What happened
Days of intense rainfall have further worsened conditions for homeless Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, according to UN agencies. Flooding has swept through camps and informal shelters, damaging tents and personal belongings, and forcing families to move yet again. Gaza’s health authorities say one newborn has died from hypothermia, while multiple people were killed when weakened buildings collapsed during the storms.

Who said what
“We are extremely concerned about children getting sick or, even worse, dying from hypothermia,” said Unicef spokesman Jonathan Crickx. The situation on the ground is “way more devastating than I can describe”, said Shrouq Al-Aila on France 24.

What next?
Aid agencies say more tents, blankets and winter supplies are urgently needed despite the increased deliveries during the ceasefire. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that the second phase of the ceasefire – which sets out provisions for rebuilding Gaza, the pull-back of Israeli forces and the disarmament of Hamas – is now close, with the return of the body of one Israeli hostage from Gaza the final outstanding element of the first phase.

What happened
An 86-year-old man has been taken into custody in connection with the unsolved 1993 killings of a married couple on a remote Welsh farm. Harry and Megan Tooze (pictured above), aged 64 and 67, were “shot at close range from behind in what was described as an execution” at their home in Rhondda Cynon Taf, said Wales Online. Police opened a forensic review of the case in 2023.

Who said what
Detective Superintendent Mark Lewis said the arrest was “clearly a significant development”, but stressed that the investigation was “very much ongoing”.

When police entered the Tooze home they found that “the table had been set with the pair’s best china, as if the couple were expecting a guest”, said The Sun. Their daughter’s boyfriend Jonathan Jones was initially convicted of the murders, but the verdict was overturned a year later and since then the case has “remained one of Wales’ most notorious unsolved murders”.

What next?
Lewis said “unanswered questions” remained and he urged “anyone who has any information about the murders to come forward”.

Multi-drug antibacterial resistance caused by the war in Ukraine is now “on the doorstep” of western Europe, according to an Australian clinician who has worked in the war-torn country.

The number of potentially lethal infections in Ukraine has increased 10-fold since the start of the war, Hailie Uren told the health platform Vaccines Work, and this “really frightening” level of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is on the march beyond its borders.

Humans are “host” to more than a thousand species of bacteria, including some superbugs that are “deemed critical threats”, said The New York Times. Normally they don’t “become pathogenic in healthy people”, but “war changes that”. War “deprives people of food, clean water and sanitary living conditions”, and “when bombs and bullets fly”, wounds become “perforated with shrapnel, debris and soil teeming with microbes”.

A “rising number of wounded soldiers” in Ukraine are being infected with microbes that are “extensively drug-resistant” or which “withstand most or all antibiotics thrown at them”, said Vaccines Work. Doctors and scientists in Ukraine are waging a “shadow war” against these “pernicious infections”, which have also “begun circulating in the general population”, including children.

Last year England’s former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies warned that the rise of superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics poses a greater threat to humanity than climate change. A paper published in The Lancet last September estimated that AMR could contribute to the deaths of 8.22 million people a year by 2050 – more than the number currently killed by cancer.