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Shortly before 9pm on Tuesday, a Hamas fighter tried to kill an Israeli soldier with a knife.

The attack took place at Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel, about four kilometres (2.5 miles) from the border with Gaza.

The man was shot dead by another soldier.

What is remarkable is that the would-be assassin had been hiding in the kibbutz since Saturday morning when he and about 50 fighters stormed the community.

Bullets on the ground at Kibbutz Re'im
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Bullets on the ground at Kibbutz Re’im

The defence forces thought they’d cleared the kibbutz but evidently, they were wrong – another search of the entire complex is under way.

This story, told to me by the head of security at the kibbutz, shows what many have been hearing about for days.

The Hamas fighters came over the border with ease and might not have returned to Gaza.

This is important because as Israel considers a ground offensive in Gaza, the government and the military can hardly expect their soldiers to cross the wire if they think the enemy is still behind them.

Over the past few days, Israel has struggled to convincingly take control of the border line.

A burnt-out nursery school at Kibbutz Re'im
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A burnt-out nursery school in the kibbutz

Only on Tuesday, I saw defence force soldiers firing machine guns at targets inside Israeli territory, while helicopter gunships attacked Hamas positions just a few kilometres inside the Gaza Strip.

The military has now moved into Kibbutz Re’im.

It is adjacent to where the Supernova music festival took place on Saturday – the scene of the murder of over 250 young men and women.

This small community was attacked by about 50 heavily-armed men intent on killing and kidnapping.

Eilan, the security chief at Kibbutz Re'im
Image:
Eilan, the security chief at Kibbutz Re’im

Eilan is the head of security here. He is a veteran border guard volunteer who doesn’t want his last name used.

He, along with other community volunteers, led the fight back against Hamas, and he walked me through the remains of the community scarred by an intense fight.

Standing in front of the rubble of two houses and a bomb shelter, he described what they had to do to stop the gunmen firing at them.

A discarded anti-tank weapon at Kibbutz Re'im
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A discarded anti-tank weapon

Eilan said the Hamas fighters were in the buildings.

“They came and started shooting from this house, we brought the tank, we launched a missile, it didn’t stop.

“We launched a second one, and it didn’t stop, we launched the third one, and it didn’t stop – it stopped when we came with the tractor and we broke the walls, we destroyed everything, as you can see.”

Eilan said that this was a different type of Hamas tactic, where usually attacks inside Israel are suicide missions. This marked a significant change of strategy.

They intended to go home to Gaza having killed or abducted Israelis.

“This is a nightmare, we never thought this could happen, that they’re coming with so many terrorists,” he told me.

“Now it’s completely different, completely different, they came to murder and to take hostages to the Gaza Strip, and you can see the evil that they took families, they took children.”

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‘They’re going house-to-house looking for traps’

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Less than a kilometre away from this community, the Supernova music festival was in full flow when the attack on the kibbutz began.

The mass murder of so many young people has sent shockwaves through Israel, but Eilan believes the real targets of the attack were the kibbutzim that border Gaza, and not the party itself.

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Israeli city shocked by attack

He thinks it was an opportunistic attack on defenceless youngsters who’d been out all night.

“Not the party, I think it’s not the reason, the party, no, I think it’s by mistake.”

I asked him if he thought they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Yes”, he nodded.

The entire community has now been moved away and Eilan says he is unsure how many will ever come back.

Eilan told me that seven people from Kibbutz Re’im were killed, and one was taken hostage.

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He said people here wanted to live in peace with the Palestinians, but after this attack, once considered impossible, everything has changed.

“Our kibbutz and all this region thought about living together with the Palestinians, with the people. I employed them, I gave them jobs, money, a salary, but now I changed my mind,” he explained.

“I don’t want any peace with them, I don’t want to deal with them at all, and if I need to consider my children or the Palestinian children, I would think about my children – never again.”

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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
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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
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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?

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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
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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)
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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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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.

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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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Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy’s home city

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Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy's home city

At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.

Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.

Ukraine’s president said Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih showed Russia “does not want a ceasefire”.

“The whole world sees it,” said Mr Zelenskyy.

“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.

“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.

Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.

Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.

Latest updates: President’s home city hit by missile attack

Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.

They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.

Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.

“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
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Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
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Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’

It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.

Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.

“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.

Read more:
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In March, the US agreed a proposed 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine after talks in Saudi Arabia. Later, Washington negotiated a limited ceasefire about energy infrastructure with Russia.

Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.

He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.

“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.

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