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A devastating flood crisis continues to unfold across Nepal, where unrelenting heavy rainfall has turned critical transportation routes into slippery mud traps, leaving emergency relief vehicles stranded and thousands of flood-affected residents waiting for rescue amid growing safety risks.

Weeks of abnormal monsoon downpours have already triggered widespread flooding and landslides across the Himalayan nation, destroying thousands of homes, cutting off remote communities, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. As emergency response teams race to deliver food, clean water, medical supplies, and shelter to hard-hit regions, the rapidly changing and unpredictable weather has created unprecedented obstacles for relief operations.

Many of the rural roads already damaged by floodwaters have become completely impassable after fresh rain saturated the soil, turning paved and unpaved routes alike into quagmires. Multiple convoys carrying life-saving aid have been stuck for hours, some even partially submerged in mudslides along mountain highways, delaying critical support to communities that have been cut off from outside assistance for days.

Rescue officials told reporters that the erratic rainfall not only blocks access routes but also makes aerial rescue operations — a key tool for reaching isolated mountain communities — far riskier. Low-hanging clouds, poor visibility, and sudden wind gusts have grounded rescue helicopters multiple times this week, leaving ground teams unable to reach stranded populations and the waiting public in limbo.

As the monsoon season enters its wettest phase, humanitarian organizations warn that the window for rescuing trapped residents and delivering critical aid is narrowing, with the risk of more landslides and flood-related damage growing by the day.

For over 20 consecutive hours, Israeli military forces have blocked the sole access point to the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian state news agency Wafa has confirmed. The closure comes in the wake of a coordinated incursion into the village Friday, where Israeli troops were joined by armed Israeli settlers who carried out targeted attacks on local residents and attempted to seize livestock belonging to Palestinian families.

Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, citing on-the-ground local sources, reports that settlers successfully stole 15 lambs during the raid, and one additional sheep was found shot and wounded. Three Palestinian villagers were injured in the violence: one was hit by live ammunition fired by Israeli forces, while the other two were assaulted and beaten by settlers. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, combined forces of Israeli troops and settlers blocked medical ambulances from reaching the wounded, delaying urgent care.

Amin Abu Aliya, head of al-Mughayyir’s local village council, told Wafa that Israeli forces have only opened the blocked entrance for a few minutes at irregular intervals, leaving residents trapped inside with limited access to outside resources. He emphasized that the deliberate restriction of civilian entry and exit is part of a deliberate strategy to force Palestinian communities to abandon their land in the area.

Abu Aliya’s warning comes as the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a formal appeal Saturday, calling on the international community to step in and protect residents of al-Mughayyir amid a broad escalation of settler violence across the occupied West Bank. Ministry officials characterize the siege on al-Mughayyir, which includes indiscriminate targeting of civilian residents, as one component of a structured campaign to eliminate Palestinian presence from the territory. The ministry stated that these actions fall under an official Israeli policy of “killing, terrorism and forced displacement,” and warned against what it calls Israel’s ongoing implementation of displacement and extermination policies against Palestinian communities.

Al-Mughayyir is not the only Palestinian community facing this kind of coordinated siege. A parallel incident has been unfolding in the West Bank village of Qusra, located near the city of Nablus. Earlier this month, Israeli settlers launched a siege of three residential homes in Qusra’s Ras al-Ain neighborhood, trapping multiple Palestinian families inside their properties. The ongoing blockade has cut off trapped residents from access to basic essential supplies, including drinking water, electricity and food.

The Israeli military has installed a permanent locked gate at Qusra’s main entrance, forcing all Palestinian residents and visitors traveling to the village to use unpaved alternate routes that are routinely blocked by Israeli soldiers. Just this Wednesday, the military added three new permanent roadblocks surrounding the peak of Ras al-Ain hill, physically severing the connection between the besieged homes and the rest of Qusra’s lower inhabited areas.

Attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian homes, businesses and agricultural land in the occupied West Bank have been a systemic, longstanding issue for decades, parallel to the continuous expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. But independent analysts and Palestinian officials note that these state-backed assaults have grown dramatically more intense and frequent since Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza in October 2023.

This reporting was framed by original independent coverage from Middle East Eye, a publication that provides unfiltered, independent analysis of developments across the Middle East and North Africa region.

Thousands of activists gathered outside New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden on Saturday to demonstrate against a high-profile public event headlined by Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation based in India. The event welcoming Bhagwat, branded “Universal Oneness”, was organised by the group American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue, and drew an estimated 5,000 attendees representing more than 200 Hindu and Indian community organisations from across the United States. The protest brought together a broad coalition of local and national advocacy groups, including the South Asian Left (SALAM), Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR), and Anti Imperialist South Asian Alliance Philadelphia (AISA Philly). A separate, independently organised demonstration by the pro-Khalistan group Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) was also held adjacent to the main protest, where activists decried Bhagwat’s visit and renewed calls for a sovereignty referendum for an independent Sikh state in India’s Punjab region. Safa Ahmed, a board member of the IAMC, told independent news outlet Middle East Eye that protesters took to the streets because the RSS has spent a century normalising the fascist ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu supremacy, that targets minority communities across India. “This ideology declares that people like me, Indian Muslims—200 million of us—do not deserve to be called Indians and that we deserve to wiped out of India,” Ahmed explained. Founded in 1925, the RSS now counts more than five million members globally and operates over 250 affiliated chapters across the United States. The organisation’s core ideological goal is the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra, an ethnonationalist Hindu state in India, and it serves as the ideological founding force behind India’s ruling national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Historical records show that early RSS leadership drew explicit ideological inspiration from 20th century European fascism and Nazism, framing their project of a homogenous Hindu state as aligned with the ethnic nationalist logic that shaped the creation of Israel in historic Palestine. In his 1930s text *We or Our Nationhood Defined*, prominent early RSS ideologue M.S. Golwalkar directly compared the group’s push for a Hindu Rashtra to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, arguing that minorities in India must face either total cultural assimilation or ethnic subjugation. “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races—the Jews,” Golwalkar wrote. “Germany has also shown how well-neigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” Beyond its ideological origins, the RSS has long been tied to violent and polarizing actions across India, including being widely blamed for the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s independence leader. On its official website, the organisation frames the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir as a “thorn in the flesh” and rejects its distinct demographic and political character. Ahmed stressed that the RSS’ agenda poses ongoing harm not only to minorities in India, but also to political discourse in the United States. “Not only does the RSS and its support base not care about minorities in India, but they’re also fine with the wanted bloodshed of Indian minorities and Kashmiris,” Ahmed said. “They’re also comfortable with normalising the far right in the United States.” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Indian-American elected to office in 2025, publicly weighed in on the controversy earlier that week, describing the RSS’ core vision as inherently exclusionary. While he made clear he opposed the event, Mamdani noted that city government lacked the legal jurisdiction to cancel a privately organised gathering. Shree Baphna, a member of New York-based South Asian advocacy group SALAM, highlighted why the location of the event at Madison Square Garden, one of the most high-profile public venues in the world, made the protest a critical priority. “Madison Square Garden represents a world stage; fascism has no place on a world stage like this,” Baphna said. “This is not just a one-off event; this is a symptom of a much larger systemic ideology and destructive thought process that exists here in our diaspora. So the fact that it’s here and so visible means that we have to show up out here in numbers and do our part.” Just days before the event, the independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom made an official recommendation that the U.S. federal government impose sanctions on the RSS over its documented role in “violent attacks against religious minorities, including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs”. The commission also called for U.S. officials to revoke Bhagwat’s visa ahead of his New York appearance. The original reporting on this event was published by Middle East Eye, an independent media outlet that provides on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and surrounding global issues.