Doctors at one of Gaza City's last functioning hospitals say they are overwhelmed with casualties from Israeli strikes and are having to carry out operations in filthy conditions with few or no anaesthetics.

One Australian medic volunteering at al-Shifa hospital told the BBC that every day was a mass casualty event, while another described how a baby was saved from the body of a pregnant woman who had been decapitated.

Israeli forces are now just 500m (1,640ft) away from the hospital as they expand their ground offensive to fully occupy Gaza City, which Israel's military calls Hamas's "main stronghold".

Witnesses say tanks are advancing into the city centre from the south and north-west.

Israeli air and artillery strikes, attacks by quadcopter drones, and detonations of remotely driven vehicles laden with explosives are also continuing to drive tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes each day.

Al-Shifa hospital was once the biggest medical complex in the Gaza Strip. After 23 months of war, it now lies in ruins, pockmarked by craters, with burned-out wards and bullet holes.

But inside, medics are working beyond full stretch. Many of the beds do not even have mattresses, medicines are in short supply, and the casualties are endless.

"It's just a mass murder, a killing, a torture, a nightmare," Dr Nada Abu Alrub, an emergency specialist from Australia volunteering at the hospital, told the BBC in a video call on Tuesday.

She said they were carrying out operations on severely wounded patients with "minimal to hardly no anaesthesia".

"No painkillers as well, with their limbs hanging with a piece of skin and the tendon. Brain matter out. Organs are out. It's horrific," she added.

Last week, she said, doctors had to conduct an emergency Caesarean on a nine-month pregnant woman whose head had been blown off. They managed to save her daughter.

"The baby was a bit bradycardic, so her heart rate was low," she recalled. "She was transferred to another hospital."

Dr Saya Aziz, an Australian anaesthetist, described how a six-year-old boy with a fractured arm and leg had been waiting for three days for an operation to place external fixators on them because the hospital's only orthopaedic surgeon had to prioritise more serious cases.

"Every couple of hours there are multiple amputation cases with massive resuscitation. It's life or limb, literally," she told the BBC.

"And you go in and you're trying to anaesthetise them [while] they're swatting flies in theatre.

"There's blood over the beds. There's no equipment. There's no replacements. And you can see the sorrow and the sadness of the healthcare workers."

Outside the hospital, Israel's tanks are advancing, as the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza City continues.

One video posted on social media showed a tank at Hamid junction in the Rimal neighbourhood, which is less than 500m from al-Shifa.

Another video showed troops to the south, only 700m from the city centre.

Palestinian journalist Fathi Sabah, who lives in southern Gaza but owns an apartment in the city's southern Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood, said members of his family had narrowly escaped an Israeli incursion.

"My wife and son went to our flat to collect some belongings. They suddenly found themselves trapped as tanks surrounded the area," he said.

"They lived through the hardest night of their lives before escaping through a back door. It's unbelievable how quickly the tanks reached the heart of the city."

Around one million Palestinians were estimated to be living in Gaza City before Israel announced its plans for the offensive last month.

The UN says more than 320,000 have fled southwards since then, while the Israeli military puts the figure at 640,000.

The Israeli military has told people to head south for their safety to a designated "humanitarian area" in al-Mawasi, where it has said medical care, water and food will be provided.

However, witnesses say the coastal al-Rashid road is severely congested and that families are struggling for hours to complete the journey.

The cost of evacuation has also reportedly soared to more than $3,000 (£2,200) per family - far beyond the reach of most residents.

The UN has also said the tent camps in al-Mawasi are overcrowded and unsafe, and that southern hospitals are operating at several times their capacity.

"The tanks are only a few meters from my house, but I cannot afford the cost of fleeing," Sultan Nassar, a 62-year-old father of five from the Sabra neighbourhood, told the BBC. "Death is everywhere, in the north and in the south."

Meanwhile, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said the oxygen station at al-Quds hospital in Tal al-Hawa had ceased operating after being struck by gunfire from Israeli forces, and that it only had enough pre-filled oxygen cylinders to last three days.

Israeli military vehicles were currently positioned at the southern gate of the hospital, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, it added.

On Monday, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry said the Israeli advance and bombardment had forced al-Rantisi children's hospital and the nearby St John Eye hospital in the northern Nasr neighbourhood to evacuate patients and shut down.

The Jordanian armed forces also decided to close their field hospital in Tal al-Hawa and relocate it to southern Gaza, with Jordan's state news agency reporting that shelling and other intense explosions in the vicinity had damaged the facility and some medical equipment.

The Palestinian Medical Relief Society's primary healthcare centre in Gaza City was meanwhile destroyed in an Israeli air strike which reportedly injured two health workers, the World Health Organization said. The centre was providing blood services, trauma care, cancer medications, and chronic disease treatment.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 65,382 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory's health ministry.

Claudia Cardinale, the Tunisian-born Italian star of The Leopard, 8 1/2 and Pink Panther, has died at the age of 87.

She had a six-decade long career, rising to fame during the golden age of Italian cinema, and was directed by greats such as Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.

The actress died at Nemours in France in the company of her children, according to her agent Laurent Savry.

"She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste," Savry told AFP news agency.

Born in Tunisia to Sicilian parents in April 1938, Cardinale won a beauty contest at 16 that saw her declared "the most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis".

The prize was a trip to the Venice film festival, where she was approached by directors and producers to become involved in filmmaking.

She later described her reluctance to abandon her hopes of becoming a teacher to "give this cinema thing a go", in her father's words.

Her early career was marked by challenges. She was picking up small roles as a teenager when she was raped. When she learned that she was pregnant, a mentor convinced her to give birth in secret abroad in London. For several years, she introduced her son, Patrick, to people as her younger brother.

Because she had grown up speaking French, Arabic, and her parents' Sicilian dialect, her accent was seen as unacceptable, and her voice was dubbed by other Italian actors.

She shot to fame in 1963 when she appeared in Fellini's Oscar-winning 8 1/2 and the epic period drama The Leopard, which became a Visconti classic.

"Visconti wanted me brunette with long hair. Fellini wanted me blonde," Cardinale said.

She worked in Hollywood in the 1960s, starring in Blake Edwards' The Pink Panther and Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In the West, and appearing with actors including Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson.

Critics praised her as the "embodiment of postwar European glamour".

Reflecting on her career later, Cardinale recalled: "The best compliment I ever got was from actor David Niven while filming The Pink Panther.

"He said: 'Claudia, along with spaghetti, you're Italy's greatest invention.'"

After separating from film producer Franco Cristaldi in the early 70s, she began a life-long relationship with Neapolitan director Pasquale Squitieri, with whom she had a daughter, also named Claudia.

She performed into her 80s, appearing in the Swiss TV Series Bulle in 2020.

In 2000 Cardinale was named Unesco Goodwill Ambassador in recognition of her advocacy for women's rights.

In 2002, she was awarded a lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival.

"I've lived more than 150 lives: prostitute, saint, romantic, every kind of woman, and that is marvellous to have this opportunity to change yourself," she said.

Italy's Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli called her "one of the greatest Italian actresses of all time", embodying "Italian grace".

An NHS trust at the centre of concerns over its poor maternity services has had to repay almost £5m after wrongly claiming it provided safe care to mothers and their babies.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was paid the money after saying its services met safe standards of care and staffing.

But a subsequent investigation by the health service's litigation arm, NHS Resolution, found the trust had not met the standards and asked for the money to be repaid to the NHS.

The Leeds trust said they had allocated additional funding to improve maternity services.

The trust received the money under a programme called the Maternity Incentive Scheme, which is run by NHS Resolution to encourage the health service to provide good maternity care.

Hospitals are asked to judge their performance against a range of standards, including listening to patients' concerns, staffing levels and properly investigating deaths.

If a trust meets all 10 safety measures, it can get a rebate on its insurance premiums as well as a share of the money paid by trusts that do not meet all the goals.

For the past two years, the Leeds trust reported it had met all 10 standards and was paid £4,887,084 from the scheme.

But the regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), published a damning report in June about maternity services at the trust.

Care was rated as inadequate, the lowest level, and it warned that women and babies were being exposed to "significant risk".

The report prompted NHS Resolution to ask Leeds to re-examine its submissions to the Maternity Incentive Scheme. The subsequent review found not all safety standards had been met, forcing the trust to repay all the money it had received.

"The repayment of the award is long overdue and should be going back even further," said Fiona Winser-Ramm, who lost her daughter Aliona in 2020 after what an inquest found to be a number of "gross failures" in the care they received.

"This provides yet further evidence for the need for a full, independent inquiry into the Leeds trust," she said, believing this should be led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden.

Mrs Winser-Ramm was among a group of parents who met Health Secretary Wes Streeting last week and demanded an investigation into maternity services at the trust.

Streeting has so far refused to order such an inquiry but the families, who have all experienced poor maternity care, said they remained hopeful.

Over the past few months, dozens of families have told the BBC they received inadequate care at the trust.

The Maternity Incentive Scheme has been beset by problems since it was set up in 2018 by the then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

NHS trusts with poor maternity safety records, including Shrewsbury and Telford, Morecambe Bay, East Kent and Nottingham have all claimed to have met the 10 standards and been paid millions of pounds only to later have to repay it.

An analysis published by NHS Resolution in July found 24 trusts have had to repay premiums over the first four years of the scheme, with 18 of them having to do so more than once.

"Nationally, families have long raised concerns about the huge flaws of the self- assessment involved by individual trusts in the maternity incentive scheme," said Mrs Winser-Ramm.

"Serious questions need to be asked about how, if trusts are unable to accurately self-report compliance, how satisfied can we be that similar misreporting is not commonplace in other areas of self-reporting."

After the review found Leeds had to repay the money it had received, the trust applied to a separate fund run by NHS Resolution for maternity improvement support and was allocated £2.1m.

In a statement to the BBC, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust did not explain how it had erroneously self-reported that it was compliant with all the standards of the scheme.

"We identified that we were not fully compliant with the MIS scheme," said Magnus Harrison, the trust's chief medical officer.

"We have now been allocated £2.1m to support our action plan to achieve compliance, which forms part of our Maternity and Neonatal Improvement Programme."

It has become known as Greece's Watergate: spyware software and Greek intelligence targeted the mobile phones of government ministers, senior military officers, judges and journalists.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called it a scandal, but no government officials have been charged in court and critics accuse the government of trying to cover up the truth.

Instead, a low-ranking judge will on Wednesday hear the case against two Israelis and two Greeks, allegedly involved with marketing spy software known as Predator.

What we know

In the summer of 2022, the current head of socialist party Pasok, Nikos Androulakis - then an MEP - was informed by the EU Parliament's IT experts that he had received a malicious text message from an unknown sender, containing spy software.

This Predator spyware, which is marketed by the Athens-based Israeli company Intellexa, can get access to a device's messages, camera, and microphone – turning a person's phone against them.

Things escalated after Androulakis also discovered that he had been tracked for "national security reasons" by Greece's National Intelligence Service (EYP).

Just a month after taking office in the summer of 2019, PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis had placed EYP directly under his supervision.

His conservative government was suddenly at the heart of the crisis. The head of EYP, Panagiotis Kontoleon, resigned, as did the prime minister's top aide and nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis, who was the liaison between EYP and the PM's office.

Predator had been used in attempts to entrap at least 87 people, according to the Hellenic Data Protection Authority. Twenty seven of those put under surveillance were simultaneously monitored by EYP, including serving ministers and senior military officers.

Despite criticism that the common targets by EYP and Predator implied a common strategy of surveillance, the government insisted that this was a coincidence and that no law enforcement agency had ever used Predator, the use of which was illegal in Greece at that time. A new law passed in 2022 has since legalised state security use of surveillance software under strict conditions.

But the government did not answer why the secret services had spied on the Chief of National Defence General Staff, Lieutenant General Konstantinos Floros, and Kostis Hatzidakis, then cabinet member and today vice president of the government.

In July 2024 a report by the Greek Supreme Court, seen by the BBC, concluded there was "clearly no connection" between Predator and government officials.

"There is a prosecutor's report and the answers are clear. Justice has spoken. There is no doubt in what it said", government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis told reporters.

The BBC has repeatedly contacted Mr Marinakis for comment on this, but at time of publication has not received a response.

The four private individuals on trial in Athens on Wednesday are all facing misdemeanor charges - allegedly connected with the marketing of Predator. Two of the accused are said to have ties with state officials, but it was never seriously investigated, opposition and watchdogs said.

"What began as a political scandal has now evolved into an institutional scandal, tainting both the judiciary and the independent authorities," says Thanasis Koukakis, a financial reporter who investigates corruption, and among the targets of dual surveillance – both by Predator and the secret services "for national security reasons".

Eliza Trintafyllou, journalist for Inside Story, has reported on the scandal since its very beginning.

"If someone has not followed the wiretapping scandal, they would think that four individuals, on their own initiative and for their own personal reasons, tapped the phones of 87 people in Greece, using advanced spyware that is otherwise marketed exclusively to state intelligence services and law enforcement authorities worldwide."

"No serving minister, judge, or military officer filed a complaint about being targeted with Predator so far. Nor were any of them called to testify as a witness," she said.

Was the government involved?

After the scandal broke out, the Greek government introduced a new law on the confidentiality of communications.

There are now more safeguards for law enforcement authorities, but at the same time the new legislation has been criticised because it effectively deprives citizens of the right to learn if they had previously been under surveillance.

In addition, the Greek government received criticism for its lack of willingness to find out who was spying on its ministers and members of the army - criticism that only mounted after authorities raided the offices of Intellexa in Athens, months after the wiretapping scandal broke out. They left empty handed.

Christos Rammos, a former senior judge and president of the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy (ADAE) at the time the scandal broke out was a key figure in uncovering the facts behind the wiretapping. It was not an easy task and faced many obstacles on the way.

"In Greece the political system cannot tolerate independent authorities, the so-called checks and balances on power. The wiretapping affair was a traumatic experience for our democracy," Rammos told the BBC. "I was subjected to personal attacks. It was an open war."

The wiretapping scandal received international attention and scrutiny since one of the first victims, Nikos Androulakis, was an MEP. The European Parliament set up a special Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (PEGA).

Its Rapporteur, former MEP Sophie in 't Veld, told the BBC that the Greek government had made "every possible attempt to conceal the truth. They have, at every turn, refused cooperation."

"The whole spyware thing is not something that you can see in isolation. It's not taking place in a vacuum. It's used to silence critical voices. It's used to stifle scrutiny. But, the damage has been done; it's had a chilling effect.

"I was just now coming back from a coffee with a friend of mine who was also looking into spyware and she said, 'I cannot be sure that my phone is safe from the Greek government' - quite literally.'"

US President Donald Trump has attracted condemnation from health experts, after he sought to claim that there was a link between the widely used painkiller Tylenol and autism.

Accompanied by his Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump said that doctors would soon be advised not to prescribe the drug - called paracetamol in some other countries, including the UK - to pregnant women.

The claims have been attacked by medical experts. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the announcement was "unsettling" and not based on "reliable data", while the UK's National Autism Society called Trump's statement "dangerous, it's anti-science and it's irresponsible".

BBC Verify has looked at some of the allegations Trump and Kennedy made during their news conference at the White House.

Is Trump correct that US autism diagnoses are rising?

During the event, Trump listed a number of statistics which he said showed that autism diagnoses in the US have risen rapidly over the past two decades.

Firstly, the US president claimed that incidence has increased from around "one in 10,000…probably 18 years ago" to "one in 31" by 2025.

The final statistic quoted by Trump - that autism rates have risen to one in 31 - is correct. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2022 found that level of diagnoses among eight year olds across 16 US states.

While that rate has grown from 18 years ago, it did not grow by anything like the figure cited by Trump. While there was no figure for 2007 - the year cited by Trump - in 2006 the CDC estimated the rate of autism in the US population to be 1 in 110. In 2008 it was 1 in 88.

Most experts say rising rates of autism can primarily be attributed to changes in how the condition is diagnosed, as well as greater recognition of the condition and more people being tested.

Trump also claimed on Sunday that California has a "more severe problem" with autism than other states surveyed by the CDC.

The CDC estimated that in 2022, about 1 in 12 eight-year old boys in California had autism - the highest rate for boys in the study across 16 US states.

But the agency noted that the state has funded a local initiative training hundreds of local paediatricians "to screen and refer children for assessment as early as possible, which could result in higher identification" of autism.

Should the MMR vaccine be taken separately?

Another claim made by Trump is around the effects of the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The US president claimed that the vaccinations should "be taken separately" rather than as a combined shot and that "it seems when you mix them, there could be a problem."

Experts fear that if parents refrain from getting their children vaccinated as a result of his unfounded claims, it risks the re-emergence of diseases like measles.

The discredited idea that childhood vaccines are linked to autism first gained mainstream attention after a paper published in 1998 in the medical journal The Lancet by British doctor Andrew Wakefield.

Wakefield was later found to have financial conflicts of interest - including that some of his test patients connected with a lawsuit against vaccine companies - and the UK's General Medical Council (GMC) found that he falsified his results. The research paper was retracted and Wakefield was struck off by the GMC in 2010.

Multiple studies since have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The most recent - a high-quality study from Denmark in 2019 looked at 657,461 children, and concluded that the data did not support the MMR vaccine causing or triggering autism.

On its website, the US CDC recommends that two doses of the combined MMR vaccine are given to children, starting with the first dose at 12-15 months and the second between the ages of four and six.

According to the UK government, there is "no evidence" that the jabs should be taken separately. It notes that any decision to do so "would be experimental".

This year, the US has seen the highest cases for measles in more than three decades. According to the CDC, 1,491 cases have been confirmed so far. Three people have died.

"President Trump produced no evidence that the current immunisation schedule in the States was harmful and no evidence that giving the combined MMR vaccine was unsafe," David Elliman - associate professor of children's health at University College London - said.

"Proponents of a link between MMR vaccine and autism cite the 1998 research paper in the Lancet, whose first author was Andrew Wakefield," he added. "In fact, the authors of the paper clearly stated in the paper that they had not proven a link but suggested more research should be done. That research has been done, and no evidence of a link has been found."

Experts also say that allowing time between jabs means children are more likely to contract diseases in the interim or that they are more likely to miss appointments if there are multiple shots.

Are autism rates lower among Amish people?

Trump cited the Amish as a group within the US who have "virtually no autism" within their community.

The Amish typically live in remote communities and refuse to adopt many features of modern life, which can include a suspicion of modern pharmaceuticals. Trump suggested - without providing evidence - that a low rate of Tylenol use within the group could have led to a lower rate of autism.

There are relatively few studies on autism rates within the Amish community. Many children are diagnosed in school - but most Amish drop out of school after eight grade, around 14-years-old.

"I think it's very very unlikely that there are no autistic people among the Amish," Eva Loth, professor of cognitive neuroscience at King's College London told BBC Verify.

"The question is how many population studies were carried out with the Amish? And are Amish people likely to seek a diagnosis? So there are a number of reasons why reported numbers may be low but that doesn't mean that no cases exist."

• Trump makes unproven link between autism and Tylenol
• What is autism and what are Trump's unproven claims about a Tylenol link?
• Trust doctors over Trump on paracetamol, Streeting says

In one 2010 study, a team of geneticists found autism occurred in approximately one in 271 Amish children. The research screened 1,899 children across two large Amish communities in Ohio and Indiana.

However, it's worth noting that research into this topic is limited, and we haven't found any studies which suggest a link between low immunisation rates and autism diagnosis among Amish people.

Trump made a similar claim about low levels of autism in Cuba - claiming that Tylenol supplies are low on the island as the reason.

It's not clear what President Trump was basing the assertion on. BBC Verify could find no official Cuban statistic and the World Health Organization (WHO) has noted that the "prevalence of autism in many low- and middle-income countries is unknown".

What has Trump said about autism previously?

Trump has intermittently expressed concern over rising rates of autism in US children for almost 20 years. In 2007 he first publicly suggested that he believed that there was a link between vaccines and the increasing prevalence.

The president has expressed interest in Kennedy's work since at least 2017, when Kennedy said that Trump had asked him to lead a vaccine safety taskforce. Seven years later, Kennedy - who was then polling at around 5% - dropped his bid for the presidency and endorsed Trump.

In a leaked call with Kennedy during the election campaign and in which the Republican tried to coax the independent to support him - Trump was heard discussing discredited claims about the health risks of childhood vaccines. After the election Trump announced him as his choice to lead the department of health and human services, with a mandate to "make America health again".

However, during his first term Trump did support some vaccine campaigns. During a 2019 measles outbreak in the US he said that people "have to get the shots. Vaccinations are so important", and it was his administration that oversaw the rapid development and early roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?