World roundup: July 22 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Mali, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
July 22, 1456: An Ottoman siege of the then-Hungarian city of Belgrade (Nándorfehérvár in Hungarian) ends in failure thanks to the city’s strong fortifications and the timely arrival of a relief army under Transylvanian warlord John Hunyadi. The defeat stymied Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s (“the Conqueror”) plans to advance west after his conquest of Constantinople and spared Hungary from Ottoman conquest—for a while, at least.
July 22, 1946: Members of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group that was one of the predecessors of the modern Likud party, bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and kill 91 people in the process. Their target was the headquarters of the British mandatory authority and the attack was meant as a response to the British arrest of hundreds of Zionist militants in Operation Agatha in late June. Most Zionist leaders condemned Irgun, which in turn blamed British authorities for not evacuating the hotel despite telephoned warnings about the bomb.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The committee tasked with investigating the massacre of Syrian Alawites back in March has determined that the affair left at least 1426 people dead. Of those, 238 were killed in an attack by Assad loyalists against Syrian security forces that began the violence but the rest were apparently killed in the sectarian reprisals that followed. You’ll note that this casualty figure is well below a more independent count published last month by Reuters that identified at least 1479 Alawites alone killed in the March incident. The committee’s investigation also diverges from that Reuters report in terms of culpability—where Reuters implicated officials all the way up the Syrian chain of command, the committee (which was appointed by the government, to be clear) contends that the commanders of the security units involved did not order attacks on Alawite civilians and in at least some cases tried to stop them. Make of that what you will though as I’ve implied here I don’t put a lot of stock into the committee’s work.
US envoy Tom Barrack is reportedly going to mediate a discussion between Syrian and Israeli officials on Thursday to try to work out a mutually agreeable security program for southern Syria. US efforts to improve the Israel-Syria relationship took a huge hit last week when the Israeli military carried out a series of airstrikes in Syria (including a couple on government sites in Damascus) amid the crisis in Suwayda province. I’m sure Barrack would like to restart that project but he’ll likely settle for simply stabilizing relations so that they don’t continue to worsen. It’s unclear where the meeting will take place though the US has been holding similar sessions in Azerbaijan of late.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Ruwaida Amer, a journalist in Khan Younis writing for +972 Magazine, narrates her own starvation:
I am so hungry.
I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe. Every moment, I find myself wishing: If only this were just a nightmare. If only I could wake up and it would all be over.
Since last May, after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Khan Younis refugee camp, I’ve heard those same words uttered by countless people around me. Hunger here feels like an assault on our dignity, a cruel contradiction in a world that prides itself on progress and innovation.
Every morning, we wake up thinking only of one thing: how to find something to eat. My thoughts go immediately to our sick mother, who had spinal surgery two weeks ago and now needs nutrition to recover. We have nothing to offer her.
Then there’s my little niece and nephew — Rital, 6, and Adam, 4 — who ask for bread all the time. And we adults try to withstand our own hunger just to save whatever scraps we can for the kids and the elderly.
Since Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza in early March (which it eased only marginally in late May), we haven’t tasted meat, eggs, or fish. In fact, we’ve gone without nearly 80 percent of the food we used to eat. Our bodies are breaking down. We feel constantly weak, unfocused, and off-balance. We grow irritable easily, but most of the time we just stay silent. Talking uses up too much energy.
Doctors in Gaza said on Tuesday that at least 15 people had died of starvation in the territory over the previous 24 hours, including a six week old infant. Al-Shifa Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya reported the starvation deaths of 21 children over the past three days. The Norwegian Refugee Council reported that its Gaza operation has completely run out of aid and its own staffers are among those who are at risk of starvation. AFP reported that its Gaza journalists are starving. Months of intentional deprivation have created a hunger crisis that has finally crossed the threshold to taking lives. More starvation deaths, potentially many more, will follow without an immediate remedy that does not seem to be forthcoming.
Elsewhere:
The Washington Post has published an investigation into the “for-profit companies” that are supporting the nonprofit “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” in its efforts to distribute aid/create massive shooting galleries for Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries. Chiefly they include “a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, whose subsidiary Orbis Operations helped set up the foundation; and Safe Reach Solutions, the primary contractor overseeing GHF operations inside Gaza, which was created late last year for that purpose” and which is “owned by a Wyoming-based trust whose beneficiary is”—wait for it—“McNally Capital.” The Boston Consulting Group, once a member of that list, has since famously parted ways with the project, leaving essentially McNally Capital. You’ll perhaps be unsurprised to learn that McNally, via at least a couple of senior personnel, has ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and US military as well as “private security companies” like the one it created specifically for this project.
The Trump administration pulled the US out of UNESCO on Tuesday over what State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce called its “globalist, ideological agenda” and specifically “the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization” following its 2011 decision to admit Palestine as a member. Apparently this all conflicts with the “America First” agenda in some way that I don’t really care to fathom. The Trump administration pulled the US out of UNESCO in 2017 so this is not hugely surprising, though it will be interesting to see whether a future Democratic administration will rejoin the organization (the Biden administration didn’t do so until 2023, citing at the time concerns about rising Chinese influence).
YEMEN
The Trump administration blacklisted two individuals and five entities on Tuesday connected with an alleged oil smuggling ring that raises funds for Yemen’s Houthi movement. Firms based in the UAE were among the targets.
ASIA
INDONESIA
The US and Indonesian governments have released details of the trade agreement they reached last week. Under it, the Trump administration is imposing a 19 percent tariff on Indonesian products, a considerable reduction from the 32 percent it proposed earlier this month. Indonesian officials agreed to a number of concessions, including the elimination of procedural requirements on US agricultural products and the elimination of export controls on critical minerals.
PHILIPPINES
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. visited the White House on Tuesday to conclude his country’s trade agreement, under which Marcos’s government will impose no tariffs on US products. In return for that concession Donald Trump has agreed to a tariff on Philippine products of 19 percent, a whopping 1 percent lower than the rate he proposed a couple of weeks ago. Marcos, who has thrown his lot almost entirely in with the US due to ongoing Philippine-Chinese tensions over the South China Sea, was not exactly negotiating from a position of leverage.
JAPAN
The Wall Street Journal reports on a relatively new right-wing party that seems to have played a decisive role in costing Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru his House of Councillors majority:
Sanseito—which translates as the participate-in-politics party—is into organic farming and worshiping the Emperor, and isn’t keen on vaccines or foreigners. It polled fourth in Sunday’s parliamentary election, helping to deprive Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s ruling coalition of its majority in the Japanese Diet’s upper house, an upset that complicates trade negotiations with the U.S. just days before sweeping new tariffs are due to come into force.
The breakthrough marks yet another example of right-wing challenges to established political parties that have transformed politics in Europe and the U.S., such as Germany’s AfD, Britain’s Reform UK or Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
Just as those groups have drawn on angst over immigration, Sanseito’s anti-foreigner rhetoric has found fertile ground in a country that is slowly opening up to newcomers to fill jobs in its rapidly aging society and where worries over surging tourism abound.
Ishiba has publicly and repeatedly asserted his intention not to resign despite the setback, but the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri reported on Wednesday (local time) that he may consider stepping down pending the outcome of his government’s trade talks with the United States. Which is quite a coincidence, in that Donald Trump announced on Tuesday evening (in the US) that those talks have been concluded, with Japan facing a 15 percent tariff on its products (down from the 25 percent rate Trump floated earlier this month). Details beyond that are unclear, though Trump said that “Japan will open their Country to Trade including Cars and Trucks, Rice and certain other Agricultural Products, and other things” and invest “$550 Billion Dollars” in the US at Trump’s “direction” (whatever that means). Unless Ishiba extracted something that could be viewed as a concession from the US I don’t know how he could spin this as a particularly good deal let alone one that’s good enough to justify him remaining in office.
AFRICA
MOROCCO
The Portuguese government on Tuesday became the latest Western government to throw its support behind the Moroccan government’s proposed autonomy plan for the disputed Western Sahara region. Portuguese Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel called the idea, which would create a separate government to manage Western Sahara’s domestic issues while giving the Moroccan government authority over foreign and defense policy as well as religious matters and recognizing Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s rule over the territory, “serious and credible” in comments to reporters. Several other European governments have also declared their support for this plan over the past couple of years, while the US and Israeli governments formally recognized Western Sahara as Moroccan as part of the “Abraham Accords” in 2020.
MALI
Human Rights Watch is accusing the Malian military and its Russian support network of continued attacks on Fulani civilians:
Mali’s armed forces and the allied Russia-backed Wagner Group have committed dozens of summary executions and enforced disappearances of ethnic Fulani men since January 2025, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Malian army and the Wagner Group, which have carried out joint operations against Islamist armed groups over the past 3 years, appear to have executed at least 12 Fulani men and forcibly disappeared at least 81 others since January, in the context of counterinsurgency operations across several regions of the country against the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen, JNIM). Witnesses said Malian soldiers and Wagner Group fighters carried out abuses against people belonging to the Fulani ethnic group, whom they accuse of collaborating with the JNIM.
“Mali’s military junta is ultimately responsible for the summary killings and enforced disappearances by the army and allied Wagner Group fighters,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The junta needs to end the abuses, make the whereabouts of those detained known, investigate and hold those responsible to account.”
This sort of violence creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that it can drive Fulani communities to seek protection from JNIM and leave Fulani men open to recruitment pitches from that group and potentially Islamic State. That in turn fuels the perception that the Fulani are inextricably linked to jihadists and becomes the justification for further state violence against them.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
In what’s becoming a theme of his second term, Donald Trump’s belligerence toward the European Union appears to be bolstering its public support:
The European Union was in bad shape at the start of the first Trump administration. Public trust in the bloc was at a historic low, Britain had just voted to leave, and the European economy was struggling to recover from the global financial crisis, which had set off a series of debt-related meltdowns across the continent.
But things slowly started to improve from around 2016. In recent months, sentiment around the European Union has picked up further. Trust ratings are approaching a two-decade high. E.U. leaders are striking trade deals with fast-growing economies like Indonesia, standing up a defense plan that has garnered partnerships with nations including Canada, and even Britain recently struck a deal to reset relations.
The bloc still has very real problems. Its population is aging and economic growth remains slow. Populist detractors who criticize it loudly have been gaining momentum, and it is grasping for ways to revitalize competitiveness. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, has come under fierce criticism as she tries to overhaul the bloc’s budget.
But even in member states like Denmark, which has long been skeptical of the European Union’s budget and border policies, feelings toward the bloc have turned decidedly more positive.
As this piece notes there are other factors besides Trump at play here, including Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and a surprisingly not-terrible EU response to COVID and the resultant economic downturn. But Trump is undoubtedly part of the picture, with concerns about the US fueling sentiment within the bloc that European nations are better off together than they would be separately.
UKRAINE
Thousands of people hit the streets of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Tuesday calling on President Volodymyr Zelensky to veto a bill that threatens to undercut the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). Zelensky reportedly signed the bill into law anyway. It will give his office expanded power over those two institutions, the primary anticorruption agencies in a country that remains pretty riddled with corruption, hence the public outcry. There’s been no comment as far as I know from Zelensky or his office as yet but I will note that if one were looking for, say, a pretext to seek Zelensky’s removal, this might do the trick.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Washington Post reported last week on a Trump administration memo outlining its human trafficking procedures:
Federal immigration officers may deport immigrants to countries other than their own, with as little as six hours’ notice, even if officials have not provided any assurances that the new arrivals will be safe from persecution or torture, a top official said in a memo.
Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.
People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.
If the State Department “believes those assurances to be credible,” then ICE may deport someone to that country “without the need for further procedures,” Lyons wrote in the memo, obtained by The Washington Post.
Zelensky will not be removed. That would require his sponsors in the west to acknowledge what they never will.