World roundup: September 17 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Thailand, Kenya, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

September 17, 1176: Byzantine Emperor Manuel I leads an army into battle against the Seljuk Turks at Myriokephalon. Well, technically, he led his army into a Seljuk trap and thus a catastrophic defeat. The loss cost the Byzantines what proved to be their final opportunity to regain control of Anatolia—the Crusader conquest of Constantinople in 1204 would slam the door on those hopes entirely.

September 17, 1978: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign the Camp David Accords under the auspices of US President Jimmy Carter. The accords nodded in the direction of Middle East peace but mainly focused on a bilateral treaty between Egypt and Israel, the former becoming the first Arab state to recognize the latter.

Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin at Camp David (US government archives)

September 17, 1982: Lebanese Christian militias, with the support of the Israeli military, massacre hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra neighborhood in western Beirut and the nearby Shatila refugee camp. Arguably the worst and most infamous of the myriad atrocities committed during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, the massacre was declared an act of genocide by the United Nations General Assembly.

INTERNATIONAL

A new report from the UK’s Grantham Institute attempts to estimate the role that climate change played in Europe’s excessively hot summer:

Climate change intensified summer temperatures across Europe and led to an additional 16,500 more deaths compared to a summer that hadn’t been heated by human activities.

Focusing on 854 European cities, this study found climate change was responsible for 68% of the 24,400 estimated heat deaths this summer by increasing temperatures by up to 3.6°C.

The analysis was led by researchers at Imperial College London and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who warn the result is only a snapshot of the death toll linked to extreme heat as the cities studied represent about 30% of Europe’s population. It follows a study by the same team that found climate change could have tripled the death toll of a July heatwave in Europe.

Using modelling, historical mortality records and peer-reviewed methods, the study provides early estimates of this summer’s fatalities and underscores why extreme heat is known as a “silent killer” – the majority of heat-related deaths go unreported, while official government figures can take months to appear, if they are released at all.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least 83 people in Gaza on Wednesday including at least 61 amid its ongoing destruction of Gaza City. As I said yesterday this moment seems too chaotic to put much stock in casualty figures so I would regard these as bare minimums, though even at that Wednesday’s figure did push the official death toll in Gaza since the October 7 attacks over 65,000. Israeli tanks entered Sheikh Radwan, one of the city’s largest residential neighborhoods, on Wednesday, so casualties may spike depending on how many civilians remain there.

The IDF is estimating that roughly 350,000 Palestinians have evacuated northern Gaza since the start of the ground offensive late Monday. Officials in Gaza’s health ministry are disputing that, estimating that some 190,000 people have fled and some of those have fled and returned after realizing that there are no suitable accommodations for the displaced in southern Gaza. Either way that still leaves hundreds of thousands of people in place with no sense of if or when they’re planning to leave. Israeli officials announced the opening of a new evacuation route on Wednesday, though even if we assume that the remaining residents of northern Gaza got the message there’s not much reason for them to believe a) that the route is actually safe and b) that there’s anyplace for them to go.

In other items: