分类： world

On Tuesday afternoon local time, a powerful shallow earthquake rocked Japan’s southwestern Kyushu region, leaving a trail of destruction, fatalities and unaccounted residents that has triggered an urgent nationwide rescue operation. As of Wednesday morning, official counts put the confirmed death toll at 15, with dozens more in critical condition and 12 people still missing, prompting Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to describe the effort to find trapped survivors as a critical “race against time.”

The earthquake struck at 16:27 JST (07:27 GMT) on Tuesday, with its epicenter located roughly 20 kilometers south of Kumamoto city at a shallow depth of just 10 kilometers. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) initially recorded the quake as magnitude 7.1, while the U.S. Geological Survey measured it at 6.8 — a discrepancy common in early seismic readings as experts process additional data. In the 24 hours following the main tremor, more than 100 aftershocks have rattled the region, and JMA officials have warned residents to prepare for the possibility of major aftershocks reaching up to maximum intensity 7 over the next week, with the highest risk concentrated in the first two to three days.

When Wednesday dawned in Kumamoto prefecture, the hardest-hit area, residents opened their doors to scenes of widespread devastation: collapsed buildings, rubble strewn across streets, cracked infrastructure and damaged historic sites. Among the landmarks damaged is the 19th-century Yatsushiro Shrine, whose main worship hall partially collapsed. Footage from local public broadcaster NHK shows buckled roads, damaged bridges, multiple structural fires, suspended regional rail services and thousands of households left without power.

Two sites have become the primary focus of rescue efforts: the Aeon Mall in Kashima and a paper factory in Yatsushiro City. An explosion at the Aeon Mall broke out roughly an hour after the main quake, following a partial collapse of the building’s second floor. Video footage captured thick white smoke billowing from the structure, as shoppers fled to the safety of the mall’s parking lot; large sections of the building’s exterior were blown away, exposing internal steel support beams. Aeon Mall President Akio Yoshida confirmed Wednesday that three employees were killed in the incident, with four others hospitalized, one rescued from a locked bathroom and another reported in cardiopulmonary arrest — a term Japanese authorities use for unconfirmed fatalities in preliminary reports. Three additional employees remain unaccounted for, Yoshida added, offering a formal public apology for the disaster at a Wednesday press conference. At the Yatsushiro City paper factory, rescue teams have already recovered two people showing no vital signs, with nine others still missing.

More than 4,600 personnel have been deployed to the region to support search and rescue operations, but crews face significant additional challenges: searing summer temperatures that hit 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, raising the risk of heatstroke for both survivors trapped in rubble and first responders working in the open. Thousands of local residents have taken shelter in overcrowded evacuation centers, many of which lack sufficient cooling. To address this, Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi announced via social media platform X that roughly 300 air conditioning units would be airlifted to Kumamoto to be distributed across the worst-affected areas.

Survivors described the terrifying moments when the quake hit, with many saying they had never experienced such a powerful tremor. Seventy-five-year-old Hiroko Ogata, a lifelong Yatsushiro resident who owns a local restaurant, recalled the sudden jolt that left her fearing for her life. “All of a sudden there was a big jolt, and I was surprised and scared… I have lived here for 75 years, but I have never experienced such a big quake. I thought I would die,” she told the BBC. Chantel Mohar, an American tourist visiting Kumamoto with her family, said the group received early earthquake alerts on their phones while traveling on a tour bus, before violent shaking erupted. “There was just a lot of rocking and confusion,” she told BBC Newsday.

As rescue teams continue sifting through rubble for any sign of life, Japanese authorities are reminding residents to remain vigilant for aftershocks and to follow official guidance to stay safe as the difficult recovery effort gets underway.

As the world’s diplomatic and media attention remains locked on high-profile Middle East conflicts in Gaza, direct Israeli-Iranian hostilities, and border clashes in Lebanon, Israel’s ultra-nationalist right-wing government is accelerating a 50-year campaign to consolidate full control over the occupied West Bank. What has gone largely unreported is a coordinated, state-supported push that leverages armed settler militias to displace Palestinian communities, seize land, and systematically eliminate the conditions required to establish a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel – the long-proposed two-state framework intended to end more than a century of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Opposition to the two-state solution has been a defining pillar of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 19-year political career, spanning seven non-consecutive terms as Israel’s longest-serving leader. His current coalition, led by his right-wing Likud Party, has doubled down on this agenda amid a global distraction from West Bank developments, independent observers note.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a conflict monitoring group affiliated with the University of Texas, highlighted this underreported crisis in a recent analysis: “While much of the world’s attention is fixated on Israel’s ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip and its unprecedented direct confrontation with Iran, another front has been quietly boiling over. Violence is surging in the West Bank.”

Even Western allies that publicly endorse the two-state solution, including the United States and major European powers, have remained largely passive in the face of Netanyahu’s escalating offensive, turning a blind eye to actions that have reduced the prospect of Palestinian statehood from a actionable policy to a distant, unfulfilled aspiration. This silence held during Netanyahu’s July visit to Washington D.C. for talks with U.S. President Donald Trump, where West Bank developments were not included on the official agenda.

According to a senior White House official, the meeting centered exclusively on strategic alignment around the conflict with Iran. The two leaders hold divergent goals: Trump seeks an immediate de-escalation and end to hostilities, while Netanyahu pushes for a decisive military victory over Iran and its ally Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia based in Lebanon. Netanyahu himself chose not to raise the topic of West Bank expansion during the negotiations.

Iran has also shown little strategic interest in the West Bank, regional analysts confirm. The territory does not rank among Tehran’s core regional priorities, and it is not included in Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance against Israel – a bloc that includes Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi movement, and Gaza’s Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack on Israel triggered the current wave of interconnected Middle Eastern wars. Iran has only issued cursory verbal condemnation of Israeli actions in the West Bank, with its Foreign Ministry releasing a generic statement July 15 calling for international intervention to halt escalating attacks and hold Israeli leaders accountable.

A Western intelligence analyst explained Iran’s limited engagement: “Iran operates within a strict strategic hierarchy. The Lebanese arena, for instance, is viewed as far more important than the Palestinians. Hamas is somewhat down the list of concerns and, anyway, was so battered by Israel that it is beyond use or help.”

This combination of global distraction, Western silence, and Iranian indifference has left the West Bank a geopolitical orphan, and Netanyahu has moved quickly to exploit the gap. As Abed Aboul Shhadeh, a commentator for London-based Qatar-based outlet *The New Arab*, put it: “While the world is focused on the war in Iran, Israel is working at full speed to create a new reality on the ground.”

On the ground, the campaign to displace Palestinian communities takes multiple coordinated forms, with most attacks led by militantly anti-Arab Israeli settlers who operate with explicit protection from the Israeli military, which stands by to defend the marauding groups rather than intervene to stop violence against Palestinians. Settlement expansion is a core pillar of the effort: initiated by Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977, it has become a signature policy of Netanyahu’s tenure. When he first took office in 1996, just 140,000 Israelis lived in West Bank settlements; today that population has grown to more than 500,000 alongside 3.4 million Palestinian residents. Since late 2023, more than half of the West Bank’s 360 unofficial settler outposts – basic, makeshift encampments that often serve as the first step toward formal settlement – have been built across the territory, alongside 147 fully constructed, officially recognized Israeli settlements.

Systematic home demolitions and forced expulsions are another key tactic. Israeli human rights researchers document that demolitions and evictions have accelerated sharply across the territory: in the first six months of 2026 alone, Israeli forces demolished 740 Palestinian homes, displacing 1,923 residents including 431 women and 546 children. Approximately 30,000 refugees from previous conflicts have already been forcibly expelled from three United Nations-run refugee camps in Jenin and the Tulkarem area, with military officials barring displaced residents from returning to their homes.

A recent operation in the town of Nahalin, near Bethlehem, illustrates the pattern. Before dawn on July 20, Israeli troops entered the town and used bulldozers to raze four homes, including one owned by the town’s mayor. Local residents responded by throwing stones, and three Palestinians were arrested during clashes. A week later, police delivered evacuation orders for 14 additional homes, offering no formal explanation. While most demolitions are officially justified by claims the structures were built without Israeli construction permits, observers note such permits are almost never granted to Palestinian applicants. Israeli officials have publicly confirmed the end goal of the Nahalin operation is to empty the town of its Palestinian population to connect three existing Israeli settlements, as part of the officially named Gush Etzion Contiguity Project.

Settler vigilantes also rely on widespread intimidation, property destruction, and violence to force Palestinian communities off their land. Amnesty International confirms that at least 50 distinct Palestinian herding communities have already been cut off from their traditional grazing lands and forced to relocate. A high-profile current target is the small West Bank community of Khan al-Ahmar, where Israeli authorities plan to displace a community of Bedouin shepherd families to clear the way for new residential development between Jerusalem and the large Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. While the Israeli government ordered an “as soon as possible” evacuation earlier this spring, no formal eviction has been carried out yet, following formal objections from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which demanded Israel “cease its measures to forcibly displace the Khan Al Ahmar community … and stop its settlement expansion plans there.” In the interim, settlers have established an encampment near the village, where they have stoned local shepherds, scattered their livestock, and cut the water pipelines supplying the community.

In the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, the Israeli government distributed thousands of firearms to newly formed civilian settler security squads across the West Bank, a move that international conflict monitors say has unleashed an unprecedented wave of vigilante violence. “Israeli settler violence is at an all-time high,” the International Crisis Group, a leading independent conflict monitoring organization, reported. “The aggressive acts, often perpetrated by gangs of armed young men, range from verbal intimidation and harassment to theft of livestock to assaults on Palestinians, in which the settlers uproot farmers’ olive trees and deny them access to land and water.”

Systematic agricultural vandalism has reshaped large swathes of the West Bank’s rural landscape. Thousands of ancient olive trees, which take decades to mature and form the primary source of income for tens of thousands of Palestinian households, have been cut down or uprooted by settler groups. During the summer dry season, settlers regularly set fire to standing wheat crops and olive groves, spray herbicides on agricultural land to poison crops and soil, and poison Palestinian livestock. One viral video showing a settler beating an elderly sheep dog to death sparked outrage from global animal rights advocates who had previously been unaware of systemic violence in the territory.

Equally damaging is the deliberate contamination and blockade of Palestinian water resources: settlers regularly dump poison, animal carcasses, and fuel into Palestinian wells, cisterns and natural springs, and block well entrances with cement. They also erect fencing to bar shepherds from accessing communal grazing land, with thousands of acres of communal land seized under the pretext of military necessity.

This sustained campaign of violence has forced many Palestinian farmers and herders to abandon their land out of fear, consolidating Israeli control over vast swathes of the West Bank. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading independent human rights organization, explained the explicit strategic goal of the campaign: the Netanyahu government endorses these actions to force dispersed rural Palestinian communities to abandon their land and relocate to overcrowded urban enclaves that are easier for Israeli authorities to control. “The regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves,” the group notes.

Even ahead of Netanyahu’s Washington meeting with Trump, Israeli officials made clear there would be no pause in the West Bank offensive, announcing that military forces would soon carry out another forced evacuation of a refugee camp in an as-yet unnamed West Bank town, mirroring recent operations in Jenin and Tulkarem.

On Tuesday, a powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook southwestern Japan’s Kyushu Island, triggering widespread structural damage, multiple fires, and a developing emergency that has left dozens unaccounted for in a collapsed regional shopping mall. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) recorded the tremor striking at 4:27 p.m. local time, registering a maximum intensity of 7 on Japan’s domestic Shindo intensity scale— the highest possible warning level for seismic activity, while the U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a magnitude of 6.8. A 6.1-magnitude aftershock followed just 41 minutes after the initial quake, adding to chaos across the affected region.

The most urgent search-and-rescue operation is centered on a shopping mall in Kashima, where the building’s second floor collapsed during the tremor, according to local fire department statements. Japanese public broadcaster NHK, citing police sources, reports that between 20 and 30 mall employees remain unreachable, with footage showing fleets of emergency vehicles with flashing lights massed outside the damaged structure. Private broadcaster TBS has warned that a “considerable number” of fatalities may be confirmed inside the mall, though national police have not yet verified any deaths at the location. Kyodo News notes that four people were transported from the site to area hospitals, all arriving in conscious condition.

Emergency response teams are also tracking multiple missing people at a paper manufacturing facility in Yatsushiro City, where the top of the plant’s chimney collapsed during the shaking. One confirmed fatality has been recorded: a resident killed when their private home collapsed, per Kyodo’s initial reporting. NHK’s on-the-ground footage from across Kumamoto Prefecture captures the full scope of the disaster: multiple active blazes, fractured and collapsed bridges, a derailed cargo train, and dozens of residential homes left teetering on the edge of collapse.

Chiharu Hara, a 35-year-old recruitment agent working in Kumamoto, described the chaotic moments when the quake hit in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “The office swayed violently side-to-side. I was afraid it would collapse. Everyone panicked,” Hara said, adding that the experience left her “terrified.”

Across the affected region, critical infrastructure has been severely disrupted. Major arterial roads have been closed to traffic, high-speed Shinkansen bullet train services were suspended immediately after the quake, and Kumamoto Airport halted all operations for several hours before reopening that evening. Two major local hospitals each reported admitting at least 50 injured patients, with staff overwhelmed by the steady flow of incoming casualties. “People are coming in with burns and fractures from being trapped under objects due to the earthquake, and ambulances are constantly bringing in injured people,” one hospital employee told NHK. “Inside the hospital, there are water leaks and electrical system failures.” Around 10 additional injuries were recorded at a local elderly nursing home.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi confirmed that the disaster has caused “human casualties, building collapses, road damage, fires,” alongside widespread water and power outages across the prefecture. Japan’s Defense Ministry announced that 3,600 military personnel have been mobilized to lead disaster relief and search operations, with 20 aircraft deployed to conduct aerial damage assessments across the quake zone. The JMA initially issued a tsunami alert shortly after the quake, but canceled the warning at 6:10 p.m. local time after no dangerous sea level changes were recorded.

This earthquake hits 10 years after a devastating pair of quakes struck the same Kumamoto region in 2016: a 6.5-magnitude tremor followed two days later by a 7.3-magnitude event that killed 273 people and injured more than 2,800. Located at the intersection of four major tectonic plates on the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire,” Japan is one of the most seismically active countries on Earth, recording hundreds of earthquakes annually. The vast majority of these events are minor and cause no significant damage, but large, destructive tremors remain a persistent threat to populated areas across the archipelago.