World roundup: November 13 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Libya, the Netherlands, and elsewhere
You’re reading the web version of Foreign Exchanges. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, sign up today:
TODAY IN HISTORY
November 13, 1002: In an event that’s been commemorated as the “St. Brice’s Day Massacre,” English King Æthelred the Unready orders the execution of all Danes in his kingdom. Æthelred’s relationship with the Danes was poor. He’d been defeated by a Danish army at the Battle of Maldon in 991 and forced to pay tribute, and Danish raiders routinely swept through the English countryside. There was a historical memory of the depredations of the Danelaw that likely contributed to general anti-Dane sentiment in England. At some point in 1002 Æthelred was apparently convinced that any Dane living in his domain would gladly assassinate him, and under this vaguely perceived notion of a “threat” he issued an order for their mass killing. The actual number of people killed is unclear but the massacre is thought to have contributed to Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard’s invasion of England in 1003. It’s said that Sweyn’s sister and her husband were among the massacre’s victims.
November 13, 1918: Allied forces occupy Istanbul. Under the Armistice of Mudros, the Ottoman Empire’s World War I surrender document, Allied soldiers were permitted to garrison the empire’s Bosphorus Fort. A military occupation of the entire city was something of a gray area, though the Ottomans were in no position to object. The later Treaty of Sèvres would have made Istanbul an “international city,” but the Turkish War of Independence and subsequent Treaty of Lausanne incorporated it into the new Republic of Turkey.
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations COP30 climate summit got underway in Brazil earlier this week amid a sense of pessimism given that the government of world’s largest oil and natural gas producing country did not send a delegation and is opposed to reducing carbon emissions on principle. Reinforcing that concern, the International Energy Agency issued a new report on the prospects for “peak” fossil fuel demand that takes the Trump administration’s predilections into account:
Two years ago, the International Energy Agency caused a stir when it published a widely read analysis suggesting that the world’s use of oil, gas and coal could start to decline by the 2030s because of the energy policies many governments were pursuing. The prospect that fossil fuel demand might soon peak was seen as a potential turning point in efforts to slow climate change.
But in a major new report published on Wednesday, the energy agency has a different message about a peak in fossil fuel use: It’s complicated.
The agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, a comprehensive report on global energy trends, still includes its previous “stated policies” scenario, essentially projecting that countries will continue enacting policies that help tackle climate change and adopting solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles at a rapid clip, potentially leading to a decline or plateau in the use of oil, gas and coal by 2035.
Unlike last year, however, the agency is also including a more conservative “current policies” scenario that assumes countries won’t enact any additional energy policies and will face obstacles in shifting to cleaner forms of power. The Trump administration had pressured the agency to include this scenario, which sees oil and gas demand rising steadily through 2050, leading to significantly more global warming.
Growing demand for electricity to power our glorious AI overlords is also changing assumptions about future fossil fuel demand, even as renewable energy continues to grow at a relatively healthy pace.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
Reuters, citing “a senior Saudi official,” is reporting that “Saudi Arabia plans imminently to boost commercial ties with Lebanon” as a reward, I guess, for the work Beirut has done to curb the flow of drugs (primarily captagon) to the kingdom. The fact that Hezbollah (and through it Iran) has been relatively marginalized in Lebanese politics of late is I’m sure also part of the Saudi rationale. Regardless, this is presumably good news for the ailing Lebanese economy.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Opinio Jurist’s Safia Southey highlights the dystopian “data for food” policy for which the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” served as a pilot project:
In Gaza, starving Palestinians face a brutal choice: surrender your personal data, or go without food. Operating outside established UN coordination frameworks, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been accused of transforming aid distribution into a system that requires Palestinians to hand over personal data through “voluntary” reservation tools and to submit to biometric screening at aid sites.
Some form of data collection, such as managing queues or preventing duplication, has long been part of aid delivery. The problem, however, arises when “humanitarian data management” shifts into a security function, shaping who receives relief, generating risk labels that resemble civilian-combatant determinations, or feeding targeting decisions. Once that line is crossed, international humanitarian law (IHL), private military and security company (PMSC) regulation, and data-protection regimes impose more exacting obligations than those designed for routine beneficiary registration.
When contractors working GHF sites have reportedly used live ammunition against aid recipients, and UN investigators have documented hundreds of deaths near these facilities, the convergence of armed protection and data-driven access control reveals that existing regulatory frameworks were built for an earlier era of guards and guns.
Meanwhile:
The Israeli military (IDF) killed two Palestinian teenagers in a town near the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday. Israeli officials said they determined that the pair “were on their way to carry out a terror attack,” without offering further explanation. There have also been reports of Israeli airstrikes and artillery attacks on multiple parts of Gaza though I haven’t seen any word as to casualties.
An Israeli settler mob assaulted and set fire to a mosque in the West Bank city of Salfit on Thursday. They scrawled messages on the walls, many of them anti-Muslim and/or anti-Palestinian and some appearing to respond to recent criticism of settler violence from Israeli government officials. That violence has continued at extreme levels over the past several weeks.
The resolution that the Trump administration is circulating among United Nations Security Council members to give formal authorization to elements of the Gaza ceasefire framework is reportedly meeting some resistance. The Chinese and Russian governments want the resolution to drop any mention of the framework’s “Board of Peace,” the Donald Trump-chaired committee that’s supposed to effectively govern Gaza through an indeterminate rebuilding period. They and some Arab governments want more language about Palestinian involvement in the territory’s governance, though it’s unclear whether Beijing and/or Moscow would be willing to veto this resolution over that issue. The administration has reportedly written a new draft that tries to some degree to respond to these complaints. Russia has now reportedly introduced its own version of the resolution that removes all mention of the “Board of Peace” and tasks the council with selecting the participants in the proposed international security force in Gaza.
Barak Ravid at Axios is reporting that the Israeli government “is seeking a new 20-year security agreement” from the Trump administration. US-Israeli security deals usually run in ten year increments and the current one was negotiated in 2016 and went into effect two years later so it expires in 2028. The current agreement provides Israel with $3.8 billion per year in military aid (in reality it gets much more than that) and the Israelis will presumably be looking for an increase in the next one. To overcome tepid feelings among Donald Trump’s “America First” base as well as Trump’s own antipathy toward aid in general, the Israelis are reportedly proposing that some portion of the aid could go toward joint projects—for example, on developing military artificial intelligence and on crafting elements of Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” air defense system.
IRAQ
Joel Wing at Musings on Iraq has more detail about the surprisingly high turnout—assuming it’s legitimate—in Tuesday’s Iraqi parliamentary election. Much of the increase was driven by much higher turnout in northern provinces, particularly Erbil which saw turnout increase from just under 36 percent in 2021 to a bit over 69 percent on Tuesday. Sulaymaniyah, Dohuk, and Saladin provinces also saw large increases as well as Anbar province in the west. Wing argues that stability may be the big factor here, as in 2025 Iraq is, for all of its challenges, a lot more stable than 2021 Iraq was especially in the Kurdistan region in the north. Turnout was also up, albeit by smaller margins, in southern provinces which suggests that Muqtada al-Sadr’s election boycott did not have the depressive effect he’d sought.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
Pakistani authorities say that they’ve determined that Afghan nationals were responsible for suicide bombings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Islamabad in recent days. The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) claimed responsibility for the latter and was almost certainly responsible for the former. The main source of tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to be the presence of TTP members in Afghanistan, though the direct involvement of alleged Afghan nationals in TTP attacks is a more serious charge and could further damage efforts to negotiate a durable ceasefire after last month’s border clashes.
CAMBODIA
The Cambodian government has evacuated “hundreds” of people from the vicinity of Wednesday’s shooting incident in which Thai soldiers killed one villager in Cambodia’s Banteay Meanchey province. Some 250 families have been moved to a Buddhist temple around 29 kilometers off of the border, according to provincial officials. The ceasefire remains at risk but holding.
AFRICA
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared on Thursday that the African continent is in the midst of “its worst outbreak of cholera in the past 25 years.” The agency says it’s logged some 300,000 cases and 7000 deaths from the disease so far this year. Sudan has driven much of this increase, which is not surprising under the circumstances. In terms of countries that are not currently experiencing open civil war perhaps the hardest hit has been Angola, which has seen 33,563 cases and 866 deaths in 2025.
SUDAN
The Rapid Support Forces militant group conducted drone strikes against the town of Merowe in Sudan’s Northern state on Thursday. The Sudanese military is claiming that it intercepted the attack and there’s no apparent word as to casualties or damage though the town did experience a blackout according to witnesses. The focus of fighting on the ground continues to be Sudan’s Kordofan region, to which the RSF has turned its attention now that it has most of neighboring Darfur under control. Both the RSF and the military appear to be gearing up for a major confrontation in El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, which the RSF is besieging.
LIBYA
A new report from the US-based NGO The Sentry looks at Libya’s “major national crisis” of fuel smuggling:
Fuel smuggling in Libya has escalated into a major national crisis, costing the country about $6.7 billion per year. Although fuel smuggling has long been one of the North African nation’s most persistent illicit activities, a few key Libyan actors—with foreign assistance—have significantly intensified the exploitation of Libya’s bloated fuel subsidy program, whose dollar size surged to unprecedented levels from 2022 to 2024. The consequences both within and outside Libya have been numerous, including inflation and the further consolidation of power by the Haftar family in Benghazi and, to a lesser extent, the Dabaiba family in Tripoli, as well as the fact that foreign players—including Russian armed units and Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—have benefited from the country’s fuel crisis.
Despite steady oil production and favorable market conditions throughout 2023 and most of 2024, the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) reported a hard currency deficit two years in a row. The fiscal imbalance stems in large part from Libya’s swapping of crude output for fuel imports, with more than half of the imported fuel siphoned off by criminal networks. Libya’s outsized fuel subsidy program reduces the amount of crude that Libya can sell for dollars, depriving the CBL of the hard currency it needs for food, medicine, and other essential imports. By reducing the National Oil Corporation’s (NOC) income, Libya’s excessive fuel imports have also made paying government salaries more difficult. Thus, the rise in smuggling activities has contributed to the Libyan dinar’s depreciation on the black market and added to consumer price inflation, hurting households across the country. Plus, as corrupt officials increasingly dominate the fuel subsidy program, legitimate consumers face fuel shortages, risks of electricity outages, and higher prices at the pump. As a result of the takeover by illicit networks, the fuel subsidy program has become less accessible to those it’s meant to serve, exacerbating the economic strain on Libyan households.
Smuggling not only deprives the CBL of crucial dollar revenues, it also undermines the integrity of the NOC, whose hydrocarbon exports account for virtually all of Libya’s income. Years of gigantic illicit profits derived from the fuel scheme have enabled some corrupt networks not only to organize themselves better but also to expand their influence—across the NOC and other formal institutions alike—often causing lasting damage. Meanwhile, the surge in fuel smuggling means that a larger share of Libya’s oil wealth is stolen, hurting the legitimate economy and worsening hardships for ordinary citizens.
The report identifies Saddam Haftar, son of “Libyan National Army” commander Khalifa Haftar, as “the primary force behind the surge in fuel smuggling.” One of his main beneficiaries has been the RSF, which the Haftars have (allegedly) been supplying with fuel at the behest of their mutual patrons in the UAE.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
Al Jazeera questions whether the corruption scandal surrounding Ukraine’s nuclear energy firm Energoatom could do irreparable damage to the country’s war effort:
A corruption scandal that involves President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s business partner, political allies, and a cast of presumed wrongdoers who profited from a nuclear power monopoly has roiled energy-starved Ukraine.
Observers told Al Jazeera that the scandal may ruin Zelenskyy’s approval ratings, enrage Western donors and cause a political crisis that could lead to battlefield losses.
“What’s actually happening is the marauding of a state-owned company during the war, and that’s very painful for the people,” Tetiana Shevchenko of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a group in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
NETHERLANDS
According to Reuters, European clients of the Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia are trying to orchestrate a “workaround” to continue purchasing its products despite Chinese threats to block their export:
The workaround, previously unreported, is not a permanent solution, nor feasible for smaller clients, but offers a patch that could relieve some pressure on the auto market, where a scarcity of Nexperia chips has dented some production of cars and parts.
A standoff between the European side of the business and its Chinese plant, sparked by the seizure of Nexperia by the Dutch government over fears of technology transfer, has snarled supply of its chips that are key for the global automotive market.
Nexperia makes wafers, the base material for making multiple chips, in Europe, which are then sent to its plant in Dongguan in China where they are cut and packaged. However, due to the standoff the European side has halted shipments to China.
Now some clients are working with Nexperia Europe to purchase silicon wafers directly from its factory in Hamburg, separately transport them to China, and there contract the Dongguan plant for the final packaging, sources said.
AMERICAS
CHILE
Chilean voters will head to the polls on Sunday for that country’s general election, including the first round of its presidential vote. Polling suggests that the Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara and right winger José Antonio Kast will be the top two vote getters and head to a runoff on December 14, which Kast appears likely to win.
COLOMBIA
Two days after Colombian President Gustavo Petro said that he’d ordered his government to suspend intelligence sharing with the United States over Donald Trump’s War on Drug Boats, Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez walked it back on Thursday. According to Sánchez, Petro has ordered Colombian institutions to maintain a “continuous flow of information” with all international agencies working to curb drug trafficking. Apparently that still includes US agencies.
UNITED STATES
The US State Department designated four European “Antifa” organizations as terrorist groups on Thursday, including the Antifa Ost group in Germany. For an administration that has declared war on domestic “antifa” organizations but doesn’t have a straightforward way to outlaw those, designating these foreign organizations under existing terrorism constructs could allow it to pursue any domestic groups with which they have ties. In explaining the designations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that “groups affiliated with [the antifa] movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas.” This is dangerously close to saying that being anticapitalist or anti-Christianity inherently makes one a terrorist, and while we’re not all the way there yet the Trump administration still has over three years to get us to that point.
Finally, the administration’s War on Drug Boats claimed its 20th vessel and its 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th summary executions on Monday, when the US military struck another boat in the Caribbean. Reuters reported on Wednesday that the US Justice Department has written a classified legal opinion decreeing these strikes legal and granting immunity to US military personnel who have participated in them. The DOJ routinely provides legal cover to the Pentagon, and while these opinions wouldn’t be controlling in an international legal proceeding nobody involved in this killing spree will ever face an actual international court. At In These Times, Greg Grandin offers some historical context for Donald Trump’s killing spree:
Many motives might explain Trump’s compulsion to murder. Perhaps he enjoys the thrill and rush of power that comes from giving execution orders, or he (and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) hope to provoke a war with Venezuela. Perhaps he considers the strikes useful distractions from the crime and corruption that define his presidency. The cold-blooded murder of Latin Americans is also red meat for the vengeful Trumpian rank-and-file who have been ginned up by culture warriors like Vice President JD Vance to blame the opioid crisis, which disproportionately plagues the Republican Party’s white rural base, on elite “betrayal.”
The murders, which Trump insists are part of a larger war against drug cartels and traffickers, are horrific. They highlight Vance’s callous cruelty. The vice president has joked about murdering fishermen and claimed he “doesn’t give a shit” if the killings are legal. As for Trump, he has brushed off the need for congressional authority to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”
But as with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation.