World roundup: July 24 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Thailand, Venezuela, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
July 24, 1261: With much of the city’s garrison apparently out on a raid, a small group of soldiers from the Nicene Empire enters and seizes control of Constantinople in a nighttime incursion. Latin Emperor Baldwin II and most of the city’s grandees were evacuated by Venetian ships. The Nicene capture of Constantinople ended a 57 year war to reestablish the Byzantine Empire following its elimination during the Fourth Crusade. The restored empire was ruled by the Palaiologos Dynasty, starting with Emperor Michael VIII, through its final collapse in 1453.
July 24, 1923: The Treaty of Lausanne formally ends the Turkish War of Independence and establishes the borders of the Republic of Turkey. The treaty superseded the World War I Treaty of Sèvres, which partitioned Anatolia and was so punitive that it motivated the remnants of the Ottoman/Turkish military to resist.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
An explosion at what emergency personnel and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights are calling an “ammunition depot” in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province killed at least seven people and wounded “scores” on Thursday. Rescue efforts were reportedly complicated by “recurring explosions” following the initial blast. There’s no indication that this was anything other than accidental but it does highlight a major problem for Syrian authorities: the dangers posed by multiple military facilities that were abandoned during the collapse of the previous Syrian government and have still not been reoccupied, much less maintained. Thursday’s incident was just the latest in a series of explosions this month, though casualty information from those other blasts is unavailable. Beyond these military facilities, the presence of loose/unexploded ordnance littering the Syrian landscape is a huge challenge particularly for returning refugees.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Negotiations on a potential ceasefire in Gaza broke down fully on Thursday, one day after Hamas submitted an “amended” response to the latest Israeli proposal. The Israeli government’s response to that response was to withdraw its negotiating team from Qatar for “consultations,” at which point the Trump administration also left the talks. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff unsurprisingly blamed Hamas for the impasse and said via social media that the administration will “consider alternative options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza.” It’s entirely unclear what that means. Although negotiations have been ongoing for two weeks the content of Hamas’s response strongly suggests that the talks made very little progress if any toward a deal.
In the meantime, the Israeli government is continuing to starve Gaza’s population:
After four months of a near-total Israeli siege, Gaza’s few remaining hospitals now have wards for the growing number of malnourished children whose tiny bodies are just the width of their bones.
Doctors are famished to the point that they have dizzy spells as they make their rounds, medics say, and the journalists documenting their caseloads are often too weak to even walk to the clinics.
For months, aid agencies had warned of the coming crisis, as Israel halted the flow of aid to the Gaza Strip before attempting to replace U.N. relief efforts with distribution points inside military zones. It was a move Israeli officials said was aimed at pressuring Hamas, whose fighters attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and continue to hold about 50 hostages who were abducted that day, about 20 of whom are still believed to be alive.
But testimonies from doctors, relief workers and Gazans this week make it clear that a worst-case scenario is finally unfolding: Nearly 1 in 3 people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation.
Israeli officials are now insisting that they’re allowing plenty of food to enter Gaza but the United Nations is “refusing” to distribute the aid for some unspecified reason. This flies in the face of the Israeli government’s actions and rhetoric over the past several months and reflects, as Drop Site’s Ryan Grim notes, a government that fears it is losing further control of the narrative amid image after image of starving Palestinian children. Those who somehow survive the starvation campaign will presumably be herded into the concentration camp the Israeli military is establishing in Rafah and from there likely expelled from Gaza altogether.
Elsewhere, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that his government will recognize Palestinian statehood during the UN General Assembly session in September. He’d previously suggested that he was preparing to make such an announcement but has waffled of late, particularly during the “12 Day War.” Assuming he doesn’t waver, France will join several other European states that have recently recognized Palestine.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
A new UN report concludes that the Afghan government has “tortured and threatened Afghans forcibly returned from Iran and Pakistan because of their identity or personal history.” Those two countries have been expelling Afghan nationals en masse in recent months despite the dangers those people were likely to face (and apparently have faced) upon their repatriation. Afghan authorities are denying any mistreatment and insist they’ve cared for returnees by, among other things, assisting in their resettlement and providing them with “legal support.”
MYANMAR
Myanmar’s ruling junta is claiming that its forces have driven rebel forces out out the town of Thabeikkyin in the Mandalay region. A “gold mining hub,” as AFP puts it, Thabeikkyin has been contested by government forces and rebels since August. It’s the second economically significant town that the junta has reclaimed in as many weeks, after its capture of Nawnghkio in neighboring Shan state.
In more uplifting news for the junta, the Trump administration lifted sanctions on several Myanmar businesspersons and firms with ties to the military on Thursday. It offered no explanation for this decision. However, earlier this month junta leader Min Aung Hlaing sent a fairly obsequious letter to Donald Trump pleading for reduced US tariffs and offering much lower tariffs on US products in return. The language in the missive was extremely deferential to Trump, and given how much he appreciates that sort of thing it’s not much of a stretch to consider whether that was enough to put the junta on Trump’s friends list.
THAILAND
Weeks of tension along the Thai-Cambodian border erupted into full blown military conflict on Thursday. How the fighting began is unclear and each government is accusing the other’s military of firing the first shots, but the upshot is that Thai and Cambodian forces began firing on one another near the Ta Muen Thom temple in Thailand’s Surin province on Thursday morning. That clash quickly intensified to include artillery fire from Cambodia and airstrikes by Thai F-16s. Thai authorities are saying that at least 11 civilians and one soldier were killed, while casualty figures from the Cambodian government have not been forthcoming. The fighting also displaced tens of thousands—over 100,000 in Thailand alone, with Cambodian figures again not forthcoming at time of writing.
Despite numerous international calls for calm there’s no indication at this point that either side is standing down or that they’ve got any open lines of communication. Neither government has declared war, so that’s at least something. Cambodia and Thailand have been disputing several parts of their border for decades now, sometimes violently, and so much hostility has built up since the late May incident in which Thai forces killed a Cambodian border guard that it may be difficult to tamp this situation down quickly now that heavy fighting has begun. The question is whether it can be limited to cross-border exchanges of fire rather than something more serious.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces militants massacred at least 32 people during a two-day rampage through a village in Sudan’s West Kordofan state this week, according to the “Emergency Room” activist group. They wounded more than 50 other people during the assault, which reportedly ended Thursday morning. RSF officials have not commented and there’s no indication as to what, if anything, triggered the killings.
NIGERIA
The Nigerian military says its forces killed at least 95 “bandits” in an attack in northwestern Nigeria’s Niger state on Tuesday. One soldier was also killed in the fighting, which authorities claim “foiled an attempted bandit attack.”
In northeastern Nigeria, meanwhile, the ongoing jihadist conflict and Western aid cuts are raising fears of a mass hunger crisis:
The limited food will soon run out by the end of July as Western aid cuts — including President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development — send humanitarian programmes into a tailspin.
“This is our last rice from USAID,” said Chi Lael, Nigeria spokeswoman for the World Food Programme, pointing at a stack of white bags at another distribution centre in Mafa, around 150 kilometres from Damboa.
There are five million “severely hungry” people in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states — the three worst affected by the jihadist insurgency waged by Boko Haram and rival Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
WFP has until now only been able to feed 1.3 million who now face starvation as food handouts run out.
“There is no food left in the warehouses,” said Lael. “Lives will be lost.”
The timing couldn’t be worse. June to September is known as the “lean season”, the time between planting and harvest when families have little food reserves.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
New fighting between M23 militants and a local militia left at least 11 people dead in the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province on Thursday. Peace talks between the Congolese government and M23 resulted in a statement of principles earlier this week that included a pledge to sign a peace agreement by August 18. Clashes like this won’t necessarily impact the peace process, since while local militias in the region generally support the DRC government (at least inasmuch as they’re opposed to M23) they are not controlled by the government. Nevertheless continued fighting could make it more difficult to reach a deal by that August 18 deadline.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
AFP reported on Thursday that EU member states have agreed on a retaliatory package of tariffs worth some €93 billion (around $109 billion) should the bloc’s trade negotiations with the US break down. A wide variety of products is involved, with tariff rates ranging as high as 30 percent. The bloc is also developing a list of non-tariff penalties that would apply to US companies. That said, the general mood around these negotiations does seem to have turned decidedly in a positive direction over the past couple of days, with the two sides seemingly approaching an agreement centered around a 15 percent US tariff on EU products. What the agreement might look like beyond that headline figure is unclear.
UKRAINE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems to be backing down in the face of public outrage over a new law substantially weakening Ukraine’s two most important anticorruption agencies by forcing them to report to the Ukrainian prosecutor-general. On Thursday he advanced a new bill that both agencies declared would restore their “procedural powers and guarantees of independence.” Zelensky cited a need to purge the agencies of alleged “Russian influence” when he signed the bill into law on Tuesday, but it’s unclear how placing them under the prosecutor-general—which ultimately would make them directly subject to the president—was supposed to solve that alleged problem. Public protests and expressions of opposition from European Union officials seem to have convinced Zelensky that he made a misstep.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the Trump administration is planning to grant Chevron permission to pump Venezuelan oil again. The Biden administration had issued a waiver allowing Chevron to operate in Venezuela in a deal under which the Venezuelan government was supposed to ensure a “free and fair” presidential election last year. The Trump administration began winding that waiver down earlier this year but the company has reportedly been lobbying hard for a policy reversal, citing the possibility that Venezuelan oil might wind up flowing to China instead. It would seem that argument has resonated within the administration.
UNITED STATES
Finally, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at the brutal toll that US sanctions take around the world, as co-author Mark Weisbrot outlines:
Broad economic sanctions, most of which are imposed by the U.S. government, kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people each year — disproportionately children. This week the Lancet Global Health journal published an article that estimated that number at about 564,000 annually over a decade. This is comparable to the annual deaths around the world from armed conflict.
Sanctions are becoming the preferred weapon of the United States and some allies — not because they are less destructive than military action, but more likely because the toll is less visible. They can devastate food systems and hospitals and silently kill people without the gruesome videos of body parts in tent camps and cafes bombed from the air. They offer policymakers something that can deliver the deadly impact of war, even against civilians, without the political cost.
The above estimate of 564,000 annual deaths from sanctions is based on an analysis of data from 152 countries over 10 years. The study was by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and myself.
It’s a horrifying finding, but not surprising to economists, statisticians and other researchers who have investigated these impacts of economic sanctions. These are measures that target the entire economy, or a part of it that most of the rest of the economy depends on, such as the financial sector or a predominant export, for example in oil-exporting economies.
The sanctions can block access to essential imports such as medicine and food and the necessary infrastructure and spare parts to maintain drinkable water, including electrical systems.