Israeli strikes killed 22 people in Beirut in the deadliest attack on the city centre since recent hostilities broke out, as the UN said its peacekeepers in Lebanon’s south were in growing danger.

The strikes hit a densely packed residential neighbourhood of apartment buildings and small shops in the heart of the Lebanese capital. Israel had not previously struck the area, which is removed from Beirut’s southern suburbs where Hezbollah’s headquarters have been repeatedly bombed over the past weeks.

Wafiq Safa, who heads Hezbollah’s liaison and coordination unit responsible for working with Lebanese security agencies, was reportedly the target of Thursday’s strikes, but survived, security sources told the Reuters news agency.

There was no immediate comment by Israel. The Israeli military issued a new evacuation warning on Thursday night for Beirut’s southern suburbs including specific buildings. Earlier in the day, Israel warned Lebanese civilians that to avoid the fighting they should not return to homes in the south.

The casualties in central Beirut on Thursday night rose quickly; the Lebanese health ministry reported 22 people killed and 117 wounded. Among the dead were a family of eight, including three children, who had evacuated from the south, according to a security source.

The deadly attack came as a UN official told the security council that the safety of more than 10,400 UN peacekeepers in Lebanon was “increasingly in jeopardy” and operations had virtually halted since late September, coinciding with Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The UN peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said Unifil had decided to relocate about 300 peacekeepers to larger bases temporarily for their safety and that one contractor had already been killed.

His comments came after the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon said Israeli forces had deliberately fired on its positions, injuring two peacekeepers. Unifil called attacks on peacekeepers “a grave violation of international humanitarian law”.

The White House said the US was deeply concerned by those reports and was pressing Israel for details. Israel’s military said its troops operated in the Naqoura area, “next to a Unifil base”. “Accordingly, the IDF instructed the UN forces in the area to remain in protected spaces, following which the forces opened fire in the area,” Israel’s statement said, adding it maintains routine communication with Unifil.

The peacekeepers were determined to remain at their posts despite Israeli attacks and orders by Israel’s military to leave, said the UN force’s spokesperson, Andrea Tenenti. Its 50 contributing countries had agreed on Thursday to keep deploying more than 10,000 peacekeepers between the Litani River in the north and the UN-recognised boundary between Lebanon and Israel known as the Blue Line in the south.

“We are there because the [UN] security council has asked us to be there. So we are staying until the situation becomes impossible for us to operate,” Tenenti said.

In New York, Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said Israel recommends Unifil relocate 5km north “to avoid danger as fighting intensifies”.

The conflict in Lebanon erupted one year ago when Hezbollah opened fire in support of Hamas at the start of the Gaza war. It has intensified dramatically in recent weeks, with Israel bombing Beirut’s southern suburbs, the south and the Bekaa Valley, before sending in ground forces.

The Middle East remains on high alert for further escalation in the region, awaiting Israel’s response to an Iranian missile strike on 1 October.

With Reuters

The director of the only major hospital in the northern Gaza Strip now offering specialised care for children has described a “catastrophic situation” as Israeli forces launched new ground assaults and airstrikes in the north and centre of the territory.

Dr Husam Abu Safiyeh, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, said it had not been possible to comply with an Israeli army order to evacuate all patients within 24 hours.

“We have seven cases in intensive care … all these cases are very severe and they all need intensive surgical or medical care,” he said. “Moving or transporting these patients puts their life in serious danger, it is not possible to transfer them. In addition, there is no facility in Gaza that has capacity to take them as they are all overrun with their own similar cases.”

The latest raids and strikes came on the sixth day of an Israeli offensive centred on the devastated cities of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun and the Jabaliya refugee camp, all of which experienced heavy fighting in the first months of the war. The offensive has trapped hundreds of thousands of civilians in fast-deteriorating conditions.

Farther south, an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in the central town of Deir al-Balah killed at least 26 people, including a child and seven women, Palestinian officials said on Thursday.

Dr Eid Sabah, the director of the nursing department at Kamal Adwan hospital, which offers paediatric intensive care facilities and a malnutrition clinic, said a fleet of ambulances evacuated some but not all of its patients.

The hospital is now running short of medical supplies as well as diesel for its generators, which means electricity and oxygen shortages. Doctors said 100 dead and more than 300 injured had been brought into the facility in recent days, including many children. “Until this moment, none of the workers inside the hospital was able to leave it due to the danger of the bombing,” Sabah said.

Israeli forces issued evacuation orders to civilians in Jabaliya and other parts of Gaza before launching their operations but one resident in Jabaliya said they had been trapped in their homes by fighting and food was running out.

Heba Abu Habl, who has three daughters and two sons, has been displaced 18 times since first leaving Beit Lahiya early in the war, and is now stuck in Jabaliya.

“We have been trapped for days and we don’t know where to go. All places are dangerous and are subjected to heavy and indiscriminate bombardment. In the end we decided to stay where we are … but we don’t have water or food and we cannot sleep at night because of the intensity of the bombing,” Abu Habl, 38, said.

Gaza’s health ministry said it recovered 40 bodies from Jabaliya, a densely populated neighbourhood in northern Gaza, between Sunday and Tuesday, and another 14 from communities farther north.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, Unrwa, said on X on Wednesday that at least 400,000 people were trapped in Jabaliya. “Many are refusing [to evacuate] because they know too well that no place anywhere in Gaza is safe,” he added.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attack on the school in Deir al-Balah. Witnesses said the strike targeted a makeshift post of the Hamas-run police inside the shelter.

Israel has repeatedly attacked schools turned shelters in Gaza, accusing militants of deliberately using the population as a human shield. Hamas has denied the charge. Numerous strikes have targeted police in Gaza, who Israeli officials argue are part of Hamas, and who have now largely withdrawn from the streets.

On Thursday, UN investigators accused Israel of deliberately targeting health facilities and killing and torturing medical personnel in Gaza.

“Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza,” the UN independent international commission of inquiry said in a statement.

Israeli officials say its forces do not target civilians and accuse Hamas of building command centres under hospitals and other civilian infrastructure. Hamas denies the charge.

The Israeli military said the latest raid was intended to stop Hamas fighters staging further attacks from Jabaliya and to prevent them from regrouping. Though the group has suffered significant losses, Hamas has continued to launch attacks on Israeli forces and fire occasional rockets into Israel in recent months. Israeli forces have had to return to many areas earlier cleared of militants.

R Adm Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, said Israeli forces in Jabaliya had killed about 100 militants, without providing evidence.

The death toll from the Israeli offensive in the territory has passed 42,000. More than two-thirds of those killed are women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities’ data. The statistics do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

The war began on 7 October last year when waves of Hamas militants broke through Israel’s security fence and attacked army bases and farming communities, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Hamas is still holding about 100 captives inside Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

The conflict has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced about 90% of its population of 2.3 million people, often multiple times.

The year since the 7 October attack has demonstrated just how densely intertwined US presidential politics is with the trajectory of events in the Middle East. Each exerts a gravitational pull on the other, often in ways that are damaging for both.

Foreign policy rarely matters much in US presidential elections, but this year could be an exception. In a contest likely to be decided by small margins in a handful of states, the fallout from the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, with a potential war with Iran looming, could have a significant impact on Kamala Harris’s prospects.

On the other side of the coin, the outcome of the election on 5 November will affect the Middle East in unpredictable but potentially momentous ways. Despite the clear limits on Washington’s ability to control Israel, its closest partner, the US remains by far the most influential external power in the region.

Joe Biden’s steadfast support for Israel in the face of mass civilian casualties in Gaza, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s clear defiance of US-led efforts to establish ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, have alienated many progressive Democrats.

Kamala Harris has not distanced herself in any significant way from Biden’s Middle East policy and now faces a particularly tough fight in Michigan, home to a sizable Arab-American community. Losing that state would considerably complicate Harris’s path to the presidency.

The spread of war and the outbreak of open conflict between Israel and Iran is likely to affect the presidential campaign far beyond Michigan, combining doubts over the Biden-Harris team’s foreign policy competence with the threat of an oil price rise at the worst possible time for Harris. It could be this election’s fatal “October surprise”.

“You’re seeing Americans being evacuated from Beirut now and it really helps the overall Trump narrative of the world’s a messier place with these weaklings,” said Daniel Levy, the head of the US/Middle East Project policy institute.

Just as the Middle East can sway US politics more than any other foreign part of the world, US politics exerts a clear and constant influence on the Middle East. Demonstrative support for Israel has become a shibboleth for both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, almost irrespective of Israel’s actions.

Dana Allin, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, pointed out that Israel’s untouchability in the US political arena had developed over time.

“This was not the way presidents spoke in the Richard Nixon era. There is irony in this fealty insofar as the respective goals and worldviews of the two allies have never been further apart,” Allin argued.

Netanyahu has vigorously enforced the American taboo against using its leverage over Israel. He has done so by mobilising the power of pro-Israel sentiment in the US against any president who has tried to rein him in.

When Barack Obama announced there should be a stop to the building of settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu called his bluff and ignored him. When Biden put a hold on the delivery of US-made 2,000lb bombs which were being used to flatten residential areas in Gaza, the Israeli prime minister declared it “unconscionable”, and later accepted a Republican invitation to address Congress and met Trump.

In Biden, he was assailing a US president with more of a personal attachment to the Israeli cause than any of his predecessors, who had flown to Israel days after the 7 October attack and literally hugged Netanyahu on the airport tarmac. The Israeli prime minister still turned on Biden at the first sign of doubt.

Netanyahu’s message has been clear: any hesitation in the provision of weapons or diplomatic support will incur a heavy political cost. The US leader held responsible will be portrayed as a traitor to Israel.

The result of this tactic has been a deep reluctance on the part of successive presidents to use US leverage, as Israel’s biggest arms supplier by far, to curb the excesses of the Netanyahu coalition in any meaningful way, in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon.

Without that leverage, a succession of US ceasefire initiatives this year have come to nothing, shrugged off by Netanyahu in ways that were sometimes deeply humiliating to the US as a superpower and supposedly dominant partner in the relationship.

“Netanyahu has spent a long part of his career turning America into a partisan issue, trying to convince Israelis that the fortunes of Israel are bound up with Republican leaders,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, said.

It is unclear whether a Harris administration would steer a significantly different course to Biden’s. On one hand, Harris does not have the same personal history with Israel as Biden and, if she wins in November, would be freer to experiment with a change in policy.

On the other hand, winning the election in the face of widespread Democratic discontent over the Middle East could convince Harris that the progressive threat over the issue could be discounted.

“One scenario is that Kamala Harris wins and continues Joe Biden’s policies, which is kind of: we want to do the right thing, but we’re basically going to let Israel do what it wants,” Scheindlin said. “Or she could get a little tougher, in line with a more progressive wing of the Democratic party, and say: ‘We’re going to start applying American law on the export of our weapons,’ which I doubt honestly.”

It seems almost certain that Netanyahu’s decision-making is influenced by anticipation of a Trump restoration in the White House, and he is not alone. The Saudi monarchy may also be waiting for Trump’s return before signing a diplomatic normalisation agreement with Israel, though the current hostilities make such a deal unlikely in the near term.

With Trump back in the White House, Netanyahu would not have to deal with US resistance to greater Israeli control, even annexation, of the West Bank. In 2019, the Trump administration recognised Israeli sovereignty over the annexed Golan Heights. Trump’s former ambassador to Israel David Friedman has been auditioning for a role in a second term with a new book, One Jewish State, arguing that Israel should swallow the West Bank whole.

“With Trump in the White House, annexation becomes a much more active possibility,” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said. “It is an administration that is going to be even less concerned with Palestinian lives than the current one. They’re not even going to pay lip service to humanitarian assistance.”

There is less certainty over whether a newly elected president Trump would help Netanyahu achieve his longstanding strategic goal: recruiting the US for a decisive attack on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Middle East policy in Trump’s first term was built around hostility to Iran. In his last weeks in office, Trump gave the green light to the assassination of the Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Suleimani. On the other hand, Trump called off a missile strike on Iran in June 2019 because he thought the likely civilian casualties were disproportionate for a response to the shooting down of a US drone. And one of the points of consistency in Trump foreign policy is his aversion to US involvement in foreign wars.

Netanyahu may be hoping for a Trump win in November, but the consequent support from Washington is likely to be more transactional and less sentimental than Biden’s. Ram Ben-Barak, a former Israeli intelligence chief, worries that in the long term, a Trump-Netanyahu combination could end up poisoning the fundamental relationship between their two countries.

“What makes our relationship with America is sharing the same values,” Ben-Barak said. “The moment you have an Israeli prime minister with no values, as we have today, and a US president without values like Trump, I’m not sure this bond will continue.”

Authorities are urgently assessing the cost of Hurricane Milton after the deadly storm spawned tornadoes ahead of slamming into central Florida and then tearing across the state, leaving destroyed homes, streets blocked with downed power lines, fallen trees and debris.

At least 16 people have been killed by the storm, according to the Tampa Bay Times and recovery efforts continue, meaning the numbers could rise. The hurricane made landfall less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene hit north-west Florida and stayed over land as a tropical storm, with an unexpectedly high death toll of 230 people, the highest since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, and brought damage from flooding and high winds to 10 states.

Milton’s powerful and destructive weather system, which produced dozens of tornadoes in Florida on Wednesday, wrecked an estimated 150 homes, knocked out power to more than 3.3 million customers, swept over barrier islands with 6ft of storm surge, ripped the roof off a baseball stadium and toppled a 500ft construction crane.

A 14-year-old boy was found floating on a piece of fence and a coast guard helicopter crew rescued a man floating on an ice chest separated from his boat in the Gulf of Mexico – “a nightmare scenario for even the most experienced mariner”, according to rescuers.

But Milton, which wobbled 70 miles south from where it was anticipated to make landfall, did not deliver the scale of destruction that authorities feared. Mass evacuations undoubtedly lowered the death toll after Milton whipped up into a category 5 hurricane as it swiped Mexico, slowed a little, accelerated again as it crossed the gulf and finally hit Florida as a category 3. Tampa was spared a direct hit, and a feared 15ft storm surge never materialized.

The worst storm surge appeared to be in Sarasota county, where it reached 8-10ft – lower than in the worst place during Helene. But the 18in of rain that fell in some areas is still causing flooding. Causeway bridges and airports have re-opened and people are returning to see what is left of their homes. Some are sound, some destroyed, some filled with sand from the huge sea surge.

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said it was not “the worst-case scenario”. He said he was “very confident that this area is going to bounce back very, very quickly”.

Milton’s fatalities included five people killed by tornadoes in the Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, and a woman killed by a fallen tree branch in Tampa. Two more women were killed by fallen trees in Volusia county.

But Milton’s cost is also being calculated in political terms, setting off a fierce round of accusations between political candidates in next month’s national elections.

The vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the White House criticized the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, for his attacks on the federal response to hurricanes Helene and Milton and suggested he was trying to turn the deadly storms to his political advantage.

“In this crisis – like in so many issues that affect the people of our country – I think it so important that leadership recognises the dignity,” Harris, the Democratic party nominee for president after Biden dropped his re-election bid in July, said at a town hall in Las Vegas on Thursday night. “I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she added.

The vice-president’s comments came after Trump suggested the Biden administration’s response had been lacking and planned in partisan ways that caused Republican voters be abandoned and left “Americans to drown”, particularly in North Carolina after Helene. “They’ve let those people suffer unjustly,” he said. His comments have received bipartisan criticism, including from some local and state Republican leaders in affected areas.

Biden called the Republican election campaign “so damn un-American with the way they’re talking about this stuff” and added directly to Trump: “Get a life, man”.

Meteorologists tracking Milton have been beset by conspiracy theories that they are controlling the weather, even by using a nuclear explosion, and have faced death threats.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” said the CBS meteorologist Katie Nickolaou. She added: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

Meteorologists tracking the advance of Hurricane Milton have been targeted by a deluge of conspiracy theories that they were controlling the weather, abuse and even death threats, amid what they say is an unprecedented surge in misinformation as two major hurricanes have hit the US.

A series of falsehoods and threats have swirled in the two weeks since Hurricane Helene tore through six states causing several hundred deaths, followed by Milton crashing into Florida on Wednesday.

The extent of the misinformation, which has been stoked by Donald Trump and his followers, has been such that it has stymied the ability to help hurricane-hit communities, according to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, said that she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” Nickolaou said.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather. I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

One post aimed at Nickolaou said: “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.” She responded: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

“People have called me a plethora of curse words, people telling me to shut up and sit down, people who think it’s OK to take out Doppler radar because they think it is controlling the weather,” Nickolaou said. “It is eating up a lot of work and free time to deal with all of this. It’s very tiring.”

A wide range of misinformation has been spread as Helene and then Milton gathered pace in the Gulf of Mexico, such as claims spread by Trump that Fema had run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants. Violent threats have also become common, with posts across TikTok, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter), alleging that Fema workers should be beaten or “arrested or shot or hung on sight”.

More outlandishly, several of Trump’s closest allies have baselessly asserted that the federal government is somehow controlling hurricanes. “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” claimed a video shared by Michael Flynn, a former national security advisor to Trump.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman, wrote on X last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

This steep rise in falsehoods has drawn a sharp response from Joe Biden, who has blamed Trump for an “onslaught of lies” and told the former president to “get a life.”

“It’s beyond ridiculous,” Biden said of the claims being made around weather control. “It’s so stupid. It’s got to stop.”

Although humans can worsen hurricanes by burning fossil fuels, creating a hotter ocean and atmosphere that gives hurricanes more energy, they cannot create, control or steer individual storms. Also, Fema’s disaster relief fund for hurricane-hit communities is separate from and unaffected by the money spent on giving shelter to migrants.

But for meteorologists, the experiences around Helene and Milton are just an extreme continuation of a trend where the public is increasingly getting its information from extremist figures online rather than experts, according to Chris Gloninger, a former TV meteorologist and climate scientist who faced threats for talking about the climate crisis during his forecasts.

“The modern Republican party has an army of people who are on social media with huge followings who just disseminate this misinformation,” Gloninger said. “I’m seeing my former colleagues getting threats, I’m getting messages that we are steering hurricanes into red states. It’s mindblowing, I’ve never seen anything like this in any disaster.”

Gloninger said that meteorologists are “going to reach a point of burnout. What other profession are people targeted for simply doing their job? All we are trying to do is protect life and property during extreme weather.”

Donald Trump and the Republican party are pushing an agenda of “division, chaos and hate” by spending tens of millions on ads attacking transgender people, advocates said, as the right wing intensifies its anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

The GOP has spent more than $65m on ads targeting trans people, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, with the former president’s most frequently aired ad targeting Kamala Harris over her support for gender-affirming care.

Television ads have also been running in tight statewide races further down the ballot, including in Ohio, Montana and Wisconsin, with Republicans returning to hyperbolic, far-right talking points that proved unsuccessful during the 2022 midterm elections.

“The Maga [Make America great again] agenda is one of division, chaos and hate,” said Brandon Wolf, a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

“They pit neighbors against one another and try to divide our communities because they don’t have a vision for lifting people up or bringing the nation together.”

One Trump ad highlights comments the vice-president made in 2019, when she said she supported “surgical care” for trans prisoners. The ad shows Harris posing next to Pattie Gonia, a drag queen – Gonia, whose real name is Wyn Wiley, has said he may sue the Trump campaign for using his image without permission – and ends with the voiceover: “Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you.”

The economy and immigration are among the key issues for Americans in the upcoming election, and Trump has focussed much of his rhetoric on those topics. But with some polls showing that Harris is becoming more trusted on those issues, it appears that Trump and the Republican party have made a concerted effort to focus on anti-trans issues.

There is evidence, however, that this is an unsuccessful strategy.

Two years ago Republicans ran on anti-trans platforms in races across the country, and it rarely proved successful. Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, falsely accused Democrats during his campaign of “indoctrinating children”, while his campaign handed out yard signs that said: “Blake Masters won’t ask your pronouns in the US Senate.” Masters lost by 5% to Mark Kelly.

In Georgia, Republican candidate Herschel Walker ran ads attacking trans athletes and suggested that when trans people “go to heaven”, “Jesus may not recognize you.” Walker lost a run-off election to the Democrat Raphael Warnock. HRC reported that in 2023 the American Principles Project spent $2m on an ad campaign in Kentucky against Andy Beshear, the incumbent Democratic governor, “for his support for transgender young people and the freedom for their families to access health care”. Beshear cruised to victory in what has historically been a Republican state.

“The more Maga bullies are exposed for having no plan for America, the more they turn to their same tired playbook of transphobia,” Wolf said. “But again – it’s a losing strategy because voters know better.”

The anti-trans ad campaigns come at a time when attacks on trans and LGBTQ+ people are becoming more widespread in the US. Glaad, the LGBTQ+ advocacy association, found that in the 12 months between June 2023 and June 2024 there were 1,109 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents – an increase of 112% on the previous year.

Republicans have introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills around the country in recent years, as opposition to LGBTQ+ rights has become something of a litmus test to be approved as a GOP politician. Trump has said he would order federal agencies to end all programs “that promote the concept of sex and gender transition”, and said he would ask Congress to “permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars” from going to gender-affirming care.

But there is nothing to show that trans issues are at the top of voters’ minds.

Polling by HRC, conducted after the 2022 midterms, found that fewer than 5% of voters identified gender-affirming care for trans youth, or trans participation in sports, as issues motivating them to vote. A New York Times/Siena poll of likely voters in September, meanwhile, found that a majority of people in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin believe that “society should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with” – suggesting anti-trans ads could have little impact.

“Politicians escalating this line of attack are out of touch with where their voters are,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of Glaad.

“The focus on other people’s bodies and other people’s children is grotesque. Our pronouns are not making you poorer – tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans and plans to refuse overtime pay and enact taxes via tariffs are.”

Ellis added: “The ads are a pathetic attempt to get people to forget how these policies will make everyone’s lives dramatically worse.”

Dramatic pictures have emerged of the first floods in the Sahara in half a century.

Two days of rainfall in September exceeded yearly averages in several areas of south-east Morocco and caused a deluge, officials of the country’s meteorology agency said in early October. In Tagounite, a village about 450km(280 miles) south of the capital, Rabat, more than 100mm (3.9 inches) was recorded in a 24-hour period.

Satellite imagery from Nasa showed Lake Iriqui, a lake bed between Zagora and Tata that had been dry for 50 years, being filled up.

“It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short space of time,’ Houssine Youabeb, an official of Morocco’s meteorology agency told the Associated Press.

Such rains, which meteorologists call an extratropical storm, may change the weather conditions in the region in the coming months and years. As the air holds more moisture, it promotes evaporation and provokes more storms, Youabeb said.

The flooding in Morocco killed 18 people last month, with the impact stretching to regions that had been affected by an earthquake last year. There were also reports of dammed reservoirs in the south-east region refilling at record rates throughout September.

The Sahara, which measures at 9.4m sq km (3.6m sq miles) is the world’s largest hot desert, stretches across a dozen countries in north, central and west Africa. Recurring drought has been a problem in many of these countries as extreme weather events are on the rise due to global heating. That has led to predictions from scientists that similar storms could happen in the Sahara in the future.

Celeste Saulo, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, told reporters on Monday that water cycles across the world were changing with increasing frequency.

“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water,” she said.

Survivors of the atomic bombings of Japan almost eight decades ago have won the Nobel peace prize for their campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations – commonly known as Nihon Hidankyo – received the accolade one year before the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at a time of growing concern about the possible use of nuclear weapons.

The Nobel committee said it had decided to award the prize to Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.

The Norwegian committee said testimony by hibakusha – survivors of the August 1945 bombings by the US – had “helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world by drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons”.

It added: “The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.”

Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, who is attending the East Asia summit in Laos, told reporters: “It’s extremely meaningful that the organisation that has worked toward abolishing nuclear weapons received the Nobel peace prize.”

While the committee noted that nuclear weapons had not been used since the end of the second world war, it said the “taboo” against their use was “under pressure”.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, while North Korea has continued to develop nuclear weapons that some experts believe are capable of striking the US mainland.

Some will see the prize as a rebuke to Japan’s conservative government, which is dependent for its defence on the US nuclear umbrella and is not among the more than 60 countries that have ratified a 2021 treaty to ban the possession and use of nuclear weapons.

“At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen,” the Nobel committee said.

Between 60,000 and 80,000 people died instantly after the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 74,000.

Today, the number of people officially recognised as having died from the effects of the bombings stands at 344,306 in Hiroshima and 198,785 in Nagasaki. The average age of the 106,000 survivors is almost 86, according to Japan’s health ministry.

“One day, the hibakusha will no longer be among us as witnesses to history,” the Nobel committee said. “But with a strong culture of remembrance and continued commitment, new generations in Japan are carrying forward the experience and the message of the witnesses.”

Nihon Hidankyo’s co-chair, Toshiyuki Mimaki, 81, told a news conference in Hiroshima that the group’s recognition would give a major boost to its efforts to demonstrate that the abolition of nuclear weapons was possible, Reuters and Agence France-Presse reported.

“It would be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved,” Mimaki said. “Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished.”

He said the idea that nuclear weapons brought peace was a fallacy. “It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” he said. “For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”

MG Sheftall, the author of Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, which was published last month, said he was “absolutely elated” by the news. “Since the nadir of the cold war, I don’t think the world has needed renewed awareness of the horror of nuclear weapons more than it needs it now,” he said.

Survivors of the atomic bombings of Japan almost eight decades ago have won the Nobel peace prize for their campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations – commonly known as Nihon Hidankyo – received the accolade one year before the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at a time of growing concern about the possible use of nuclear weapons.

The Nobel committee said it had decided to award the prize to Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.

The Norwegian committee said testimony by hibakusha – survivors of the August 1945 bombings by the US – had “helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world by drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons”.

It added: “The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.”

Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, who is attending the East Asia summit in Laos, told reporters: “It’s extremely meaningful that the organisation that has worked toward abolishing nuclear weapons received the Nobel peace prize.”

While the committee noted that nuclear weapons had not been used since the end of the second world war, it said the “taboo” against their use was “under pressure”.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, while North Korea has continued to develop nuclear weapons that some experts believe are capable of striking the US mainland.

Some will see the prize as a rebuke to Japan’s conservative government, which is dependent for its defence on the US nuclear umbrella and is not among the more than 60 countries that have ratified a 2021 treaty to ban the possession and use of nuclear weapons.

“At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen,” the Nobel committee said.

Between 60,000 and 80,000 people died instantly after the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 74,000.

Today, the number of people officially recognised as having died from the effects of the bombings stands at 344,306 in Hiroshima and 198,785 in Nagasaki. The average age of the 106,000 survivors is almost 86, according to Japan’s health ministry.

“One day, the hibakusha will no longer be among us as witnesses to history,” the Nobel committee said. “But with a strong culture of remembrance and continued commitment, new generations in Japan are carrying forward the experience and the message of the witnesses.”

Nihon Hidankyo’s co-chair, Toshiyuki Mimaki, 81, told a news conference in Hiroshima that the group’s recognition would give a major boost to its efforts to demonstrate that the abolition of nuclear weapons was possible, Reuters and Agence France-Presse reported.

“It would be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved,” Mimaki said. “Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished.”

He said the idea that nuclear weapons brought peace was a fallacy. “It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” he said. “For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”

MG Sheftall, the author of Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, which was published last month, said he was “absolutely elated” by the news. “Since the nadir of the cold war, I don’t think the world has needed renewed awareness of the horror of nuclear weapons more than it needs it now,” he said.

A group of leading legal figures say Fifa has ignored their report into human rights concerns over the 2034 World Cup, warning that the governing body is “dealing with the devil” in planning to take the tournament to Saudi Arabia.

A decision on the Saudi bid to host the World Cup is to be made in December, although it appears to be a foregone conclusion given there are no other bidders. The lawyers – Prof Mark Pieth, Stefan Wehrenberg and Rodney Dixon KC – submitted a report to Fifa in May pointing out areas in which the Saudi state breached the human rights policies of world football’s governing body.

Dixon, who represents the widow of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, Hatice Cengiz, said Fifa had failed to respond to the report. “We are calling on Fifa, with its proud history of taking a stance in favour of human rights, to do exactly that right now and it is simply not good enough to not respond at all to our report,” he said. “There has to be a consultation. Things have to change if Saudi is going to be considered for the World Cup. We can’t have vague recommendations or straw man scenarios.”

Pieth was formerly the chair of Fifa’s independent governance committee, which was introduced after the exposure of widespread corruption in the organisation after the successful Russian and Qatari bids to host the World Cup. The committee delivered governance changes that helped president Gianni Infantino, in 2020, to declare “the new Fifa … a credible, accountable, modern, professional and transparent organisation”.

Pieth said that going to Saudi Arabia was a “big risk” for Fifa. “My understanding is that Saudi Arabia is quite a bit nervous [about public criticism] and they are dangerous,” he said. “That’s my take. I’m not shy to say it in public. People are really dealing with the devil here. So there is a big risk.”

The authors of the report say they are taking a “staged” approach to engagement with Fifa, and are not ruling out legal action should Fifa fail to respond. Article 7 of the governing body’s human rights policy says “Fifa will constructively engage with the relevant authorities and other stakeholders and make every effort to uphold its international human rights responsibilities”.

“We are not alone in calling for an honest, proper review,” Dixon said. “Fifa does have teeth. In the past it has taken dramatic steps, and banned countries including Russia and Indonesia. They have had a huge impact on changing perceptions. We say this is another watershed moment.”

The report focuses on four areas. First, Saudi Arabia “must immediately release all political prisoners and those who are arbitrarily detained” and treat all prisoners in accordance with human rights standards. Second, “the judiciary in Saudi Arabia must be appointed independently by a body not connected to the executive” and must be permitted to carry out its work without external influence. Third, employment law must be changed to allow migrant workers to leave jobs or the country without having to apply for government permission. Finally, Saudi Arabia must improve women’s rights by “criminalising marital rape, ensuring adequate protection from domestic violence, and allowing women to be the legal guardian for their child” if it is in the child’s best interests.

A Fifa spokesperson said it was implementing “thorough bidding processes” for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups. “All relevant reports, including the independent human rights context assessments and the human rights strategies of all bidders for the 2030 and 2034 editions, are available on our website. The bid evaluation reports for the 2030 and 2034 Fifa World Cup will be published ahead of the Extraordinary Fifa Congress on 11 December 2024.”

The EU will be unable to claw back any of the €150m (£125m) paid to Tunisia despite the money being increasingly linked to human rights violations, including allegations that sums went to security forces who raped migrant women.

The European Commission paid the amount to the Tunis government in a controversial migration and development deal, despite concerns that the north African state was increasingly authoritarian and its police largely operated with impunity.

A Guardian investigation last month revealed allegations of myriad abuses by EU-funded security forces in Tunisia, including widespread sexual violence against migrants.

Now it has emerged that there is no system in place to retrieve the funds even if the money is connected to serious human rights violations.

European funding rules dictate that the money should be spent in a way that respects fundamental rights, with stricter requirements introduced in 2021 to ensure any spending does not contravene human rights.

However, a human rights impact assessment was not carried out before the EU-Tunisia deal was announced last year. The money was paid to Tunis in March.

Catherine Woollard, director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, said human rights abuses were inevitable with a migration deal that aims to stop people from reaching Europe by boat from north Africa.

She said: “Human rights violations are a feature, not a bug, in agreements with repressive governments. They are about outsourcing not just people but also abusive actions when Europe doesn’t want to get its hands dirty.”

Tunisia’s controversial president, Kais Saied, secured a second five-year term this week with an election win condemned by rights groups and which further cemented the country’s slide from birthplace of the Arab spring into an autocracy.

Victory for Saied, who has a record of racist tirades against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has prompted concerns that it may precipitate fresh abuses by his security forces.

Brussels’ deal with Tunisia, and its compatibility with the bloc’s human rights obligations, is now the focus of an investigation by the EU ombudsman. Emily O’Reilly’s report, due in the coming weeks, is likely to question the accord’s integrity and whether measures are in place to suspend EU funding if human rights violations are identified.

O’Reilly said it had been “really tricky” to follow the funding as part of the EU-Tunisia deal.

She said: “If you discover that equipment that you have funded to Tunisia is being used in a way that damages the fundamental rights of migrants, are you going to get the money back? How are you going to get the money back?”

A commission spokesperson said the €150m was paid to Tunis after “mutually agreed conditions” had been met.

In a further development that underlines growing unease over the deal, the international criminal court (ICC) may launch an investigation into the abuse of sub-Saharan migrants by the Tunisian authorities.

Such a move would be acutely embarrassing for the commission and modelled on a similar inquiry into the mistreatment of migrants in neighbouring Libya.

The British barrister Rodney Dixon KC filed a submission to the ICC regarding abuse of migrants five days after the Guardian’s allegations that members of the Tunisian national guard were raping women and beating children.

Dixon said: “We are hoping to work with the [ICC’s] office of the prosecutor in the coming months to ensure this matter is investigated given the seriousness of the allegations. There is a clear legal basis to proceed.”

Even before the latest scandal involving the Tunisian security forces, EU officials were already uneasy about backing a migration deal that has become a template for agreements with other states such as Egypt and Mauritania.

An internal document from the EU’s diplomatic service leaked last month exposed concern that the EU’s credibility could suffer because of its attempt to tackle migration through payments to repressive regimes.

A commission spokesperson said: “The respect for human rights and human dignity of all migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are fundamental principles of migration management, in line with obligations under international law.”

They added that human rights obligations had been raised with the Tunisian authorities as part of the deal and that significant efforts and schemes to monitor EU funded programmes were in place “including [monitoring] the situation on human rights”.

“Efforts are ongoing in Tunisia to strengthen existing monitoring mechanisms. The commission remains engaged to improve the situation on the ground.”

Hundreds of passengers are stranded on the French Caribbean island of Martinique after its international airport shut as protesters entered the runway and tried to force the main airport entrance.

Martinique has been gripped since Monday by a new wave of protests over the high cost of living, which turned violent. At least one person was killed as demonstrators set fire to a police station, cars and road barricades and clashed with officers.

Martinique Aimé Césaire international airport said on Facebook on Thursday night that “no departing or arriving flights will be operated” until further notice.

Earlier on Thursday, protesters overran the tarmac at the airport in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France, and tried to enter the main building, where hundreds of passengers had taken shelter, according to videos posted on social media.

Police securing the entrance can be seen fending off demonstrators and firing what appears to be teargas in their direction.

Three planes carrying about 1,000 passengers had to be diverted to the nearby island of Guadeloupe on Thursday, Martinique’s prefecture said. Another 500 passengers who were supposed to board those flights were stuck at the Fort-de-France airport, it said.

The prefecture said protesters descended on the airport came after rumours spread on social media about the imminent arrival of hundreds of French police officers by plane. “This completely false information is at the origin of groupings and the invasion of the airport runway,” the prefecture read.

Nearly a dozen officers have been injured this week as protesters threw bottles and rocks and police responded with teargas, according to the government. Some demonstrators also opened fire, officials said.

The latest round of violence prompted the government to announce another curfew as it said demonstrations on public roads were prohibited.

It is the latest in a string of protests that began in early September, prompting France to send anti-riot police to the island.

Martinique has experienced similar protests in recent years, many of them caused by anger over what demonstrators say is economic, social and racial inequality.

The partial remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine are believed to have been found on the slopes of Mount Everest, a century after he died alongside his fellow British climber George Mallory while attempting – or just possibly returning from – the first ascent of the mountain.

The two men, part of a British expedition to climb the north-east ridge, were last seen making a push for the summit on 8 June 1924. They never returned, leading to one of the most enduring mysteries in mountaineering – whether the two men died after reaching the summit, as members of their team believed.

Mallory’s remains were found in 1999, and last month, a team of climbers and film-makers discovered a foot encased in a climbing boot and sock – on which was sewn a label identifying it as Irvine’s.

“I lifted up the sock and there’s a red label that has ‘AC Irvine’ stitched into it,” the climber and film director Jimmy Chin told National Geographic. “We were all literally running in circles dropping f-bombs.”

While the discovery of Mallory’s body, marked by deep rope-marks that might indicate a fall, answered some questions about the circumstances of their deaths, it left many others unanswered. A photograph of Mallory’s wife which he had intended to leave on the summit was not found with his body – indicating that they may have achieved their aim.

Irvine, who was 22, is believed to have been carrying a Kodak camera, which some have hoped might settle the question for good, but neither this nor the rest of his body have been found. It would be another 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first acknowledged ascent in 1953.

The foot was found on a glacier below Everest’s north face, at a lower altitude than Mallory’s body. It is now with the China Tibet Mountaineering Association, which is responsible for climbing permits on Everest’s northern side.

Julie Summers, Irvine’s great-niece and biographer, said: “I have lived with this story since I was a seven-year-old when my father told us about the mystery of Uncle Sandy on Everest. The story became more real when climbers found the body of George Mallory in 1999, and I wondered if Sandy’s body would be discovered next.

“A quarter of a century after that discovery, it seemed extremely unlikely that anything new would be found. When Jimmy told me that he saw the name AC Irvine on the label on the sock inside the boot, I found myself moved to tears. It was and will remain an extraordinary and poignant moment.”

Chin said: “It’s the first real evidence of where Sandy ended up. A lot of theories have been put out there … When someone disappears and there’s no evidence of what happened to them, it can be really challenging for families. And just having some definitive information of where Sandy might have ended up is certainly [helpful], and also a big clue for the climbing community as to what happened.”

Questions have been raised in recent years about the whereabouts of the two men’s bodies – Mallory’s was left where it lay on the mountain in 1999 – amid suggestions they had been found and removed by Chinese authorities. But Summers told the magazine she believed they were refuted by the discovery of the foot. “I think Jimmy’s find has absolutely answered that question,” she said.

Prof Joe Smith, director of the Royal Geographical Society, said of the discovery: “Sandy was an exceptional figure and made a significant contribution to our understanding of Everest and the Himalaya. This discovery of his remains provides an element of closure for his relatives and the wider mountaineering community, and we are grateful to Jimmy and his team for enabling this and ensuring Sandy is in safe hands.”

Scientists in Spain claim to have solved the two lingering mysteries that cling to Christopher Columbus more than five centuries after the explorer died: are the much-travelled remains buried in a magnificent tomb in Seville Cathedral really his? And was the navigator who changed the course of world history really from Genoa – as history has long claimed – or was he actually Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Jewish or Portuguese?

The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is … wait until Saturday.

The long-running and often competitive theorising has not been helped by his corpse’s posthumous voyages. Although Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war.

On Thursday, after two decades of DNA testing and research, the forensic medical expert José Antonio Lorente said the incomplete set of remains in Seville Cathedral were indeed those of Columbus.

“Today, thanks to new technology, the previous partial theory that the remains in Seville are those of Christopher Columbus has been definitively confirmed,” said the expert, who led the study at the University of Granada. The conclusion followed comparisons of DNA samples from the tomb with others taken from one of Columbus’s brothers, Diego, and his son Fernando.

The knottier question of the explorer’s precise origins will be revealed in Columbus DNA: His True Origin, a special TV programme shown on Saturday 12 October, the date when Spain celebrates its national day and commemorates Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

While myriad claims have been made about where the navigator was from – the theories include Italy, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, France, Greece, Scotland and a handful of different Spanish regions – the programme-makers insist they now have the answer.

“Twenty-five possible origins and eight finalists but there can be only one,” Spain’s state broadcaster, RTVE, said in a statement.

Lorente, who described the investigation as “very complicated”, remained tight-lipped about its conclusions. “There are some really important results – results that will help us in multiple studies and analyses that should be evaluated by historians,” he told reporters on Thursday.

He has, however, been previously quite blunt that he believed Columbus was Genoese, saying in 2021: “There is no doubt on our part [about his Italian origin], but we can provide objective data that can … close a series of existing theories.”

The scientist has also pointed out that parts of Columbus could still be in the Caribbean. In 1877, an excavation of Santo Domingo Cathedral in the Dominican Republic unearthed a small lead box of bone fragments marked: “Illustrious and distinguished male, Christopher Columbus.” Those remains are now buried at the Faro a Colón monument (Columbus Lighthouse) in Santo Domingo Este.

Lorente said that as both sets of bones were incomplete, both could belong to the explorer.

If, as the programme and the attendant hype suggest, the fascination with Columbus remains undimmed, so, increasingly, does the controversy over his legacy.

In 2015, Ada Colau, then the mayor of Barcelona, joined many on the Spanish left in decrying the 12 October celebrations. “Shame that a nation celebrates a genocide and, on top of that, with a military parade that costs 800,000 euros,” she tweeted.

José María González Santos, the then mayor of Cádiz, agreed. “We never discovered America, we massacred and suppressed a continent and its cultures in the name of God,” he said. “Nothing to celebrate.”

Four years ago, a statue of Columbus in Richmond, Virginia, was torn down, set ablaze and thrown into a lake. A sign reading “Columbus represents genocide” was then placed on the spray-painted foundation that once held the figure.