World roundup: October 31 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, North Korea, Ukraine, and elsewhere

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Happy Halloween!

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 31, 1517: Martin Luther mails his Ninety-five Theses to the Archbishop of Mainz, the event that has come to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation. He’s also more famously said to have nailed the text to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, though Luther’s own recounting of events raises questions about whether he did so on October 31 or, really, at all. It’s entirely possible he did, but while that act has been cast as a stunning display of rebellion by history, posting disputations in a public place like the door to the city’s church was common practice at the time. Whatever actually happened, it’s safe to say that word got around.

German painter Julius Hübner’s 1878 Luther publishes the 95 Theses portrays what would have been a relatively commonplace occurrence as a dramatic public event (Lutherhaus via Wikimedia Commons)

October 31, 1941: The USS Reuben James, a Clemson-class destroyer, is torpedoed by German submarine U-552 while sailing as part of a convoy that had set out from Newfoundland about a week earlier. The attack killed 100 of the 144 people on board and made the Reuben James the first US vessel to be sunk in combat in World War II’s European Theater.

INTERNATIONAL

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program issued a dire joint warning on Thursday regarding the threat of hunger across 16 “hunger hotspots” around the world:

Humanitarian action was urgently needed to prevent starvation and death in the Palestinian territories, Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali, said the report, based on research by experts from the two Rome-based United Nations agencies.

"Without immediate humanitarian efforts and concerted international action to address severe access constraints and advocate for the de-escalation of conflict and insecurity, further starvation and loss of life are likely" in those spots, it found.

Of "very high concern", are Nigeria, Chad, Yemen, Mozambique, Myanmar, Syria and Lebanon, it said. In all those countries, conflict was either a major driver of hunger, or a contributor.

With its focus on the most severe and worsening countries, the UN agencies said the report did not "represent all countries/territories experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity".

The agencies said 2024 marked the second consecutive year of declining funding for humanitarian assistance, while 12 appeals faced funding shortfalls of more than 75 percent, including for Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria and Myanmar.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

A senior Hamas official, Taher al-Nunu, told AFP on Thursday that the organization would reject any temporary pause in fighting in Gaza that does not include a path toward an indefinite ceasefire and Israeli military (IDF) withdrawal from the territory. I have no idea if his statement can be considered definitive, partly because in the wake of former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s death it’s unclear who’s making decisions and/or speaking for the group. Nunu is highly positioned within Hamas though, so it’s reasonable to believe at least that he may be speaking on its behalf. This is relevant in light of the new US-led push for a 28 day cessation of fighting that is not explicitly linked to a full ceasefire. That said, Nunu also told the outlet that Hamas hasn’t seen that proposal yet so he wasn’t expressly rejecting it. The Biden administration is telling people that it believes the temporary pause could lead to a more permanent ceasefire, and seems to be hoping that Sinwar’s death will make Hamas more open to that line of thinking.

In other items:

• Barak Ravid is reporting, based on “two Israeli sources,” that there are indications that Iran is preparing to launch a retaliatory strike this past weekend’s IDF attack but that the preparations are happening in Iraq, not Iran. Somehow we’re told that the Iranians think launching the attack from Iraqi soil, via Iraqi militias, will prevent an Israeli response that targets Iran directly. This seems pretty naive, so I have a hard time believing that’s really what Iranian leaders are thinking. Maybe they’re trying to shorten the distance between their launch sites and Israel in order to confound Israeli air defenses. Maybe the Iranians are doing a bit of misdirection. Or maybe the story is bogus. It’s also hard to believe that the Iraqi government, which is already nervous about low-level militia attacks against Israel, would permit something like this—but in fairness, it’s conceivable that Baghdad is unable to stand in Iran’s way. At any rate, there’s some thinking that an attack could come ahead of Tuesday’s US election, though US officials say they believe the Iranians haven’t made any firm decisions to move forward.

• The IDF reportedly carried out an airstrike on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on Thursday, destroying a shipment of medical supplies that had been dropped off there from the World Health Organization earlier this week. Israeli forces raided the facility late last week, abducting most of its staff, while insisting that Hamas is using it as a base of operations. It’s reportedly “investigating” Thursday’s strike.

• The IDF raided the Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarm overnight, killing at least three people. It had assaulted the Tulkarm camp on Wednesday evening in an operation that left at least one Palestinian dead.

• Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich now says he will sign an extension of the cooperation agreement connecting Palestinian banks to the Israeli financial network, but only for one month. Smotrich previously signed a four month extension of that agreement back in June that was to have expired on Thursday. Failing to maintain this agreement will likely collapse the Palestinian economy, an outcome Smotrich surely wants, but several Western finance ministers have been pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to let it happen and that pressure is apparently what achieved this extension.

LEBANON

Hezbollah rocket strikes killed at least seven people in northern Israel on Thursday, making it the deadliest day for such incidents in several weeks. One strike on the town of Metula killed at least five people while the other two were killed in a strike near Haifa. The human toll on the Lebanese side of the border has been more consistent, with UNICEF director Catherine Russell reporting on Thursday that Israeli strikes have killed at least one child per day since October 4. The IDF continued to issue evacuation orders for parts of Lebanon on Thursday, including one for a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre and a second order for the city of Baalbek.

US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk were due to arrive in Israel on Thursday ostensibly to try to achieve a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. I say “ostensibly” because if one actually wanted a ceasefire it’s hard to think of two worse people to charge with attaining that goal. The two men were last seen encouraging Israeli leaders to move ahead with a ground invasion of Lebanon in order to Remake The Middle East, and it’s unclear why their thinking would have changed since then. That said, the Israelis may be looking for a dignified exit from a conflict that seems increasingly aimless, so maybe the time is ripe for a deal. Netanyahu stressed on Thursday that the success of any ceasefire deal would hinge on “Israel’s determination and ability to enforce” it, which implicitly assumes an Israeli right to operate militarily within Lebanon that already violates the terms of UN Security Council resolution 1701, on which any deal would likely be based.

SYRIA

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, IDF airstrikes killed at least three people and wounded another five in the Qusayr region of Syria’s Homs province on Thursday. The SOHR says that one strike hit “a weapons depot and a fuel storage facility” in Qusayr city, and that appears to have been the one that caused the casualties.

SAUDI ARABIA

The Architect’s Newspaper reports on the staggering human cost of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s grand vision:

A new documentary, Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, has revealed the total amount of worker deaths related to Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030, a multitrillion dollar program which includes NEOM and the Line.

According to the exposé by ITV, more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017 working on various aspects of Saudi Vision 2030. And according to The Hindustan Times, reports show that more than 100,000 people have “disappeared” during NEOM’s construction.

Workers also say that, under current working conditions, they are “trapped slaves” and “beggars.” There’s also been reports of wage theft, illegal working hours, and human rights abuses. More than 20,000 Indigenous people were also forcefully removed from the region to make way for NEOM.

The ITV documentary comes on the heels of another damning report by Wall Street Journal from last September. In that report, senior executives behind NEOM were accused of corruption, racism, Islamophobia, and misogyny.

IRAN

Afghan authorities claim that they have confirmed the deaths of two Afghan nationals in an incident involving “explosions and gunfire” in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province earlier this month. Claims have been circulating for a couple of weeks regarding some sort of violent encounter between Iranian security forces and a group of Afghan migrants near the town of Saravan on October 13. A Baluch rights group called HalVash has alleged a death toll in the “dozens” while Iranian officials are denying that any incident took place at all.

Afghan migrants are meeting growing levels of intolerance in Iran as that country’s economy suffers, in large part due to Western sanctions. As happens all over the world, economic hardship is engendering hostility toward perceived outsiders. The mounting intolerance seems to be fueling an increased willingness on the part of Iranian security forces to treat Afghan migrants brutally.

ASIA

INDIA

Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said on Thursday that Indian and Chinese border forces have almost finished the “process of disengagement” along the Line of Actual Control that separates India’s Ladakh region from China’s Aksai Chin region. The two countries reached an agreement last week to deescalate tensions along the border by staggering military patrols to minimize the chances of an encounter between Indian and Chinese personnel.

PHILIPPINES

An apparent land dispute between factions of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front sparked a violent clash on Wednesday that left at least 11 people dead in the Philippines’ Maguindanao del Sur province. The MILF reached a ceasefire agreement with the Philippine government in 2014 and disarmed in 2018 to support an initiative to grant autonomy to the Bangsamoro region in the southern Philippines. The Philippine military indicated on Thursday that it’s treating the clash as a violation of the peace process and is engaging with MILF leaders to prevent further outbreaks.

NORTH KOREA

The North Korean military does indeed appear to have conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test on Thursday morning, firing off a projectile that flew for 86 minutes and may have reached an altitude of 7000 kilometers. That’s the longest missile test Pyongyang has ever conducted. State media quoted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un calling the test “an appropriate military action that fully meets the purpose of informing the rivals, who have intentionally escalated the regional situation and posed a threat to the security of our Republic recently, of our counteraction will.” It’s unclear whether this test involved an existing North Korean ICBM model (a Hwasong-18, perhaps) or a new type, or perhaps an existing model with upgrades of some kind.

Elsewhere, new satellite imagery appears to show that the North Korean military has dug “at least two large trenches across roads and rail lines on its heavily armed border with South Korea.” As we know, it blew up the northern parts of those lines on October 15. Apparently imagery shows that work on those trenches began just two days later. There could be some defensive function here but mostly this seems to be a symbolic action, like the demolitions were, reinforcing Kim’s decision to forswear the idea of Korean reunification.

AFRICA

MOROCCO

The UN Security Council voted on Thursday to extend its peacekeeping mission in the Moroccan-claimed Western Sahara territory for at least another year. The vote was 12-0, with Russia and Mozambique abstaining and Algeria boycotting the vote because the renewal resolution didn’t say anything about monitoring human rights.

CHAD

AFP is reporting that the Chadian military killed “scores” of Nigerian fishermen in airstrikes in the Lake Chad region on Wednesday in an apparently botched counterinsurgency operation. Chad’s military is attempting to retaliate for a Boko Haram attack on one of its bases earlier this week that left some 40 people dead. A local militia leader said Chadian pilots “mistook” the fishermen for jihadists. A “Chadian general” acknowledged the strikes to AFP and did allow for the possibility of civilian casualties.

UGANDA

Uganda is home to more refugees, around 1.7 million, than any other country in Africa. But with the number of refugees rising and international support dwindling, the Ugandan government and aid groups say those refugees are increasingly at risk:

[Agnes] Bulaba is among tens of thousands in Rwamwanja, a refugee settlement in southwestern Uganda. As in other settlements across the east African country, refugees there are given small plots of land to cultivate as they are slowly weaned off total dependence on humanitarian food rations.

Since 2021, as funding consistently declined, the U.N.’s World Food Program has prioritized the most vulnerable groups for food assistance, in food items or cash, which can be as little as $3. After spending three months in Uganda, refugees are eligible to get 60% rations, and the number falls by half after six months. Only new arrivals get 100% food assistance, leaving the vast majority of some 99,000 refugees in Bulaba’s settlement vulnerable to hunger and other impoverishment.

In 2017, the Ugandan government and the U.N. held a summit in Kampala, the capital, and appealed for $8 billion to deal with the sharp influx of refugees from South Sudan at the time. Only $350 million was pledged.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

In a technical sense I guess the Congolese-M23 ceasefire is still in place, but in practice it appears to be in tatters. M23 fighters are reportedly advancing on Pinga, a town in the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province that contains a strategically important airstrip and is, according to AFP, a “stronghold” of the government-aligned Wazalendo militia. Congolese forces and militia personnel are fighting to defend the town. The Angolan government, which brokered the ceasefire back in August, has accused M23 of violating it, as has the French government. Congolese officials on Thursday likewise accused M23’s Rwandan backers of “taking advantage” of the ceasefire “to seize control of certain localities.”

RWANDA

At Africa Is a Country, activist Denise Zaneza contrasts the Rwandan government’s international image and its brutal human rights record:

On the global stage, Rwanda is the poster child for African development, celebrated for its post-genocide recovery and lauded as a beacon of economic success. The seemingly stable nation has won the admiration of many international actors despite a grim reality: a systematic pattern of human rights abuses, suppression of dissent, and exploitation of neighboring countries, particularly the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Rwanda’s human rights situation has been deplorable, with human rights organizations reporting widespread repression of critics of the Rwandan government both in and outside the country, media censorship, and the use of torture. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report published in October 2024, torture is routinely employed against detainees, particularly those perceived as political threats to President Paul Kagame’s regime. The report reveals harrowing accounts of abuse, including beatings, electrocution, and mock executions.

Enforced disappearances have become a hallmark of Kagame’s authoritarian grip on power. These are not random acts of violence but a deliberate strategy of political repression aimed at creating a climate of fear, deterring political opposition, and maintaining control. The cases of those who responded to the call of opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza to struggle for genuine democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law in Rwanda underscore this.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

A Russian court on Thursday ordered Google to pay $20 decillion in damages for blocking 17 Russian media outlets from its YouTube service. Given that the market cap of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is around $2.1 trillion I suspect it’s going to be a while before the court is able to collect. That said, the affected outlets may be able to use this ruling to win seizures of Google assets in friendly jurisdictions—a South African court issued such a ruling earlier this year, for example.

UKRAINE

The Russian military claimed the capture of another village, this one near the town of Kurakhove, on Thursday. Elsewhere, its drones are reportedly “hunting” civilians in the Ukrainian city of Kherson:

Russian forces have escalated indiscriminate drone attacks against civilians in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, killing and maiming scores of people in what locals have described as a “human safari.”

Unlike elsewhere on the 600-mile-long front, Russian forces in Kherson are just across the river from the city and are using small drones to harass the population, either by crashing into targets and exploding or by dropping grenades and small camouflaged mines. The situation is fairly unique compared with the rest of Ukraine, where Russian troops must use longer-range weapons to reach civilians.

Humanitarian operations and city services such as fire trucks and buses seem to be under particular threat, officials said, though children on bicycles and older people gathering at markets have also been struck.

While we’re on the subject of war crimes, Ukrainian officials are accusing the Russian military of executing POWs on the battlefield “in increasing numbers” this year and especially over the past several weeks. They’re citing one incident on September 30, when Russian soldiers allegedly massacred 16 Ukrainian soldiers after they had surrendered near the city of Pokrovsk. The Ukrainians say they’ve been able to use videos of these incidents posted online as well as intercepted phone calls by Russian soldiers to verify these claims. Russian officials deny that the executions are taking place and say the claims are Ukrainian government propaganda to convince their own soldiers that there is nothing to be gained by surrendering.

GERMANY

The German government on Thursday ordered the closure of all of the Iranian consulates in that country (in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich) in response to the execution of German-Iranian national Jamshid Sharmahd on Monday. Sharmahd was convicted last year of involvement in a 2008 terrorist attack in the city of Shiraz, after Iranian authorities had effectively kidnapped him from Dubai back in 2020. He was allegedly a member of Tondar, which is a militant group affiliated with the Kingdom Assembly of Iran monarchist organization. Sharmahd’s family denied the charges and suffice to say the normal functioning of the Iranian judicial system does not engender much confidence that he would have received a fair trial. The Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned Germany’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran to protest the closures.

AMERICAS

MEXICO

The Biden administration on Thursday blacklisted five individuals and two entities linked to a drug trafficking outfit known as “La Linea,” which operates out of Mexico’s Chihuahua state. The group is accused of trafficking fentanyl and other drugs into the US on behalf of the Juarez Cartel.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Foreign Policy in Focus’s Edward Hunt argues that the Washington is attempting to broaden its imperial network in the Indo-Pacific into a full-fledged “Asian NATO”:

The hub-and-spoke model is the basis for an “informal empire” in Asia, as former U.S. official Victor Cha described it in his 2016 book Powerplay. Although Cha identified growing challenges to the model, particularly from China and its efforts to build China-centered regional structures, he insisted that the model remained the basis for U.S. regional power. He called it a “thread” that holds the regional architecture together.

U.S. officials have long valued the hub-and-spoke model for securing U.S. dominance of the Pacific, but they have never viewed it as an equal to NATO. Whereas NATO provides the United States with the ability to coordinate actions across the North Atlantic region, the hub-and-spoke model impedes multilateral cooperation across the Pacific, as it is built around bilateral relationships with allies and partners that do not always share common interests.

“We would like to see a good deal more cooperation among our allies and security partners—more multilateral ties in addition to hubs and spokes,” Robert Gates said in 2009, when he was secretary of defense in the Obama administration.

With the goal of building more multilateral ties, U.S. officials have been working to bring the spokes into multilateral groupings that embrace multilateral cooperation. Comparing the hub-and-spoke model to the wheel of a bicycle, they have said that they are trying to build a tire around the spokes in a way that holds everything together under U.S. leadership.

“We need to network better our alliances,” Cha advised Congress in 2017. “We need to build a tire around that hub and spokes.”