First Thing: Witnesses recount Israeli ‘double-tap’ strike that killed child and medic in Gaza

Good morning.

Mohammad Abdul Zinati was walking home from school through the rubble of Salah Khalaf Street in northern Gaza City when he stopped at a supermarket where a group of classmates and friends had gathered.

Shortly before 3.30pm, an explosion tore through the air. When the smoke and dust cleared, there was a man lying bleeding on the dusty road. He was badly wounded, but still alive. The man was calling for help, and Mohammad ran towards him.

He did not hear the shouts of his cousin, who had spotted an approaching Israeli drone. Within seconds, the drone released a glide bomb, designed to allow operators to identify and strike targets with a high degree of accuracy.

The Guardian verified footage of the attack, and spoke to witnesses and weapons experts in an effort to shed light on the latest Israeli strike to kill a child in Gaza.

South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, has said he will ⁠not deploy the military to the ⁠Middle East in a way ​that could draw the country into conflict, resisting calls from Donald Trump to support his war in Iran.

“There won’t be deployment that would involve or enter war. I can tell you that very clearly,” Lee said at a ⁠news conference on Friday. “We won’t deploy military assets in any form to that end.”

As the death toll from the worst measles outbreak in decades rises, Robert F Kennedy Jr headlined the Washington DC conference of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, which he led for nearly a decade.

“Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” Kennedy, now serving as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told anti-vaccine activists at the conference in a speech lasting nearly an hour and a half. He urged patience, saying that he would have made sweeping changes “on day one” but that he had to follow the law in order to make permanent change.

More than 1,500 academics and economists from 100-plus countries are urging global leaders to join an initiative against extreme inequality, calling current unfairness “a policy choice that can be reversed”. Before the UN general assembly in New York next week, the experts have signed an open letter backing the International Panel on Inequality (IPI).

The Irish-born, London-based writer and film-maker Shane O’Sullivan’s latest takes aim at the big kahuna itself: Watergate – the crime, the scandal and the cultural phenomenon. It is explored through a hailstorm of archive clips and snippets of feature films, all nimbly stitched together, with a deadpan voiceover by the great Harry Shearer. The result is, of course, nostalgic, but also feels fresh and immediate.

Three cartographers have spoken of their astonishment at the UN’s near-universal adoption of a map they created to more accurately show the sizes of Africa and Europe, even though they have received a few complaints from some disgruntled diplomats.

After ​Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in a horrific attack, his wife, a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths, had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life.

Fueled by exceptionally warm ocean conditions across the tropical Pacific – and developing alongside the human-driven climate crisis – El Niño is virtually guaranteed to hit a very strong intensity towards the end of this year and into 2027. From Sri Lanka to South Korea, governments are preparing for droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods.

Roughly 30,000 mosquitoes are due to be released in San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles every week, nearly half a million in all. But before locals start to worry, they are all males – and male mosquitoes do not bite. It is part of a strategy to reduce the number of mosquitoes in the area. The male mosquitoes can mate with wild females but cannot produce viable eggs, thus reducing the population.

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