Before the war on Gaza, the seed of Israel’s strategy of wholesale destruction was planted in a 2006 war on Lebanon. Today, the playbook repeats itself

Shortly after 2pm on 8 April, it seemed that Beirut was hit by an earthquake. Within 10 minutes, multiple apartment buildings were obliterated, leaving in their wake mounds of rubble and shattered glass, pulverized concrete and twisted metal – and hundreds of dead and wounded bodies.

In those minutes, Israel had carried out one of the worst mass killings in Lebanon’s history. Dozens of Israeli warplanes dropped bombs and missiles on 100 targets across a country roughly the size of Connecticut, striking Beirut, the Bekaa valley and southern Lebanon. By the time rescue crews finished digging out mangled remains from the rubble two days later, the Lebanese health ministry’s toll stood at 357 dead and more than 1,200 injured. But even that is not a final accounting of the day’s casualties because health officials were still struggling to identify remains and conduct DNA tests.

The chances of that happening? Over 24 trillion to one

I have played the lottery since I was 18. I always felt I was going to win big one day. When my children were born, I started using regular numbers based on their birthdays and birth weights. In June 2018, I was doing a client’s colour at my hair salon in Talgarth in mid-Wales, where I live. While we waited for the colour to take, I got my lottery ticket and popped next door to the shop to check if I had won anything.

The shop was busy. It’s a small town, and as a hairdresser I knew everyone in the queue, so we started chatting away. The woman behind the till scanned my ticket. She said, “I’ll have to give you the ticket back. I can’t pay it.” The person from the Post Office counter said, “I can pay up to £50,000 if he wants to come here.” She replied, “No, it’s more than that.” Everyone in the queue was asking, “What’s he won?”

As the bodies pile up and he continues to blame everyone but himself, respect for the prime minister is draining steadily away

A good leader never asks their people to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. Hold others to the highest standards, by all means, but only if you have equally high expectations of yourself: otherwise you may command obedience in politics but never respect, and over time even that grudging compliance may come laced with contempt. And so it is, less than two years into power, for Keir Starmer.

Nobody in government emerges well from the story of Peter Mandelson’s journey to Washington, and that includes Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office mandarin sacked for not telling Downing Street that its chosen ambassador had set off fire alarms inside the vetting process. Robbins could arguably have saved himself by kicking this intensely political decision upstairs, albeit to a prime minister famous for not really doing politics: he could have just let Starmer choose between the public humiliation of telling the Americans that the man he wanted to send into their highly classified midst was a potential security risk, or the gamble of sending Mandelson anyway but with added guardrails.

Gaby Hinsliiff is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here

People born after 1997 are now the most frequent cinemagoers, defying fears that digital natives would lose interest in the big screen

Rumours about the imminent demise of moviegoing may have been overstated, with 2026 now forecast to be the best year at the global box office since the start of the pandemic. And it is generation Z at the forefront of the cinema revival. According to a US-based survey by Fandango, gen Z are now the most frequent cinemagoers, with 87% saying they have seen at least one film in a cinema in the past 12 months. Millennials are close behind at 82%, followed by gen X at 70% and boomers at 58%. Gen Z also go more often than other cohorts, averaging around seven trips a year.

Gen Z – people born between 1997 and 2012 – grew up with near unlimited streaming and social media as their default entertainment. But after spending their lives in algorithm-driven digital spaces, many are beginning to tire of them. “As the internet becomes ever more pervasive, and in many ways ever more annoying, gen Z are looking for experiences beyond the black mirror,” say Benedict and Hannah Townsend, hosts of the film and TV podcast Talk of the Townsends. What gen Z are looking for is a “third space”: a social environment away from home and work. And for many, the cinema can fill that role.

As a career-spanning documentary hits cinemas and the band eye two nights at Knebworth, they revisit their path from pubs to stadiums – but how did they get through their crisis-filled 1990s?

When I ask Iron Maiden bassist and founder Steve Harris about the fact his band have lasted for more than half a century, he sounds bewildered, as if he’s put something down then forgotten where he’s left it. “It’s gone so quick. You go on tour for a few months and it seems to fly, but so much happens. Our whole career is an extension of that – for 50 years.”

He’s looking back on how he steered one of the most influential – and deeply idiosyncratic – British bands in history. Catapulted to the premier league of 80s metal on the back of galloping, theatrical, multi-platinum LPs including The Number of the Beast, Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Iron Maiden not only survived the mid-90s slump that befell many metal bands, but got even more heavy and ambitious.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

US president orders navy to ‘shoot and kill’ boats laying mines in Hormuz and claims ‘total control’ over the strait

• Trump claims US has total control over strait of Hormuz after Iran seizes two container ships

• Analysis: Trump may talk of regime infighting, but Iran seems united by strategy born of war

The EU’s foreign chief has said that talks with Iran should include nuclear experts otherwise “we will end up with a more dangerous Iran.”

Speaking on Friday ahead of an informal summit of EU leaders in Cyprus, EU’s foreign chief Kaja Kallas said: “If the talks are only about the nuclear and there are no nuclear experts around the table, then we will end up with an agreement that is weaker than the JCPOA was.”

Labour MPs are reportedly urging colleagues to demand Burnham’s return in order to position him as Starmer’s eventual successor

If Keir Starmer is looking for a saviour to keep him in No 10 after the May elections and the scandal of the Mandelson saga, there is an unlikely figure in the north-west who might help him – temporarily.

It has been the week where the prime minister seemed at his most isolated. But Labour MPs told the Guardian they were urging colleagues not to depose Starmer next month, and were instead preparing to demand that Andy Burnham return to parliament in order to succeed him before the next general election.

Amjad Youssef is one of most-wanted fugitives in relation to slaughter of estimated 288 civilians under Assad

A Syrian former regime official suspected of leading a notorious civilian massacre revealed by the Guardian – and who became one of the country’s most-wanted fugitives after the fall of Bashar al-Assad – has been arrested by security forces, Syria’s interior ministry announced.

Amjad Youssef was captured in the countryside about 30 miles (50km) outside the city of Hama and had “been taken into custody following a carefully executed security operation”, the interior minister, Anas Khattab, said in a social media post on Friday.

President accuses Britain of trying to ‘make an easy buck’ from American tech firms, weeks after warning UK–US trade deal can be changed

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump has threatened to impose “a big tariff” on the UK if it does not drop its digital services tax on US social media firms.

The digital services tax, introduced in 2020, imposes a 2% levy on the revenues of several big US tech companies.