Oscar Piastri’s victory put Australia on top of the Formula One world championship for the first time since 2010.

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri cruised to victory in the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix to move atop the driver’s championship after five races on the season.

The 24-year-old became the first driver this season to win while not starting on the pole, and he comfortably finished the race ahead of runner-up Max Verstappen of Red Bull, who was given a five-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage in the opening lap of the race on Sunday.

Charles Leclerc finished third to give Ferrari its first podium of the season. Piastri’s McLaren teammate Lando Norris finished fourth, while Mercedes’s George Russell finished fifth and Kimi Antonelli was sixth.

With his third victory of the season, and second consecutive after winning at Bahrain last week, Piastri becomes the first driver from Australia to lead the drivers’ championship standings since Mark Webber in 2010. It is the first time Piastri has led the drivers’ standings in his F1 career.

Piastri, who began the race from second position on the starting grid, ultimately took the lead on the 6.1km (3.8-mile) track after Verstappen served his five-second penalty during a pit stop on Lap 22. He finished off his fifth career victory in his 51st start without much of a challenge from Verstappen, crossing the finish line 2.84 seconds ahead of the reigning world champion.

In addition to 2025 race victories in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Piastri also won the second race of the season in China. McLaren has won four of the five races after Norris won the season-opening race in Australia.

Verstappen’s runner-up finish came after he won the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix in two of the last three years.

In the drivers’ championship, Piastri has 99 points to Norris’s 89 and Verstappen’s 87. Champions McLaren stretched their lead over Mercedes in the constructors’ standings to 77 points.

The Israeli military has released details of an investigation into its own killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and aid workers in Gaza last month, saying its code of ethics was not violated and only one soldier is dismissed, in an attack that sparked outrage in the international community.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the Israeli rights organisation Breaking the Silence rejected the findings of the Israeli probe on Sunday.

PRCS’s president told Al-Araby TV that the Israeli narrative on the killings in Rafah was “contradictory”.

“It is incomprehensible why the occupation soldiers buried the bodies of the paramedics in a criminal manner,” Younis al-Khatib said.

Al-Khatib added that the Israeli army communicated with the paramedics before killing them and that the evidence – including a video showing their ambulances flashing emergency lights – proved “the falsity of the occupation’s narrative regarding the limited visibility at the site”.

“An independent and impartial investigation must be conducted by a UN body,” he said.

PRCS, which had medics killed by Israel in the incident, also denounced the Israeli report as “full of lies” on Sunday. “It is invalid and unacceptable, as it justifies the killing and shifts responsibility to a personal error in the field command when the truth is quite different,” Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the organisation, told the AFP news agency.

The PRCS said last week that it received confirmation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that one of its medics who was missing is being held by Israel.

🚨Urgent: We have been informed by the International Committee of the Red Cross that PRCS medic Assad Al-Nsasrah is being held by the Israeli occupation authorities. His fate had remained unknown since he was targeted along with other PRCS medics in #Rafah.
📢We call on the… pic.twitter.com/l0oOxujS8G

— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) April 13, 2025

The Israeli army on Sunday claimed that six of the aid workers who were killed and buried in a shallow mass grave along with their ambulances were Hamas “terrorists”, without providing any evidence.

It admitted its probe detected a series of “professional failures”, including partial and inaccurate reporting by the commanding officers in the field invading southern Gaza’s Rafah.

The deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion will be dismissed, while the commanding officer of the 14th Brigade is to receive a reprimand.

The examination also found “no evidence to support claims of execution or that any of the deceased were bound before or after the shooting”, despite the testimonies and the evidence.

The Israeli military had initially claimed that the ambulances and aid workers were not clearly marked as first responders and approached its troops “suspiciously”.

A mobile phone video recorded by one of the killed aid workers that was obtained by the New York Times showed that the crew were clearly marked and visible to Israeli forces, and were killed by Israeli fire that lasted several minutes.

United Nations and Palestinian officials later found the mass grave and the bulldozed ambulances and bodies after Israeli authorities granted access to the area of the mostly destroyed city of Rafah bordering Egypt.

‘Another day, another cover-up’

The Israeli anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence said the military investigation is “riddled with contradictions, vague phrasing, and selective details”.

“Not every lie has a video to expose it, but this report doesn’t even attempt to engage with the truth,” the group said. “Another day, another cover-up. More innocent lives taken, with no accountability.”

But far-right voices in the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believe the army is going too far in punishing the soldiers.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s ultranationalist national security minister, said the decision to dismiss the deputy commander was a “grave mistake” that must be reversed.

“Our combat soldiers, who are sacrificing their lives in Gaza, deserve our full support,” he said.

‘Report invites many questions’

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Nice told Al Jazeera that the findings of the probe raise questions about the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and the thoroughness of the investigative process.

“It’s a pretty surprising document. It’s also a document that invites many questions that it will be difficult, I suspect, for the [Israeli military] to answer,” Nice said in a television interview.

“For example, [there is] the proposition that six of these people were Hamas, presumably members of Hamas on active [military] service, not people who might have been associated with Hamas in some way. No documentary evidence at all is identified [for that].”

Israel has a track record of denying accusations of wrongdoing and contradicting its own earlier statements.

Past investigations have exonerated the armed forces or placed the blame on a single individual without broader repercussions.

The UN accused the Israeli military of being responsible for the killing of the 15 aid workers, along with the killing of a Bulgarian UN staff member and wounding of six other foreign staff in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah last month.

The organisation has been forced to significantly cut its staff in Gaza as the war’s death toll continues to mount.

Palestinian Christians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem have marked a second sombre Easter under punishing conditions and Israel’s war on Gaza.

In the Gaza Strip, where no food or aid has been allowed in by the Israeli military for nearly 50 days, people observed Easter on Sunday at the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City amid death and destruction.

Easter celebrations were limited to religious rituals as families cancelled other gatherings fearing more bombs would be dropped by Israeli warplanes, which killed dozens of people in the besieged enclave on Sunday.

Israeli forces bombed the Saint Porphyrius compound in October 2023, just days after the war began in the aftermath of Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Israel said it was targeting “terrorists”.

That attack killed at least 18 displaced Palestinians who had sought refuge in the church. More than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army since the start of the war.

During a brief appearance before thousands of Catholic pilgrims gathered in St Peter’s Square for the Vatican’s open-air Easter Mass, Pope Francis renewed his call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

He also called on the Palestinian armed group Hamas and other groups to release the remaining captives held in Gaza.

Heavy restrictions in occupied West Bank

Israeli authorities prevented many Christians, including Palestinians, from accessing holy sites for Easter in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli police clashed with Christian worshippers and even a priest as they tried to access the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in occupied East Jerusalem.

The Old City of Jerusalem was in effect turned by Israeli authorities into a military outpost, said Fathi Nimer, Palestine policy fellow at the Al-Shabaka think tank.

“Some would say that there are now more soldiers, security and police officers than worshippers around the Holy Sepulchre,” he told Al Jazeera from Ramallah in the West Bank on Sunday.

“There are dozens of checkpoints within the city, and these limitations have not only impacted Palestinian Christians from the West Bank but also from Jerusalem itself and within the 1948 territories.”

Nimer said people were beaten, and Israeli officers and onlookers directed insults and slurs towards Christians.

Only about 6,000 Palestinians from the West Bank received permits to attend Easter services this year, and even the representative of the Vatican in Palestine was denied entry into the church.

Nimer said a tightening Israeli chokehold over holy places in the past few years has led to a dwindling number of worshippers of Palestinian origin.

“This is all part of the wider war on Palestinian culture and identity. Israel is basically saying they have an exclusive claim to Jerusalem and all of Palestine,” he said.

‘I don’t have a permit to go as a pastor’

Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian pastor and theologian and founder and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, concurred that current Israeli restrictions are among the toughest.

“I myself as a pastor don’t have a permit to go for the Holy Week, which is the most important week for Christians throughout the year because Jesus was crucified and risen in Jerusalem,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The Palestinian-Christian community that has been there for 2,000 years cannot go there to celebrate and mark this where it all happened.”

Raheb said incitement against Palestinian Christians, especially clergy members, has also been on the rise with dozens of incidents of Israeli settler attacks reported this year.

“One of the first things you read about in church about Jesus is that he was like a lamb led to the slaughter. But when you hear this today as Palestinian Christians, you think it’s our whole people being led to slaughter, considering what is happening in Gaza.”

Israeli settlers and politicians, backed by armed police and soldiers, have also been increasingly storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound to perform Talmudic rituals and challenge its status quo.

Non-Muslims are not allowed to worship at the compound of Islam’s third holiest site, which is located in East Jerusalem, as part of the status quo agreement that the Israeli government claims it remains committed to.

Pope Tawadros II, head of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, strongly condemned the Israeli onslaught on Gaza.

“Palestinians are subject to the most horrific forms of injustice in their daily lives amid the destruction of their homeland,” he told state television during Easter celebrations.