Singh, her loyal home minister, to the presidency.

Despite serious flirtation, India never made the leap to a presidential system. Did Gandhi, a deeply tactical politician, hold herself back ? Or was there no national appetite for radical change and India’s parliamentary system proved sticky?

There was a hint of presidential drift in the early 1970s, as India’s parliamentary democracy – especially after 1967 – grew more competitive and unstable, marked by fragile coalitions, according to Prof Raghavan. Around this time, voices began suggesting that a presidential system might suit India better. The Emergency became the moment when these ideas crystallised into serious political thinking.

“The aim was to reshape the system in ways that immediately strengthened her hold on power. There was no grand long-term design – most of the lasting consequences of her [Gandhi’s] rule were likely unintended,” Prof Raghavan told the BBC.

“During the Emergency, her primary goal was short-term: to shield her office from any challenge. The Forty Second Amendment was crafted to ensure that even the judiciary couldn’t stand in her way.”

The itch for a presidential system within the Congress never quite faded. As late as April 1984, senior minister Vasant Sathe launched a nationwide debate advocating a shift to presidential governance – even while in power.

But six months later, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in Delhi, and with her, the conversation abruptly died. India stayed a parliamentary democracy.

US President Donald Trump has said his relationship with Elon Musk is over.

“I would assume so, yeah,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday, when asked if he thought the pair’s close relationship had ended. He replied “No” when asked if he wished to mend the damaged ties.

The comments were Trump’s latest since the epic fallout between him and Musk unravelled on social media.

It came after the tech billionaire – who donated millions to Trump’s election campaign and became a White House aide – publicly criticised the president’s tax and spending bill, a key domestic policy.

A majority of Republicans have fallen in line behind the president. Vice-President JD Vance said that Musk had “gone so nuclear” and may never be welcomed back into the fold.

Vance told podcaster Theo Von that it was a “big mistake” for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to attack the president.

For weeks, Musk had been criticising Trump’s signature legislation – dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill” – as it made its way through Congress.

He said that, if passed, the bill would add trillions of dollars to the national deficit and “undermine” the work he did as the head of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its efforts to cut government spending.

Shortly after leaving Doge after 129 days in the job, Musk posted on his social media site X that the bill was a “disgusting abomination” – but did not criticise Trump directly.

On Thursday, however, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” with Musk’s behaviour.

Musk responded with a flurry of posts on X, saying that Trump would have lost the election without him and accusing Trump of being implicated in files of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail awaiting sex trafficking charges.

He has since deleted the post and Epstein’s lawyer has come out denying the accusations.

Trump responded on his social media platform Truth Social, saying that Musk had gone “crazy”. In one post, he threatened to cut Musk’s contracts with the federal government.

In his interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said Musk had been “disrespectful to the office of the president”.

“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the president,” Trump said.

Musk, the world’s richest man, who donated roughly $250m to Trump’s presidential campaign, suggested during the social media feud that he might back some of Trump’s opponents during next year’s midterm elections, throwing his support behind challengers to the lawmakers who supported Trump’s tax bill.

When asked about the prospect of Musk backing Democratic candidates that run against Republicans, Trump said he would face “serious consequences”.

A new round of talks aimed at resolving a trade war between the US and China is set take place in London on Monday.

US President Donald Trump announced on Friday that a senior US delegation would meet Chinese representatives. Over the weekend, Beijing confirmed that Vice Premier He Lifeng will attend the talks.

The announcements came after Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping had a phone conversation last week, which the US president described as a “very good talk”.

Last month, the world’s two biggest economies agreed a temporary truce to lower import taxes on goods being traded between them, but since then both countries have accused the other of breaching the deal.

Writing on his Truth Social platform on Friday, Trump said US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer would meet Chinese officials in London on Monday.

On Saturday, China’s foreign ministry said Vice Premier He would be in the UK between 8 and 13 June, and that a meeting of the “China-US economic and trade mechanism” would take place.

The new round of negotiations came after Trump said his phone conversation with Xi on Thursday mainly focused on trade and had “resulted in a very positive conclusion for both countries”.

According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Xi told Trump that the US should “withdraw the negative measures it has taken against China”.

The call was the first time the two leaders had spoken since the trade war erupted in February.

When Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from a number of countries earlier this year, China was the hardest hit. Beijing responded with its own higher rates on US imports, and this triggered tit-for-tat increases that peaked at 145%.

In May, talks held in Switzerland led to a temporary truce that Trump called a “total reset”.

It brought US tariffs on Chinese products down to 30%, while Beijing slashed levies on US imports to 10% and promised to lift barriers on critical mineral exports.

The agreement gave both sides a 90-day deadline to try to reach a trade deal.

But since then, relations appeared to have soured. Last month, Trump said China had “totally violated its agreement with us”, and then a few days later China said the US had “severely violated” the agreement.

The US accused China of failing to restart shipments of critical minerals and rare earth magnets vital to car and computer industries.

On Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said it had approved some applications for rare earth export licences, although it did not provide details of which countries involved.

The announcement came after Trump said on Friday that Xi had agreed to restart trade in rare earth materials.

Bu speaking on Sunday, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CBS News that “those exports of critical minerals have been getting released at a rate that is, you know, higher than it was, but not as high as we believe we agreed to in Geneva”.

US President Donald Trump says he has deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to uphold “very strong law and order”, after violent protests against immigration raids erupted in America’s second-biggest city.

His decision to summon the National Guard overruled the authority of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the move “purposefully inflammatory”.

At least 118 immigrants have been arrested in operations across the city over the past week, which led to clashes as demonstrators gathered outside businesses that were thought to have been raided.

The LA County Sheriff’s Department said crowds “became increasingly agitated, throwing objects and exhibiting violent behaviour”, prompting police to use tear gas and stun grenades.

Governor Newsom, along with the LA mayor and a California congresswoman, said in separate comments they believed local police could handle the protests. Twenty-nine people were arrested, according to local officials.

• Follow live coverage here
• Trump’s quick intervention in LA may thrill his base but inflame tensions

To quell the growing unrest, Trump issued a directive under a rarely used federal law that allows the president to federalise National Guard troops under certain circumstances.

The National Guard acts as a hybrid entity that serves both state and federal interests. Typically, a state’s National Guard force is activated at the request of the governor.

In this case, Trump has circumvented that step by invoking a specific provision of the US Code of Armed Services titled 10 U.S.C. 12406, which lists three circumstances under which the president can federalise the National Guard.

If the US “is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation”; “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the government; or “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.

Trump said in his memorandum requesting the National Guard that the protests in Los Angeles “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”.

The National Guard’s role in Los Angeles will be to protect federal agents, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Homeland Security, as they carry out their duties.

The troops will not be conducting their own immigration raids or performing ordinary law enforcement activities against civilians.

The law generally prohibits domestic use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement, outside of some exceptions like the Insurrection Act.

Although Trump has threatened to invoke that act in the past, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for example, he has not done so here.

According to experts, this is the first time the National Guard has been activated without request of the state’s governor since 1965.

In 1992, the National Guard was federalised in LA during riots after police officers were acquitted for the beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Then-President George HW Bush sent troops at the request of California’s governor at the time, Pete Wilson.

In 2020, National Guard troops were deployed in some states in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd.

Senior figures in the Trump administration have backed the president’s decision to mobilise the National Guard. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media it was “COMMON SENSE”, adding: “Violence & destruction against federal agents & federal facilities will NOT be tolerated.”

Hegseth also said that active duty US Marines stationed at nearby Camp Pendleton would be sent if needed and were on “high alert”.

Senator Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, told CNN: “Does it look like it’s [the protests] under control? Absolutely not.”

However, several Californian officials insist city police are equipped to deal with the unrest, and the military’s involvement is unnecessary.

California congresswoman Nanette Barragán, a Democrat who represents the city of Paramount in LA’s suburbs where the protests have taken place, told CNN: “We don’t need the help.”

The National Guard is “only going to make things worse”, she said.

Her words echo Governor Newsom, who also spoke against National Guard troops being sent to his state.

“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles – not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Newsom wrote on X.

LA Mayor Karen Bass told ABC7 the National Guard was not needed.

Ice officers conducted raids in heavily Latino parts of LA on Friday, as part of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Forty-four people were arrested, said a spokesperson for Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.

The efforts are a part of the president’s aim to enact the “biggest deportation operation” in US history.

Los Angeles, where over one-third of the population is foreign-born, has been a big target.

In early May, Ice announced it had arrested 239 undocumented migrants during a weeklong operation in the LA area, as overall arrests and deportations lagged behind Trump’s expectations.

The following month, the White House increased its goal for Ice officials to make at least 3,000 arrests per day.

Authorities have expanded their search increasingly to include workplaces such as restaurants and retail shops. The LA raids that sparked the protests occurred at a wholesale clothing supplier and a Home Depot outlet.

“You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation,” Trump’s border official Thomas Homan said.

The ambitious deportation campaign has included rounding up migrants on military planes and sending them to Guantanamo Bay before bringing them back to Louisiana.

Other migrants have been deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, including at least one who was in the US legally. Some migrants have been sent to countries where they are not from.

Many of these actions have been met by legal challenges in court.

On Friday, protesters clashed with federal agents outside a clothing wholesaler. They threw objects at agents and attempted to block federal officials from carrying out their arrests. In response, officials in riot gear used flash bang grenades and pepper spray to subdue the crowd.

Outside a Home Depot store in Paramount, roughly 20 miles (32 km) south of downtown LA, tear gas and flash bangs were deployed against protesters that gathered again on Saturday.

In a social media post, Ice described the scene on Saturday, saying: “Our brave officers were vastly outnumbered – over 1,000 rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building.”

Responding to the protests, the LA Police Department said it made 29 arrests, almost all for failure to disperse, which is a misdemeanour, according to the BBC’s media partner CBS News.

On Sunday, day three of the protests, National Guard troops arrived to LA and were seen walling off protesters outside of a federal building that contains a detention centre.

In one of the more tense exchanges, federal officers with Department of Homeland Security badges fired what appeared to be tear gas and pepper spray and some kind of non-lethal round towards the crowd.