World roundup: November 4 2025
Stories from North Korea, Nigeria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere
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PROGRAMMING NOTE: I will not be writing a newsletter tomorrow. Instead I will be participating in an event for writer Luke O’Neil’s new book, We Had It Coming, at the Brookland Busboys and Poets in DC. I will be completely out of my depth but it should be fun. We’ll double up Thursday’s newsletter.
TODAY IN HISTORY
November 4, 1979: The Iran Hostage Crisis begins when a group of Iranian students storms the American embassy in Tehran and takes 66 US citizens hostage. They would hold 52 of those hostages for the next 444 days, shaping both the 1980 US presidential election and the course of the Iranian Revolution in the process. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used the embassy seizure and hostage crisis to outmaneuver potential opponents within the broader revolutionary movement and ensure that his conception of the “Islamic Republic” would emerge.
November 4, 1995: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical named Yigal Amir. Rabin’s murder is often seen as the reason for the failure of the Oslo peace process, which he’d begun a couple of years earlier with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Oslo’s internal flaws probably doomed it to failure anyway, but Rabin’s killing did hasten the shift of Israeli politics to the right and led indirectly to Benjamin Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
With Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa scheduled to visit the White House on Monday, the Trump administration is reportedly pushing for a United Nations Security Council vote this weekend to lift the sanctions that body imposed on him and Syrian Interior Minister Anas Khattab back when they were just simple jihadist militants. According to Al-Monitor it’s facing resistance from the Chinese government and has amended an earlier draft resolution—which would have lifted sanctions on Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham faction as well—in response. It’s unclear whether that will be enough to satisfy Beijing, which objects to the presence of Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party members in the new Syrian security forces.
LEBANON
According to Al-Monitor’s Ben Caspit, the Israeli military (IDF) is preparing “to resume heavy attacks against Hezbollah” unless the Lebanese government moves expeditiously to disarm the organization. You might be thinking “hasn’t the IDF already resumed heavy attacks against Hezbollah?” or “did the IDF ever stop conducting heavy attacks against Hezbollah?” but apparently the answer to both of those question is “no,” at least as far as the IDF itself is concerned. A “senior Israeli military source” told Caspit that the IDF is not looking for “an all-out war” but rather “intensifying” what it’s already doing, which to be clear is conducting multiple airstrikes per day on various parts of Lebanon.
According to Caspit, “a senior Israeli security source” (presumably a different source) said that the aim would be “to make it clear to Hezbollah that if it does not disarm voluntarily, it will disarm by force.” The Israelis have already tried to disarm Hezbollah by force, and while they battered the group pretty hard they failed to disarm it. This is why they turned responsibility for disarmament over to the Lebanese government in the first place, but I digress. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has said that he’s offered to discuss the situation with Israeli officials, but that there is no “mutual willingness” for negotiations.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Inkstick’s Issam Adwan reports on the “illusion,” or perhaps delusion would be a better term, of a Gaza ceasefire:
It was Oct. 19, just 10 days into the so-called ceasefire. The Israeli strike killed 10 members of [Gaza resident Mohammed] Washah’s family, including his brother Ibrahim, 30, his wife, and their toddler son. Only a four-year-old daughter survived. “Ibrahim had just enrolled her in kindergarten. He was so proud,” Washah says, eyes fixed on the shattered window frame. “He told me, ‘She’s growing up, finally ready for school.’ Now she’s an orphan.”
Washah himself was lightly injured in the blast. His daughter was in his arms. Beside him, his niece screamed. He handed the children off to a neighbor, then rushed back to find the rest of his family. “I couldn’t find my mother. My father was under the rubble, his head bleeding. I screamed for Ibrahim. He was just here… half a meter from me.”
Neighbors joined the frantic search. They pulled Washah’s mother out — she had been pinned beneath debris, only her hand visible. She survived. But his brother, sister-in-law, and their son were gone. A cousin, just six, who had survived an earlier airstrike, died beside them. “There were no bodies,” Washah says. “Just pieces. That missile erased them.”
The Gaza Media Office reports that Israeli forces violated the ceasefire 125 times within the first 10 days, killing 94 Palestinians and injuring 344. Human rights groups believe the true number is higher. On Oct. 29 alone, Israeli strikes killed 104 Palestinians, including 46 children, the deadliest day since the truce began. And yet Trump insisted, “The ceasefire holds.”
For many in Gaza, those words are meaningless.
In other items:
The IDF killed at least two people in separate incidents in northern Gaza on Tuesday. At least one of them appears to have been guilty of encroaching on the “yellow line” demarcating IDF-controlled Gaza. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is also claiming that its fighters attacked an IDF unit near the West Bank city of Tulkarm though details beyond that were not available at time of writing.
Hamas returned another body to Israel on Tuesday, this one identified as IDF soldier and US-Israeli dual national Itay Chen. He was the last unaccounted-for American captive in Gaza.
Aid agencies are continuing to sound the alarm about the lack of shelter materials entering Gaza heading into winter. This is related to the overall dearth of aid, which is entering the territory at levels higher than before the ceasefire but still far lower than what the ceasefire specifies. Food also continues to be an issue, as reported cases of malnutrition have dropped a bit but are still high. Conditions are substantially worse in the northern part of Gaza as opposed to the south.
According to Barak Ravid at Axios, the Trump administration is circulating another draft resolution at the UNSC that would establish its proposed international security force for Gaza with a term of at least two years. The draft also establishes the proposed Donald Trump-chaired “Board of Peace” as the “transitional governance administration” for the territory, with a view toward eventually handing political control over to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority. Serving under the Board would be a “technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians from the Strip” that would “be responsible for day-to-day operations of Gaza’s civil service and administration.” It’s unclear what kind of reception the draft is currently getting among UNSC members.
SAUDI ARABIA
The Saudi military’s interest in purchasing the F-35 aircraft has reportedly gotten approval from the Pentagon’s policy office, clearing one of several obstacles to an eventual sale. The Saudis are seeking to buy 48 of the planes as part of their air force modernization project but there has been significant hesitation about that idea in Washington, both because of institutional distaste for the Saudi monarchy and because of concerns that selling F-35s to Riyadh would end Israel’s regional monopoly on the aircraft. Successive US administrations have also viewed access to the F-35 as a carrot that they could dangle before the Saudis to secure a normalization agreement with Israel, though under the circumstances that seems extremely unlikely. So the Trump administration may be prepared to go forward with the sale anyway.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
The NGO Swissaid issued a report on Tuesday accusing the UAE of serving as a hub for illicit gold, particularly from Africa. This is sort of an open secret but it’s helpful to put some numbers behind the allegations, and in this case the organization says it tracked 748 metric tons of African gold to the UAE in 2024, an 18 percent increase over the previous year. Much of that gold is coming from Sudan and its neighbors, including Chad and Libya—two known destinations for gold smuggled out of Sudan by the Rapid Support Forces militant group. A large portion also comes from Uganda and Rwanda, countries that don’t have large gold reserves of their own but are used as conduits for gold smuggled out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Another major source is Togo, a country that also has negligible domestic gold reserves but is an outlet for gold smuggled out of other states in West Africa.
ASIA
INDIA
Amid a still-frosty bilateral relationship, the US and Indian militaries found time last week to renew their cooperation agreement for the second time:
On October 31, India and the United States renewed a 10-year defense cooperation agreement (DCA), first signed in 2005. This is expected to provide some stability to bilateral relations that have been strained of late by U.S. President Donald Trump’s imposition of steep trade tariffs on India.
Arun Singh, former Indian ambassador to the U.S., told The Diplomat that despite the “huge differences,” India and the U.S. were able to sign the DCA. It “is an attempt to ensure stability in other areas of cooperation,” Singh said.
The Framework for the U.S.-India Major Defense Partnership pact was signed on the margins of the 12th ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting – Plus (ADMM-Plus) in Kuala Lumpur. It comes against the backdrop of a major global geopolitical churn that includes a possible redefinition of ties between the United States and China, seen as India’s main strategic competitor in Asia.
Ahead of the signing of the pact, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh described his meeting with his U.S. counterpart Pete Hegseth as “fruitful.”
Maybe he was referring to the limes in their gin and tonics.
NORTH KOREA
The South Korean National Intelligence Service is predicting that Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will hold a summit sometime next year. Trump has already expressed his interest in reconnecting with Kim, so it’s the latter who’s the holdout. The NIS assessment, as relayed by opposition politician Lee Sung-kwon, is that Kim “has the intent to pursue dialogue with the United States and will seek contact if conditions become favorable.” The agency has, again according to Lee, told members of parliament that Pyongyang “is preparing behind the scenes for dialogue with the United States.” Kim has publicly said that he won’t meet with Trump unless the US government drops its demand for North Korea’s “denuclearization.”
AFRICA
SUDAN
There are several items of note:
A drone strike left at least 40 funeral-goers dead in a village near the Sudanese city of El-Obeid on Monday. Suspicion has unsurprisingly fallen on the Rapid Support Forces militant group, which has demonstrated its willingness to kill large numbers of civilians and has made its designs on El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, clear.
The Sudan Doctors Network is claiming that the RSF also attacked a children’s hospital in the town of Karnoi in North Darfur state on Monday, killing at least seven people.
Civilian casualties in Sudan are on the rise—the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data monitor reported 1545 deaths in October, the most it’s tracked in a single month since the RSF and Sudanese military began their war in April 2023. It reported some 3000 casualties in total, a bit off of the 3240 casualties recorded in October 2024 but still high.
The Trump administration submitted a ceasefire proposal to Sudan’s military government that said government rejected on Tuesday after its security and defense council met to discuss it. Nothing about the proposal has been made public so it’s impossible to know why the military found it objectionable.
NIGERIA
Security forces reportedly killed at least 19 bandits in a raid on a hideout in northern Nigeria’s Kano state on Tuesday. Two soldiers and a paramilitary auxiliary were also killed in the operation. In northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state, meanwhile, soldiers reportedly fought off a raid by “Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) fighters” on a military base, killing at least six of the attackers. This seems dubious inasmuch as “Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province” don’t get along with one another as a rule. But what do I know?
Speaking of jihadist groups operating in Nigeria, Alex Thurston has a new piece discussing the apparent emergence of the Mali-based Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin organization in that country:
The JNIM attack was not particularly bloody - one soldier was killed - but it is the JNIM name that draws attention. As the Africa Report’s Boubacar Haidara writes, JNIM’s official arrival means a new headache for the Nigerian military at a time when it is already fighting on multiple internal fronts, all while civil-military relations are a bit shaky.
Beyond Nigeria, one major concern is the possibility of a contiguous jihadist corridor emerging from Mali to Lake Chad - an “arc of instability,” to bring back a phrase that was widespread in the 2000s and 2010s when talking about Africa amid the early War on Terror. But I think it’s more complicated than that.
To me the right image is not the arc or the belt but the patchwork. More and more, the Sahel and Nigeria comprise pockets of government authority interspersed with pockets of control by different armed actors; the original “arc of instability” talk forecast that a kind of broad-based “terrorist arc” would emerge in the Sahel and beyond, which would in turn act as a “launch pad” for attacks on Western countries. I think what one confronts now is less a cohesive “terrorist arc” and more a terrain of competition and uncertainty, with overlapping spheres of influence and violence. One thing that makes life in the Sahel and West Africa so deadly and dangerous for many civilians is that who controls what, and where it’s safe to work and live and travel, can change dramatically from one moment to the next. And for locals, who often refer to armed groups by nicknames or generic names (see the Premium Times report for an example of this dynamic), the violence is often experienced not as the work of dreaded outsiders but as the work of local or at least regional men.
He notes that there’s some question as to who claimed responsibility for last Wednesday’s attack but it may not have been JNIM’s core leadership group. This could mean that it was a local group asserting a tie to the organization that doesn’t necessarily exist (at least not yet).
CAMEROON
Reuters, citing data provided by a pair of United Nations “sources,” is reporting that Cameroonian security forces have killed 48 people in protests following the reelection (at least officially) of incumbent President Paul Biya. Most died of gunshot wounds but “several” appear to have been beaten to death. Opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma called for a three day “lockdown” to protest the vote that began on Monday and seems to have taken effect at least in places where his supporters have a large presence, including the country’s largest city Douala. Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, has partially locked down but some businesses have remained open.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Ukrainian military claimed successful drone strikes on Russian oil and petrochemical facilities in Nizhny Novgorod and the Bashkortostan region on Tuesday. I mention these not because I think they’re necessarily crippling to Russian infrastructure but because both targets are well inside Russia, reflecting Ukraine’s growing capabilities in conducting long-range attacks with its own projectiles rather than anything provided from abroad. If there is going to come a point where the Russian government feels somewhat compelled to engage in actual peace talks that capability might be part of the reason why.
NETHERLANDS
Final vote numbers have the centrist Democrats 66 party winning last week’s Dutch parliamentary election. It finished tied with the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) at 26 seats apiece, but eked out a slight lead in the popular vote count. This means that party leader Rob Jetten should become the Netherlands’ next prime minister, albeit after what’s expected to be an extended coalition building process. However, while PVV and leader Geert Wilders came up short, having lost 11 seats and facing exclusion from the next government, a new Jacobin piece points out that last Wednesday was not a bad night for the Dutch right overall. The Dutch left, however, has seen better days:
First, after the October 29 vote, the core trio of far-right parties — PVV, JA21 (Conservative Liberals), and Forum for Democracy — hold forty-two of one hundred fifty seats. In 2023, they held forty-one. Wilders’s party lost eleven, yet JA21 jumped from one to nine and Forum rose from three to seven. In total, they control nearly one-third of the 150-seat parliament. This reshuffle is mainly tactical: once every mainstream party said it would refuse to govern with Wilders, many hard-right voters simply parked their ballot with JA21 or Forum, instead of abandoning this kind of politics altogether.
Second, the combined forces of the Left, in all their colors, have crashed to just thirty seats. The GreenLeft–Labor coalition fell from twenty-five to twenty, the Socialists from five to three. The further-left BIJ1 had already lost its single seat in 2023. It failed to regain it, and no newcomer filled the gap.
That 20 percent share of seats in parliament is the leanest left-wing bench the Netherlands has recorded since the advent of universal suffrage. This is even more remarkable given the context of this election, following the collapse of a right-wing government widely regarded as a failure. It also followed an election campaign in which economic issues (including housing and health care) were salient to many voters, which should’ve benefited left-wing parties. Despite such favorable conditions, however, they performed worse than ever.
AMERICAS
MEXICO
NBC News reported on Monday that “the Trump administration has begun detailed planning for a new mission to send American troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to target drug cartels, according to two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials familiar with the effort.” Training, in this report, is already underway but there’s been no decision about when (and possibly whether) to deploy. If there is a deployment it will involve US special forces and CIA operatives under CIA direction, and would mark a shift from past US policy that has sent forces to Mexico to support Mexican security forces but not to engage the cartels directly. NBC reported earlier this year that the administration was considering drone strikes against Mexican cartels and it sounds like that’s what these forces would primarily be doing, using short-range drones that require operators in the vicinity.
This all appears to be news to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who denied on Tuesday that any “unilateral” US operations in Mexico are in the offing and said that if they were her government would not “agree to it.” There may be some attempt to bring Sheinbaum on board with this operation if it comes to fruition, but it sounds like the administration is prepared to move forward with or without her cooperation.
UNITED STATES
The US military killed two more alleged drug traffickers in bombing another alleged drug boat in the Caribbean on Tuesday. This marks 16 boats it’s blown up and 66 summary executions it’s carried out since beginning this spree in early September.
Finally, former Vice President Dick Cheney died on Tuesday. My wife hates it when I speak ill of the dead, and while I think she’d make an exception in this case I’m nevertheless going to let The Nation’s Spencer Ackerman do it for me:
Cheney, 84, picked an appropriate time to die. His decades-long struggle to consolidate the unparalleled might of US warmaking within the White House has succeeded. “In Cheney’s view,” wrote his biographer Barton Gellman, “the president’s authority was close to absolute within his rightful sphere.” Cheney defined that sphere expansively and fought for his definitions aggressively. When Patrick Leahy accused the former Halliburton CEO of rigging gigantic no-bid contracts for the company in Iraq, Cheney responded, “Fuck yourself.” He later called the exchange “the best thing I ever did.”
The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, [Trump administration Office of Legal Counsel director T. Elliot] Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) [Donald] Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy, and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in 21st-century America.
No hell is hot enough or eternal enough for Dick Cheney. Any discussion of his works must begin with the 2021 assessment of Brown University’s Costs of War Project that found, conservatively, that the War on Terror killed between 897,000 and 929,000 people across five of its battlefields. Codirector Neda Crawford called that assessment “a vast undercount,” since it doesn’t take into account the downstream casualties caused by the epidemiological effects of destroying the infrastructure of the countries Cheney helped bomb, invade, and occupy. Cheney shares the blame for what is surely the deaths of more than a million people with many others, especially George W. Bush, the president he served. But while Bush was the self-styled “decider,” Cheney was the most crucial architect the War on Terror had, shaping the decisions Bush made.
To give Cheney his full due, a 2023 Costs of War assessment estimated that the War on Terror had claimed at least 4.5 million lives in total by that point, including those it indirectly caused.
Good riddance to Cheney