The fate of a humpback whale stuck in shallow bays off Germany’s Baltic coast hangs in the balance after it became stranded for a third time.

The roughly 10-metre-long (33ft) mammal appeared weakened and sick on Sunday and was struggling to find a route back to the Atlantic when it ran into fresh difficulty.

“The prognosis as a whole doesn’t look good,” Burkard Baschek, a marine scientist, told reporters on Sunday after conducting an assessment at the scene.

Scientists say the whale’s breathing frequency has reduced and that it is no longer exhibiting reactions to nearby vessels.

Till Backhaus, the environment minister of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, told a news conference in the coastal town of Wismar earlier in the day, before the latest stranding, that a 500-metre restricted area had been established around the animal to give it a chance to rest and hopefully free itself.

“He would be able to do so if he regains his strength, and that is why we decided to leave him alone, allowing him to actually set off and then successfully leave this area,” Backhaus said. “But we also have to assume that he is weakened. And he is also sick.” It is thought a fishing net may have injured the whale.

Humpback whales are not native to the Baltic and experts suspect that the young whale, thought to be male, followed a shoal of fish or became disoriented by the noise of a submarine. Baltic waters lack the salt concentration and type of nutrition that humpbacks need to survive in the long term.

The whale was first spotted in the Baltic on 3 March and reported stranded on a sandbank last week. Guests of a hotel in Niendorf heard its deep moans and alerted police.

Authorities used an excavator to deepen a channel and boats to create waves to help free the mammal, which has been nicknamed Timmy, after Timmendorfer Strand beach in Wismar Bay. News alerts about the drama have captivated the German public.

The whale freed itself from a sandbank on Friday and was escorted by a flotilla of vessels aiming to guide it through German and Danish waters to the Atlantic. However, the whale became trapped on another sandbank on Saturday, and it was stranded once again on Sunday.

Stephanie Gross, of the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover, told AP: “It is very noticeable that the animal is showing significantly less activity. Its respiratory rate has dropped considerably. The animal is not moving. It did not react even when we drove closer.”

Baschek, the director of the German Maritime Museum in Stralsund, said that even if the whale freed itself again, it would need to navigate narrow straits and about 310 miles to reach relative safety. “The chances of success are relatively slim,” he said.

The NHS is set to miss key targets to shorten waiting times for help at A&E, cancer care and planned hospital treatment, leaving millions of patients facing persistently long delays.

The health service in England will not deliver a series of milestone improvements in its performance that ministers demanded it achieve by the time the fiscal year ends on Tuesday, a Guardian analysis of the NHS’s most recent data has found.

The lack of progress raises questions about pledges made last week by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to get key waiting times back on track by the end of the parliament in 2029.

The findings will concern Keir Starmer, the prime minister, given Labour’s commitment to “get the NHS back on its feet” and the public’s strong desire to see an end to the routinely long waits for care that crept in from 2015.

The gloomy picture on waiting times also comes despite the NHS handing hospitals an extra £120m in recent weeks to fund a pre-deadline “elective sprint” – of extra appointments and more operations – intended to bolster its chances of delivering the necessary improvements by 31 March.

Streeting has repeatedly promised to ensure that 92% of people waiting for non-urgent hospital care such as appointments and operations get it within 18 weeks by 2029. However, the NHS only saw 61.5% of patents within 18 weeks in January. That was up on its 58.9% performance in January 2025 but still too low to hit the 65% year-end target for 2025-26.

Only 52 of the service’s 150 trusts – one in three – managed to deliver 65% performance in January.

In addition, 112 trusts – 70% of the total – had not delivered an additional requirement to improve their performance by at least 5% compared with the year before. The position at 44 trusts on the 18-week standard had worsened, amid unrelenting demand for care and a major NHS budget squeeze.

The service is also off-track to meet its year-end target for increasing the proportion of A&E patients treated within four hours. It was told to deliver 78% performance by 31 March. However, in February it managed to do so with just 74.1% of A&E arrivals – still short of the 78% target.

“These missed targets have very real human consequence. Patients will now be forced to face long delays for care they desperately need due to an NHS that isn’t up to scratch,” said Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson.

“Labour promised the world but have delivered little on our NHS. Patients still languish on corridors, can’t see a GP and wait too long for treatment. This is the biggest of all Starmer’s broken promises.”

The Guardian analysis also found that the NHS was due to miss the deadline to improve “category two” ambulance response times after a 999 call – which includes callouts for strokes and heart attacks – to an average of 30 minutes.

In January, response times had improved but were still at 30 minutes and 25 seconds. Six of England’s 11 ambulance trusts hit the target but five did not. The 30-minute target by the end of 2025-26 is meant to be a step in a series of annual improvements to help the NHS once again deliver its official target of 18 minutes.

More positively, the NHS is boosting patients’ satisfaction with getting GP appointments – another key target for this year – which is the public’s joint NHS priority, alongside speedy A&E care.

“Recent progress is encouraging, but meeting the government’s pledges to reduce waiting times will require a herculean effort,” said Tim Gardner, the assistant director of policy at the Health Foundation.

“It’s touch and go whether the current ‘sprint’ will be enough to meet this month’s interim target, with substantial variation across the country and some trusts struggling to even get close,” he added.

Projections by the thinktank suggest Labour will not be able to deliver its pledge to ensure that the NHS is again giving 92% of patients elective hospital care by 2029, he said.

Speaking last week to the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast, Streeting insisted that the government would not just hit that target but also get back to four-hour A&E care, cancer patients receiving their first treatment within 31 or 62 days and ambulances arriving within eight or 18 minutes of an emergency call, depending on the severity of the illness or injury.

He did so hours after a speech in which he stressed that “for the first time in 15 years waiting lists are falling, down by 374,000 since this government came to power”. That, and the first rise in public satisfaction with the NHS – albeit only to 26% – showed Labour’s medicine of £26bn extra funding and its 10-year health plan was helping to revive the NHS.

Labour inherited a waiting list in which 6.3 million people were waiting for 7.62m treatments. But by January that had fallen to 6.13 million patients waiting for 7.25m episodes of care.

“Overall there has been some progress [on waiting times since Labour took office in July 2024]. But it was from an incredibly low base and was already trending upwards,” said Stuart Hoddinott, an associate director of the Institute for Government thinktank.

“Crucially, additional funding and staffing are not translating into rapid improvements in performance,” he added.

Meanwhile, a separate analysis shows that the number of people in England waiting for a diagnostic test has hit 1.8 million – the highest since the Covid pandemic – and that delays in getting an X-ray or scan are limiting the NHS’s ability to crack its still-huge backlog of care.

Research by Magentus, a firm that works with NHS diagnostics services, also found:

• The number of people forced to wait more than 13 weeks for a test – well over the six-week supposed maximum – has risen to 139,652, the highest number since January 2024.

Marlen Suller, Magentus’s managing director for clinical diagnostics, said: “Diagnostic waiting lists are still growing, which can mean worrying waits for many patients. A test or scan is the starting point for many people’s journey through the healthcare system, and delays at this stage can hold everything else up. It can mean a longer wait for treatment to begin, and people who don’t need further care can’t be discharged and safely moved off the waiting list.”

An NHS spokesperson said: “Analysing old data misses the fact that the NHS is currently working flat out to achieve its ambitions and has improved dramatically since the end of January. NHS weekly management information shows that this effort has got us within a hare’s whisker of the 18-week target, with two weeks to go. We’ve delivered record numbers of appointments, tests and scans in 2025 and reduced the waiting list to its lowest level in three years, and year-long waits to their lowest level in almost six years, alongside seeing and treating record numbers of patients for cancer.”

US lawmakers responded to reports that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, as thousands of US troops assemble in the Middle East and the conflict showed signs of entering a new, more dangerous phase.

Officials told the Washington Post that a ground operation in Iran could be limited to raids by Special Operations forces and infantry troops, but it was unclear whether Donald Trump would approve any of the Pentagon’s plans.

Senator James Lankford, a Republican, told NBC’s Meet the Press that he had not ruled out supporting troops on the ground but that “we’ve got to be able to know what the objectives are and what they’re actually carrying out.”

Lankford, who serves on the Senate’s committee on intelligence, said it was important to “finish” the job but know “what boots we’re putting on the ground”.

“If this is special forces to be able to carry out a specific operation – get in, get out – that’s very different than long-standing occupation,” he said. “The worst thing that can happen is to be able to have this kind of conflict start and to not end it, to leave it undone”.

“We’ve got to be able to finish this,” he added.

Responding to the Washington Post report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the commander-in-chief maximum optionality. It does not mean the President has made a decision.”

A further 3,500 US soldiers and marines arrived in the Middle East on Sunday as part of a unit led by the warship USS Tripoli, which also includes assault and transport assets. The US typically stations around 50,000 troops in the region.

Options for use of the military build up include plans aimed at securing the strait of Hormuz, operations to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium or seizing Iranian oil facilities.

Trump has previously said he was “not putting troops anywhere” amid apparent splits in his Maga base over foreign military engagements and the need for congressional approval.

On Sunday, Lankford was asked if the president needed congressional approval to deploy US troops in Iran. Lankford demurred, saying it was “contingent” on how they are used.

“If we had a long-standing war that’s happening, go back again to what happened in Iraq or in Afghanistan, yes,” Lankford said. “If this is to protect Americans and to be able to make sure that we’re in there for a season and we’re stopping and getting out, that’s very, very different. So again, this is all contingent.”

Senate Republicans have previously rejected multiple war powers resolutions aimed at limiting Trump’s ability to launch further military action against Iran without congressional approval.

The Pentagon has reportedly requested an additional $200bn for the war, in addition to its annual $1tn budget. Trump has said the additional funds were being requested “for a lot of reasons, beyond even what we’re talking about in Iran”.

That comes as an Iranian missile strike destroyed a US E-3 Sentry early warning and control aircraft on the ground at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia. The loss of the $300m plane is the first known combat incident for the type. The US is believed to have about eight in service.

Lankford indicated that if the request comes, Congress “will have to speak at that moment to be able to talk about how far, what the plans are, what we’re going to do”.

The House majority leader, Steve Scalise, said on Sunday that the Trump administration had been meeting its objectives in the conflict.

“The whole world knows that a nuclear armed Iran would have been a danger to the world,” he told ABC News. “Just look at what Iran is doing right now. They’ve actually united, not only Israel, but all the other Arab nations around them against Iran, because of the danger that they pose.”

Scalise rejected any characterization that the administration has not laid out its objectives. He said Trump “understands what needs to be done” and has “a great team around him.”

Democrats reacted on Sunday to signs that the conflict could be entering a more dangerous phase.

New Jersey senator Cory Booker said that the Trump administration had “gotten us into what will be looked at as one of the greatest blunders, presidential blunders of our time”.

Booker said that by not seeking congressional approval, Trump was “pushing us further and further into a conflict with no foreseeable off-ramp and thousands of more troops moving into that region”.

He said that the US military engagement with Iran “is clearly not just a war, but the biggest military engagement we’ve had since the war in Afghanistan” and questioned its planning.

“This has been the problem from the start,” Booker said, adding that Trump did not “make his case to us or the American people or strategic allies in the region”.

Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen told ABC’s This Week he hoped an additional Pentagon budget request would not pass in Congress.

“I don’t think we should be providing more money for an illegal war of choice to a president who promised during the campaign that he would not drag America into new wars, especially in the Middle East and a war that is now making us less, not more safe and has already cost American lives, is costing billions of dollars every day, oil and gas prices are going up.”

Van Hollen added that a president who campaigned on lowering prices and ending foreign wars “has started foreign wars along with Prime Minister Netanyahu and prices are going through the roof. So no, we should not keep funding an illegal war of choice that’s making us less safe.”

Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf on Sunday warned the US against a ground invasion, threatening to set the American troops “on fire” and step up attacks on US allies.

According to Iranian official media, Ghalibaf said Iranian forces “are waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire and punish their regional partners forever”.

Iran policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour told CBS’s Face the Nation that he doesn’t “see any possibility of a resolution to this conflict” outside of a negotiated settlement.

“I think the US and Iran are miles apart when it comes to their goals here,” he warned, adding: “I think we could see potential ceasefire that opens the strait of Hormuz, which would shift us back from a hot war, back to a cold war.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it was prepared to target US universities in the Middle East in retaliation for what it claimed were US-Israeli strikes had destroyed two Iranian universities.

“If the US government wants its universities in the region to be free from retaliation… it must condemn the bombing of the universities in an official statement by 12 noon on Monday, March 30, Tehran time,” said the statement published by Iranian media.