World roundup: August 1 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 1, 1798: The French fleet that had accompanied Napoleon on his great eastern campaign is nearly wiped out by a British fleet in Egypt’s Abu Qir Bay in the somewhat inaptly named “Battle of the Nile.” A hitherto relatively obscure British admiral named Horatio Nelson managed to track Napoleon down in Egypt and completely outmaneuver the French fleet in the bay so that several of his vessels were able to attack the French ships of the line from their unprotected rear, and that was pretty much that. The French defeat was so total that not only did it doom Napoleon’s campaign to failure, it established British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean for the rest of the Napoleonic period.

English painter Thomas Luny’s 1834 The Battle of the Nile depicts the destruction of the French flagship L’Orient (Wikimedia Commons)

August 1, 1927: The Nanchang Uprising marks the start of the Chinese Civil War. In a direct response to the Shanghai Massacre of April 12, in which Kuomintang forces purged Chinese Communist Party members from their ranks (and killed thousands of them, though the casualty figures are disputed), a CCP army captured Nanchang, home of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Nationalist Party. This was one of several CCP uprisings around the country. Realizing they couldn’t hold the city against a counterattack, the CCP withdrew on August 5 and undertook what became known as the “Little Long March” south to Guangdong province. China’s People’s Liberation Army dates its founding to this uprising.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

There are a few items of note:

• Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff and US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee made a (no doubt carefully curated) visit to a “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” facility in Rafah on Friday. Shortly afterward Israeli soldiers gunned down three aid seekers at one of the GHF’s Rafah sites, and while it may not have been the same site Witkoff and Huckabee visited I think the juxtaposition is still relevant. The Israeli military (IDF) has killed over 1000 Palestinian aid seekers since the GHF began operations in late May, most in or around GHF facilities but some while attempting to get supplies from United Nations trucks. With people in Gaza now dying nearly daily of malnutrition and many perhaps past the point where simply feeding them would be enough to save their lives, Witkoff’s visit was supposed to be the precursor to some sort of new US aid effort. But if his visit didn’t extend beyond the GHF site there’s not much reason for optimism about what the Trump administration might do next.