World roundup: November 5-6 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
November 5, 1556: At the Second Battle of Panipat, the army of the would-be Hindu ruler of northern India, Hemu (or Hemchandra Vikramaditya), is defeated by the Mughal Empire under the young Emperor Akbar and his regent, Bayram Khan. The Mughal victory ended a string of successes by Hemu, a Hindu notable who became the de facto ruler of the remnants of the Suri Empire. His death collapsed his kingdom and left the Mughals as the unchecked power in northern India.
November 5, 1605: Guy Fawkes is arrested by English authorities for his role in the “Gunpowder Plot,” a scheme by a group of Catholics to blow up the House of Lords with King James I in it and install James’ young daughter Elizabeth as a Catholic monarch. Fawkes became the symbol of the plot, and his arrest is celebrated annually as “Guy Fawkes Day” or “Guy Fawkes Night.” Fawkes’ image went from reviled would-be assassin in the years following the foiled plot to something more sympathetic (depending on your perspective) by the 19th and into the 20th centuries.
November 6, 1865: The CSS Shenandoah surrenders in Liverpool, almost six months after Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s surrender at Bennett Place, North Carolina, had ended the US Civil War. The Shenandoah circumnavigated the globe, having set out from England in October 1864 with a mission to disrupt Union commerce. It sailed through the Indian Ocean to Australia, then spent some time attacking US whaling vessels in the North Pacific before planning an attack on San Francisco and then aborting it when its captain, James Waddell, learned of the war’s end. He opted to return to Liverpool and surrender there due to concerns that his crew would be treated as pirates by the US government.
November 6, 1975: The Moroccan government organizes the “Green March” to demand a Spanish withdrawal from that country’s Western Sahara colony. Some 350,000 people, accompanied by 20,000 soldiers, entered the territory carrying Moroccan flags and copies of the Quran. The Spanish government, trying to prepare for the imminent death of longtime dictator Francisco Franco, responded to the march by opening up negotiations about the future of Western Sahara. The status of the territory remains disputed between the claims of the Moroccan monarchy and the Sahrawi independence movement known as Polisario.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The United Nations Security Council voted on Thursday to rescind sanctions on Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Interior Minister Anas Khattab. Both had been on the council’s Islamic State/al-Qaeda sanctions list, though Sharaa’s sanctions have been repeatedly waived since he became Syrian president. Al-Monitor reported earlier this week that the Trump administration was seeking this vote ahead of Sharaa’s White House visit on Monday.
Reuters is reporting that the US military will “establish a military presence” at an unnamed airbase in Damascus, ostensibly for the purpose of monitoring the security agreement that the Trump administration is trying to broker between the Israeli and Syrian governments. It would be similar in purpose to facilities recently set up in Lebanon (monitoring the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire) and Israel (monitoring the Gaza ceasefire), though given the recent history of US-Syrian relations this military foot in the door probably carries a bit more significance than those other two. On the subject of the Syrian-Israeli security relationship, Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday that the Israeli military (IDF) has established a “checkpoint” in southern Syria’s Quneitra province in what would seem on its face to be another blatant violation of Syrian sovereignty. There’s been no comment from either the Syrian or Israeli governments.
LEBANON
The IDF carried out multiple airstrikes on southern Lebanon on Thursday, killing at least one person and wounding another in what may be the “intensification” of its bombing campaign that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened over the weekend. It issued several evacuation orders prior to these strikes, which suggests an escalation. Israeli strikes also killed one person and wounded another on Wednesday.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Wall Street Journal reports on one potential threat to the Gaza ceasefire—the continued presence of Hamas fighters trapped tunnels located in IDF-controlled areas:
A detachment of Israeli engineering troops was demolishing tunnels behind the withdrawal line in Gaza last month when Hamas militants sprang from a hidden shaft, fired an antitank missile toward their excavator and killed two soldiers.
A little over a week earlier, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Israel responded to the deadly encounter with a round of airstrikes on Gaza that killed dozens of people.
The early test of the fragile truce pointed to a bigger problem: Hundreds of armed Hamas fighters are trapped in tunnels under the Israeli-controlled side of Gaza, and willing to take shots at Israel.
The situation is the result of Israeli efforts that began in May to flush out militants and destroy Hamas’s extensive tunnel system where the group has hidden fighters, hostages and weapons throughout the conflict. The strategy was to cut off sections of the underground web from one another. But Israel’s partial withdrawal under the U.S.-brokered cease-fire last month has left militants who remain behind the line trapped underground with no means of escape and dwindling supplies.
The Israeli government is resisting proposals to evacuate those fighters beyond the “yellow line.” But according to Barak Ravid at Axios, the Trump administration is coming to view this potential crisis as an “opportunity” to test its offer for Hamas as a whole: disarmament and surrender in exchange for amnesty and safe passage. That’s the proposal on the table for dealing with these trapped fighters, who could serve as a trial run for a bigger disarmament deal—if the Israelis agree to go through with it.
In other items:
On the subject of the ceasefire’s durability, the WSJ reported on Thursday that the IDF is about to start demobilizing reservists. After over two years of nonstop conflict involving some 300,000 reservists, the IDF almost doesn’t have a choice but to alleviate the strain this mass call up has had on Israeli society. It has the flexibility to do this now that the ceasefire is in effect, but the drawdown also means it’s going to be harder for the IDF to suddenly go back to full-scale conflict should Israeli leaders decide to do so. This is at least an indication that they’re not planning to scrap the ceasefire in the near future.
Gaza’s government media office reported on Thursday that only 4453 trucks have entered the territory since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10. I say “only” because under the ceasefire’s 600 truck per day stipulation the territory should have received 15,600 trucks by now. Moreover, many of the trucks that the IDF has allowed in are commercial rather than humanitarian, meaning they’re a) often carrying junk food that is b) only available for sale to a population that mostly can’t afford any of it. The IDF is also apparently still blocking the entry of the kind of heavy equipment needed to recover the bodies of thousands of Palestinians buried under rubble.
Katz has declared the Gaza-Egypt border “a closed military zone” ostensibly because of weapon smuggling into the territory via drone. This could be the pretext for de facto seizing the border area beyond the timeframe of the current ceasefire phase.
The US has submitted its UNSC resolution authorizing the still-theoretical international security force for Gaza as well as the “Board of Peace” that’s supposed to govern the territory. The council hasn’t set a date to vote on the measure which could suggest that the Trump administration isn’t yet sure that it will pass. Having the UN’s imprimatur on the security force could help entice some hesitant would-be participants in the security force to commit to that project, though concerns about its poorly-defined mission seem to be a bigger problem than the issue of UN backing.
Israeli forces killed a Palestinian teenager in a town near the West Bank city of Jenin on Wednesday. The IDF later claimed that he had “hurled an explosive” at Israeli soldiers.
ASIA
KAZAKHSTAN
Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Kazakhstan has agreed to join the “Abraham Accords.” This is somewhat less significant than it sounds (if it sounds significant at all) inasmuch as Kazakhstan and Israel have had normal diplomatic relations since the early 1990s. There may be some expanded commercial or defense ties that come along with this though even that is questionable. The main thing this will do, or at least the main thing Trump is hoping it will do, is revitalize the accords, which have clearly stalled out in large part because of Gaza. Maybe the symbolism of Kazakhstan officially joining the club will entice other countries to do so. I’m skeptical but what do I know?
It’s unclear what Trump is giving Kazakhstan in return, if anything. The announcement came just prior to a White House summit between Trump and the leaders of the five ex-Soviet Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). That meeting produced the typical array of vague Business Deals but seems to have focused primarily on the region’s critical minerals resources, with Trump offering investment in exchange for access. This would be in keeping with his efforts to find non-Chinese sources for those raw materials.
AFGHANISTAN
AFP is reporting that at least five people were killed in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province after a short cross-border clash between the Afghan and Pakistani militaries. There have been no reports as yet of casualties in Pakistan. Both governments blamed each other for provoking the incident, which took place as their negotiating teams were opening another round of ceasefire talks in Istanbul. This breakdown notwithstanding the ceasefire overall still seems to be holding.
CAMBODIA
The Trump administration has lifted an arms embargo that the Biden administration imposed on Cambodia back in 2021. At that time the Biden administration cited fears of Chinese influence as justification, particularly allegations that an expansion of Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base was intended to accommodate the People’s Liberation Army Navy. If anything has changed on that front neither the US nor Cambodian governments have said anything publicly about it. US [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth did meet with his Cambodian counterpart last week so maybe they hashed some things out, but it’s also possible that ending this embargo was part of an agreement that led to the July ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia and/or the “expanded” ceasefire that the leaders of both countries signed along with Trump (and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim) last month.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Rapid Support Forces militant group announced on Thursday that it has accepted a ceasefire proposal from the “Quad” mediation group (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the US). I assume this is the same proposal that Sudan’s military government rejected earlier this week though I am not entirely sure. At any rate the initial response from the Sudanese military doesn’t seem terribly receptive—an unnamed “official” apparently told the AP that it will “only agree to a truce that includes the RSF withdrawing from civilian areas and giving up weapons.” That’s exceedingly unlikely given that the RSF currently has momentum on its side following its capture of the city of Al-Fashir last month.
The RSF’s acceptance of the ceasefire is something of a no-lose proposition. If the military also accepts it then the militants get time to consolidate their recent gains. If the military continues to reject it then the war continues but the RSF can argue to the Quad (really to the US) that it is the more reasonable of the two belligerents even as it’s in the process of (allegedly) committing genocide in Darfur.
NIGERIA
Islamic State West Africa Province fighters attacked a military outpost in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Monday, according to AFP. The ensuing battle left 14 soldiers wounded and “several” of the attackers dead.
Meanwhile, in a new FX column Alex Thurston picks apart Donald Trump’s claim (based on narrative that’s been spun by the Christian Right for several years now) of an anti-Christian genocide in Nigeria:
The narrative of genocide relies on four distortions. First, the jihadist group Boko Haram and its successors and rivals, such as Islamic State West Africa Province, are framed as anti-Christian militants. Second, herders in Nigeria—who are often ethnically Fulani and religiously Muslim—are framed as the unequivocal aggressors in their conflicts with farmers. Third, herder violence against farmers is depicted as religiously motivated and specifically anti-Christian. And fourth, the victims of jihadist violence and herder violence are conflated in order to give the impression of an astronomical death toll driven purely by hatred of Christians and Christianity.
This framework is false on multiple levels. In reality, jihadists—who mostly operate in Muslim-majority areas of northern Nigeria—have killed far more Muslims than Christians, a point reiterated recently by none other than Donald Trump’s Africa advisor, Massad Boulos. And as for herder-farmer violence, it is fueled far more by resources than religion. Herders—far from being the perpetual aggressors—are often the victims of attacks by farmers, all while being squeezed and discriminated against by state governments.
The Nigerian government has pushed back against Trump’s decision to designate it as a “country of particular concern” on religious freedom grounds, with Information Minister Mohammed Idris telling reporters on Wednesday that “any narrative suggesting that the Nigerian State is failing to take action against religious attacks is based on misinformation or faulty data.” They’ve now got to walk a fine line in terms of denying Trump’s statements without seeming to criticize Trump himself lest they make him mad.
ETHIOPIA
Officials in Ethiopia’s Afar region are reporting that elements of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front have been attacking and seizing villages on the Afar side of the Afar-Tigray regional border. They haven’t offered any insight as to casualties but they claim that Tigrayan fighters are “controlling six villages and bombing civilians with mortars.” If this is true—and for the record TPLF officials are denying it—that would be a clear violation of the peace agreement that ended the TPLF’s 2020-2022 war with the Ethiopian government and the sort of thing that could spark the long-feared war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, with whose government the TPLF is now allegedly allied—though that may be a bit premature.
SOUTH SUDAN
The Trump administration is threatening to veto a UNSC resolution that would renew the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in Abyei, a disputed region along the Sudan-South Sudan border that is administered by South Sudan. UN ambassador Mike Waltz told the council on Wednesday that Washington is expecting the Sudanese and South Sudanese governments “to implement their key commitments under the 2011 peace agreement”—or at least make progress toward implementing them—to avoid a veto.
I’m not sure what “the 2011 peace agreement” is, though it’s possible that he was referring to the 2005 agreement that ended the second Sudanese Civil War and led to South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Among other things that agreement called for a 2011 referendum in Abyei to determine its final status. That referendum has still not been conducted. Other obligations like the formation of a joint interim administrative and security apparatus have similarly gone unfulfilled.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian Security Council on Wednesday to “submit proposals for a possible resumption of nuclear tests” if Donald Trump follows through on his threat to start conducting them again. Trump has of course claimed that Russia is already conducting super double secret hidden nuclear tests, which somehow only he seems to know about. At any rate it seems like Trump is really talking about conducting sub-critical systems testing, which is not nearly as provocative as his random musings on the subject have seemed.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that a number of analysts, including at least one ex-Russian foreign ministry official, have doubts about the “nuclear-powered” Burevestnik cruise missile, whose testing may have been the thing that set Trump off on this tangent a couple of weeks ago. I am neither a physicist nor an engineer so I will just leave that link there for those who are interested.
UKRAINE
The Russian Defense Ministry called on Wednesday for the remaining Ukrainian soldiers in the cities of Pokrovsk, in Donetsk oblast, and Kupiansk, in Kharkiv oblast, to surrender. From what I can tell much more is known about the situation in Pokrovsk, where the fighting now seems to be at least street to street if not building to building and Ukrainian forces are losing ground. The Russian military appears close to encircling the city, which means the Ukrainian government is approaching a point where it will have to either withdraw its remaining forces or risk losing them altogether.
Assuming the Russians take Pokrovsk it will be their most significant conquest since they captured the city of Bakhmut back in 2023, and it may be the first stage in a larger operation. The Russians view Pokrovsk as the ideal staging area for a final push to seize the rest of Donetsk, though that’s by no means a foregone conclusion and the success or failure of their advance once they’ve taking the city will depend to a large degree on how quickly the Ukrainians can strengthen their remaining defensive line.
AMERICAS
PERU
The Peruvian Congress voted on Thursday to declare Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum persona non grata, so if she had any plans to visit Machu Picchu she’ll have to put them on hold. The Peruvian government has already cut off diplomatic relations with its Mexican counterpart over its decision to grant asylum to former Peruvian Prime Minister Betssy Chávez, who is wanted on charges of “rebellion” related to her time leading former President Pedro Castillo’s cabinet.
VENEZUELA
According to The New York Times, the US military has moved “at least three” aircraft to El Salvador International Airport, including an AC-130J Ghostrider attack plane belonging to US Air Force Special Operations Command, a US Navy P-8A reconnaissance plane, and a C-40 transport plane. It’s not entirely clear what they’re doing in El Salvador but chances are pretty good they’re part of the regional military buildup ostensibly focused on counternarcotics operations but really focused on trying to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power. That said, the WSJ is reporting that Trump is still hedging about what to do and “has recently expressed reservations to top aides about launching military action” to take out Maduro. He’s considering alternatives, one of which may be to continue the military buildup as a threat without actually ordering attacks on Venezuela.
UNITED STATES
US [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth announced another boat strike in the Caribbean on Thursday that killed three people. This marks I believe 17 such strikes and 69 summary executions since the military began this project about two months ago.
Finally, a new report from Julia Gledhill at Brown University’s Costs of War project argues that Donald Trump’s signature piece of legislation (so far) does a few very troubling things to the US military budget:
H.R. 1, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” dramatically increases Pentagon and other military-related spending over the next five years. When combining H.R. 1 funding with the annual Pentagon budget, the law pushes Pentagon and military-related spending past the trillion-dollar threshold in fiscal year (FY) 2026. Debt impacts will span the coming decade.
It is unusual for reconciliation bills, such as H.R. 1, to include substantial funding for the Department of Defense or other military-related programs in other departments. However, H.R. 1 breaks from precedent by allocating $156 billion to “national defense.” This is problematic for four main reasons: (1) It benefits weapons-makers and contractors more than service members; (2) It lacks details on specific spending categories, effectively making it a slush fund; (3) It incentivizes future lawmakers to skirt the regular budget process, which is more deliberative and transparent than the reconciliation process; and (4) It increases Pentagon and military-related spending by over 13 percent from FY25, pushing “national defense” spending beyond the $1 trillion mark.