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It’s a sign of how bad things are for the new prime minister that only her third Prime Minister’s Questions is being billed as a potentially defining moment in her short premiership.

MPs tell me that how Liz Truss performs at the dispatch box against Sir Keir Starmer at their weekly joust will be an acid test for the prime minister put on notice by her party.

Having dodged questions on Friday when she reversed key planks of her economic plan, and then left it to her new chancellor complete the mini-Budget and two-year energy support plan reversal, this PMQs will be a moment of reckoning.

Truss under pressure: Latest live updates

Many of her party doubt she can meet the moment and think a poor performance will again reignite calls for her go.

“I can’t see what she says at PMQs,” one former minister told me. “Her reputation’s in shreds.”

For the opposition this a “moment of jeopardy” to exploit. “On the Labour side looking across you can see a PM’s authority draining away – as we saw with Johnson.

More on Liz Truss

“I’m sure sets of electrodes are being handed to MPs to bounce up and down in support of the prime minister.

“But it will a big moment, and isn’t just about exchanges with Keir Starmer, the most damaging stuff can come from their own side.”

We saw that back in January when David Davis, the former cabinet minister, used PMQs to publicly call on Mr Johnson to resign. And just moments before that happened Bury South MP Christian Wakeford crossed the floor of the House, defecting from the Conservatives to Labour in another body blow for an embattled prime minister.

Mr Johnson clung on for another six months in a rolling political and leadership crisis, finally being pushed out from Downing Street after dozens of ministers quit his government. As he put it in his resignation speech: “When the herd moves it moves.”

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January 2022: Johnson told ‘in the name of God, go’

This PMQs will be the latest test of that herd mentality with MPs muttering that she needs to put in a strong showing. She is undoubtedly in deep trouble, with five MPs calling for her publicly to go – although many are privately saying the same.

But if a bad performance is further destabilising, a good performance will now do little to change the fortunes for Ms Truss beyond the immediate moment.

All the talk in Westminster – apart from those cabinet ministers taking to the airwaves to try to shore her up, is about the timing and mechanism for removing and replacing her. The polling around her is disastrous with only one in 10 Britons satisfied with her.

It is the worst polling ever for any leader, from which there is likely no way back. One former cabinet minister told me this week that they thought 90 per cent of the party thought Ms Truss had to go and said Sir Graham Brady will, at some point, have to go to the PM and tell her she no longer has the support of her party and can either stand aside or see a rule change that would force a confidence vote in the PM.

Changing the rules?

What I hear Sir Graham is now working on is a change in the nominations to basically try to force a unity candidate onto the party and avoid a drawn-out run-off in which party members get the final say.

There is talk of setting the nominations bar as perhaps around a third of the parliamentary party – something like 100 or 120 votes. At that level the likely trio with a chance at the top job would be Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt or Penny Mordaunt.

But the aim might be to set the threshold at the level that only one could reach in order to settle the matter quickly, and amongst MPs rather than members, who polling now shows they regret their choice of Ms Truss.

If it all sounds ferociously complicated, that’s because it is. And it comes back to the point that there is not an obvious unity candidate, while MPs are desperate to avoid a protracted run-off – two reasons helping Mr Truss stay in post.

But even if the herd isn’t quite ready to stampede, the outlook is treacherous for the prime minister.

Read more: Which Tory MPs are calling for Truss to go – and how could the PM be ousted?

Her new chancellor told me this week after he had ripped up the mini-Budget and reversed £32bn of tax cuts that there would be “eye-wateringly difficult decisions” to take around spending. That’s because he has to fill a fiscal black hole running to perhaps £40bn-£50bn through spending cuts and further tax rises.

One former cabinet minister told me that the cuts Mr Hunt is eyeing will be much bigger than those dealt by former chancellor George Osborne. “They might end up having to do double the amount of cuts than in the austerity years. Jeremy is really worried about it.”

Unease over spending cuts

And so he should be. MPs and ministers are already agitating against potential spending cuts, after Mr Hunt on Monday put everything back on the table. He refused in an interview with me on Monday to commit to uprating pension or benefits by inflation or honouring Liz Truss’s promise to lift defence spending to 3% of GDP by the end of the decade.

The Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and his deputy James Heappey have suggested they could quit if this pledge is reversed, while two MPs have already publicly said they will not support the government if it attempts to end the pensions triple lock.

“Pensioners should not be paying the price for the cost of living crisis whether caused by the war in Ukraine or mini budgets,” wrote Tory MP Maria Caulfield on Twitter last night.

Mr Hunt is also eyeing up additional taxes to raise funds for government coffers. Options include possible windfall taxes on banks and energy companies – again Ms Truss vowed not to introduce an energy windfall tax when she became PM – as a way to help plug the gap.

It goes without saying that all of this is fraught with political difficulty and if the markets decide Mr Hunt can’t get his spending cuts through parliament and begin selling off government debt, there could be another bout of market turbulence, with all the potentially fatal fall-out that has for Ms Truss. That fiscal statement, billed for 31 October, really could prove a frightful event.

PMQs is undoubtedly a huge test for the prime minister today whose reputation has been shredded this week. But this is just the first test of many she’s going to face. For now, this is a PM and a No 10 just trying to survive from one day to the next.

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Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza – contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack

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Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza - contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack

Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.

The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.

The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.

But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.

The three vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Image:
Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage

Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.

It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.

It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.

The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.

Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.

Pic: Planet Labs PBC
Image:
Pic: Planet Labs PBC

The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.

When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.

The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.

The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.

Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.

Stills from video footage shows a Red Crescent symbol on the back of one of the vehicles
Image:
The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle

Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’

In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.

“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.

In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.

“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.

‘They should have been protected’

Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.

He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.

“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”

Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Image:
Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)

Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.

“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.

“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”

In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.

It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.

It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.

The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen - with three red light vehicles visible in front
Image:
Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March

Bodies found in ‘mass grave’

The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.

He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.

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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.

According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.

Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.

Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.

The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.

chart

Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.

In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.

‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’

Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.

“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”

Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.

By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.

chart

Names were previously added to the list without verification

Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.

The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.

Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?

A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.

These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.

“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”

More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote - and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Image:
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters

04 April 2025, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: Stock exchange traders watch their monitors on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange while the display board with the Dax curve shows falling prices. US President Trump had issued a huge tariff package against trading partners around the world. The European Union and China have already announced countermeasures. Photo by: Arne Dedert/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Image:
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off

These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

Aerial view of a ro-ro terminal for vehicle shipment in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT
Image:
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP

Cargo containers line a shipping terminal at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Image:
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

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