分类： world

The quiet homes of grieving Indian families across Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and beyond hold the same unbearable weight: a framed photograph of a loved one who will never come home, taken by a military strike thousands of miles from shore in the increasingly volatile waters of the Gulf of Oman. For Bhargavi Suresh, 36, every hour brings a cycle of longing: she wipes clean the glass holding her husband Patnala Suresh’s image, kisses it, holds it tight, then reaches for it again just minutes later, her grief spilling over into sobs.

Patnala, 14-year veteran of the merchant navy and chief engineer of the commercial oil tanker MT Settebello, was one of three Indian crew members killed when the United States military struck the vessel near the Strait of Hormuz on June 10. US authorities claimed the tanker ignored repeated warnings to comply, but that justification holds no weight for the families of the dead civilians.

“My husband was not a soldier,” Bhargavi told Middle East Eye. “They could have stopped or detained the ship if they wanted to. Why fire a missile at a vessel carrying unarmed civilians?” The strike was an unjustified violation of international law, she says, and the US must be held fully accountable. To the couple’s two young sons, aged 13 and 10, Patnala was far more than a crew member: he was their superhero, a man who crossed rough seas and braved storms to keep global trade moving, and whose strength they admired in everything.

Aditya Sharma, a 23-year-old deck cadet on probation, was the other Indian fatality of the MT Settebello attack. His 60-year-old father Rajesh, from Hamirpur district in Himachal Pradesh, still cannot bring himself to accept that his only son will never make his daily morning and evening check-in calls home. “He never started his day without calling us, once before work and once before bed,” Rajesh recalled through tears. “He was our only child, we were so proud of him, one in a million. How do we live with this loss?”

Like Bhargavi, Rajesh holds the US responsible for destroying his family in seconds. He also joins a growing chorus of criticism accusing the Indian government of failing to match the gravity of the tragedy with a strong response. After the strike, New Delhi issued only a diplomatic protest to Washington, declining to summon the US ambassador— a step it did take against Iran following the deaths of four Indian seafarers in earlier attacks that Iran denied carrying out. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised general concerns about seafarer safety during a side meeting with former US President Donald Trump at the mid-June G7 Summit in France, families of the deceased point to a complete lack of a specific public statement, formal press release or public condemnation of the attack that killed their loved ones. “A diplomatic protest alone is not enough,” Rajesh said. “Our prime minister should have spoken directly about this, addressed the grieving families, and condemned the attack himself. We expected far stronger intervention, and it never came.”

The deaths of Patnala and Aditya are just a small part of the growing human and economic toll of the ongoing US-Israeli conflict with Iran, which has turned one of the world’s busiest and most critical maritime corridors into a deathtrap for civilian seafarers. India, the world’s third-largest supplier of seafarers with more than 300,000 Indians working on merchant vessels (comprising 10 to 12 percent of the global seafaring workforce), has been disproportionately affected by the chaos. Since the conflict began in late February, more than 40 commercial vessels have come under attack, leaving at least 14 non-Iranian and 44 Iranian maritime workers dead. At least seven Indian seafarers have been killed, and more than 1,100 Indian crew members on 37 Indian-flagged vessels remain trapped in the volatile region.

A fragile June 17 ceasefire between the US and Iran briefly opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, but the truce has already teetered on collapse. In recent days, the two sides have exchanged fire near the strait and traded accusations of ceasefire violations, bringing shipping traffic to a halt once again. Washington blames Tehran for attacking commercial vessels, while Iran says foreign ships have violated its navigation rules and accuses the US of intentional provocation.

Maritime experts and union leaders warn that prolonged anchoring of commercial vessels carries enormous, underreported risks for both ships and crews. Unlike stationary infrastructure, commercial tankers and cargo ships are designed to sail continuously; sitting anchored for weeks or months leads to rapid deterioration of critical systems. Manoj Yadav, general secretary of the Forward Seamen’s Union of India (FSUI), explained that extended idleness allows rust, barnacles, algae and marine growth to accumulate on hulls, while many ships cannot get critical spare parts needed to restore operability when tensions finally de-escalate. More dangerously, long-term inactivity creates hazardous onboard conditions, including the buildup of toxic gases in enclosed spaces, that directly threaten crew health and safety. “Ships are meant to move, not remain idle for months,” Yadav said.

That risk has already claimed another life. Nishanth Uirthanathan, a 35-year-old second officer on the MT Celestial tanker and father of two, died in early June after falling seriously ill while his ship was anchored at Oman’s Duqm Port. His brother Prashant told MEE Nishanth suffered from fever, vomiting and extreme fatigue for nearly a month, conditions exacerbated by the prolonged anchoring that destroyed onboard living standards: sanitation and food quality had deteriorated sharply, he said, and Nishanth told his wife just days before his death that conditions onboard were unsafe. The family also blames the shipping company for dangerous delays in accessing emergency medical care. “We were poor before Nishanth became a seafarer; he lifted our whole family out of poverty,” Prashant said. “If the conflict hadn’t trapped his ship, he would have come home months ago, and he would still be alive today.”

Risks of death in these unsafe conditions are well-documented. The International Maritime Organization’s 2025 report records that since 1996, roughly 350 seafarers have died from exposure to oxygen-deficient or toxic atmospheres in ship confined spaces; since 2022 alone, 43 such accidents have killed 70 workers.

Beyond the immediate safety risks, grieving families say the Indian government has also failed to deliver adequate support and compensation. India’s Director General of Shipping says 10 lakh rupees ($10,500) has been distributed to the families of deceased seafarers via the Seafarers’ Welfare Fund Society, and efforts are ongoing to secure additional aid. But Yadav points out that this funding comes from a pre-existing industry welfare pool, not direct government compensation. “These were not accidental deaths,” he said. “These were civilian seafarers killed in military strikes.” The FSUI is demanding 1 crore rupees ($105,000) in compensation per family, a government job for a next of kin, and has petitioned the United Nations for $5 million in total damages for the bereaved. “There was an expectation that the government would stand strongly with these families,” Yadav said. “Many feel that promise has not been kept.”

As the Strait of Hormuz remains closed once again, hundreds of Indian seafarers remain trapped in the region, living with constant fear, anxiety and chronic psychological trauma. The Indian government says its Directorate General of Shipping has handled more than 12,331 calls and 27,515 emails from seafarers and their families since the crisis began, and has facilitated the repatriation of 3,537 Indian seafarers. But Yadav says the FSUI still receives hundreds of desperate pleas for evacuation from trapped crew members.

For those who have already survived attacks, the psychological scars never fade. Bhumesh, an Indian seafarer who survived a March 1 attack on the tanker Skylight that killed one crew member before he was rescued by Omani forces, says the memories still haunt his every day. “When the ship was hit, all I could see was my parents’ faces,” he said. “I still live with that trauma. The images never leave. Seafarers can barely sleep from fear. Living out here now is like living in hell.”

In a damning new report released Monday, leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has exposed an unprecedented crisis of civilian harm in the occupied West Bank, documenting that Israeli forces are killing Palestinian children at a rate not seen since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the territory began. The group’s figures show 54 Palestinian children have been shot dead by Israeli forces in the West Bank in 2025 alone, with minors accounting for nearly one in every four Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in the territory since October 2023 – the highest share of child fatalities recorded in 58 years of occupation.

Crucially, B’Tselem emphasizes that these child deaths are not accidental or rogue violations of military protocol. Instead, the organization attributes the soaring fatalities to a deliberate Israeli state policy that enforces loose rules of engagement, broadly labels Palestinian people as “terrorists” to justify lethal force, and systematically shields soldiers from legal consequences for unlawful killings. As of the report’s release, no Israeli service members have faced indictment or any form of accountability for child killings in the West Bank carried out since October 2023.

“The widespread, unprecedented killing of Palestinian children and teenagers in the West Bank is the result of a broader Israeli policy that enables the killing of Palestinians with virtually no accountability,” stated Yuli Novak, Executive Director of B’Tselem. Novak pointed to recent public comments from Israel’s top military commander for the West Bank that confirm this institutional pattern: when commander Avi Bluth openly boasted that Israeli forces are killing Palestinians “like we haven’t killed since 1967”, he inadvertently confirmed that the Israeli system not only backs troops who use lethal force, but grants them effective license to kill.

Bluth, a West Bank settler who has led Israeli military operations in the territory since 2024, made the remarks during a closed-door forum earlier this year. In those comments, he explicitly defended the relaxed rules of engagement that allow troops to open fire on unarmed Palestinians, and acknowledged a stark discriminatory double standard: Jewish Israeli civilians who engage in stone-throwing are never targeted with lethal force, while Palestinians who carry out the same action are shot. Bluth also framed the escalating killing campaign as a deterrence strategy, claiming that the high death toll has prevented a new mass uprising, noting “the Arabs understand that ‘if someone rises to kill you, kill him first’ is part of the rules of the Middle East, and therefore we are killing like we have not killed since 1967.”

Beyond the permissive rules of engagement and discriminatory targeting, B’Tselem documented additional contributing factors to the child death toll. In nearly 25 percent of the cases the organization investigated, Israeli forces deliberately delayed or denied access for medical teams to reach wounded children, directly worsening fatality outcomes. Israeli authorities have also seized the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed in operations, and as of the report, 18 of the children killed in 2025 remain withheld from their families for burial.

Official United Nations data aligns with the scope of the crisis outlined by B’Tselem: the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) confirms that Israeli forces have killed 1,105 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023, a count that includes at least 242 children.

B’Tselem also draws a direct connection between the escalating killings in the West Bank and the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of genocide that has disproportionately targeted children. The organization notes that more than 21,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza to date, and argues that the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable for mass casualties in Gaza has directly encouraged the expansion of the same lethal policy into the West Bank.

“By allowing Israel to kill on such a scale in Gaza without consequences, the international community has effectively given it a green light to pursue the same lethal policy in the West Bank,” the report reads. “As long as Israel continues to enjoy near-total impunity in the world, the lives of Palestinians – including children – will remain unprotected and exposed.”

In mid-June, during a high-profile diplomatic visit to Moscow, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan tabled a new peace initiative aimed at halting active hostilities between Russia and Ukraine and reopening bilateral negotiations, multiple anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the talks confirmed to Middle East Eye. But the proposal, which called for establishing a tentative ceasefire window and aligning on a foundational framework to resume dialogue, was firmly turned away by Russian officials, who declined to open discussions on the terms.

Fidan held meetings with Russia’s top leadership during his trip, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin. Had the Turkish initiative gained traction, the plan would have brought Russian and Ukrainian negotiating teams to Turkey for formal talks coinciding with the upcoming NATO summit scheduled to be held in the country in July. For now, that diplomatic path appears all but closed, according to sources familiar with Ankara’s strategic planning.

Russia’s non-negotiable precondition for any lasting agreement with Kyiv remains unchanged: Ukraine must formally recognize Russia’s 2014 and 2022 annexations of the Donbas region’s provincial borders, a demand Kyiv has repeatedly rejected outright. While Ukrainian officials have pushed back against claims of expanding Russian control along the Donbas frontline, recent on-the-ground reporting from *The New York Times* confirms Russian forces have advanced into the outskirts of Kostyantynivka, one of the last remaining major Ukrainian-held urban centers in the region.

Russia currently holds more than 80 percent of Donetsk Oblast, the economic heart of Donbas, and is continuing offensive operations to encircle both Kostyantynivka and Lyman. The neighboring city of Druzhkivka has been reduced to a largely uninhabitable wasteland by months of heavy fighting, leaving Sloviansk and Kramatorsk as Kyiv’s last significant fortified strongholds in the oblast. Despite Kyiv’s unwavering public commitment to retaking all of Donbas, military analysts warn that many of the region’s key population centers may be left unrecognizable by the time frontline fighting stabilizes, leaving little infrastructure or civilian presence to defend.

Parallel to Russia’s incremental territorial gains in eastern Ukraine, which come even as Ukraine expands its long-range strike capacity to hit Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russian territory including within Moscow, multiple independent economic analyses paint an increasingly grim picture of strain on Russia’s domestic economy. The Russian government has already imposed intermittent full shutdowns of mobile internet access in parts of the country to curb unrest, and after more than two years of full-scale invasion and sweeping Western sanctions, deep structural fissures have begun to emerge in the country’s financial sector.

A confidential European economic analysis reviewed by MEE reveals that Russian regulators and top government officials are deeply alarmed by growing systemic risk in the domestic banking industry, which faces overlapping threats that could trigger a widespread sectoral crisis. The report notes that Russian banks’ balance sheets have been artificially inflated by aggressive risk-taking designed to attract new investment, leaving institutions heavily exposed to widespread loan defaults from borrowers who overstate their income and creditworthiness.

Multiple factors have amplified this risk. Widespread government subsidies for low-interest mortgages have driven a rapid surge in residential property prices, creating the conditions for a potentially destabilizing property bubble that could pop once demand cools, triggering mass defaults on home loans. Additionally, public-private partnership schemes used to fund regional development projects have shifted billions in regional debt onto the balance sheets of private and state-owned Russian banks, forcing financial institutions to absorb losses from unprofitable infrastructure projects as regional governments struggle to repay their obligations. As of 2024, Russia hosts roughly 3,500 active public-private partnership projects with a combined total valuation of nearly €50 billion, all of which place additional pressure on the banking sector.

Industry projections indicate that more than a dozen Russian banks will be forced to cease operations by the end of 2025 amid mounting insolvency risk. Personal financial distress is also spreading rapidly across the country: more than 500,000 Russian individuals filed for personal bankruptcy in 2025, marking a 31.5 percent jump from the total number of filings recorded in 2024.

On Sunday, Israeli military bulldozers carried out a large-scale destruction of Palestinian agricultural land in the village of Zububa, located near the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, just meters from the controversial separation wall that splits Israeli and Palestinian territory. Local officials confirm that at least 500 mature olive trees across 50 dunams (roughly 12.4 acres) of farmland were completely uprooted – a devastating blow to local communities just three months ahead of the annual olive harvest, the primary economic lifeline for tens of thousands of Palestinian families across the West Bank.

What makes the destruction even more alarming for Zububa’s residents is that the operation is far from over. Zaki Jaradat, head of the Zububa Village Council, confirmed to reporters that an additional 120 dunams (nearly 30 acres) of established olive groves are at imminent risk of being razed in the coming days. For affected landowners like Mahmoud Jaradat, the destruction has already erased years of labor and eliminated any prospect of income from this year’s harvest. “All my hard work and years of toil vanished in a single moment,” Mahmoud Jaradat, a Zububa resident whose entire plot of dozens of trees was destroyed, told Middle East Eye. “I’ll have to buy olive oil instead of selling it this year. This is a heartbreaking scene I have no words for.”

Israeli military officials had previously notified local residents that the land clearing was being carried out to expand a security buffer zone along the separation wall, which already cuts through vast swathes of land that Zububa’s residents have owned and cultivated for generations. The entire at-risk zone holds roughly 2,000 productive olive trees, all of which were being carefully tended by local families in preparation for the critical October harvest. Even more disconcerting for villagers, Sunday’s bulldozing extended far beyond the 127 dunams the military had previously marked for clearing. According to Zaki Jaradat, the total area slated for destruction could ultimately exceed 250 dunams (more than 61 acres), all under the guise of security needs. “They told us they would bulldoze 127 dunams, but from what we see now, what they will bulldoze will exceed 250 dunams from all directions, all under the pretext of security,” Zaki Jaradat said.

This latest operation is just the latest chapter in a years-long pattern of land dispossession for Zububa. Once encompassing roughly 14,000 dunams (3,459 acres) of territory, the village has lost more than 89 percent of its total land since the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Today, local Palestinian residents can only access roughly 1,500 dunams (371 acres) of their historic territory, with the remainder seized for Israeli infrastructure, settlements, or the construction of the separation wall. The village is already one of many Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank subjected to routine collective punishment measures, including frequent movement restrictions, road blockades, near-daily home raids, and mass arrests.

Following Sunday’s destruction, the Israeli military distributed leaflets to Zububa residents warning young people against approaching the separation wall or adjacent security fence, threatening collective consequences for the entire village if any such movement occurs. Data collected by the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, a Palestinian grassroots organization tracking land violations, confirms that this destruction is part of a rapidly accelerating trend across the occupied West Bank. Since 2020, the commission estimates that Israeli forces have uprooted, damaged, or poisoned at least 120,000 Palestinian-owned trees, the vast majority of them productive olive trees critical to local livelihoods.

Attacks on olive groves have surged sharply in recent years: in 2024, 14,212 trees were destroyed, 10,459 of them olive trees. That figure more than doubled in 2025, when 35,273 trees were uprooted or damaged, including 26,988 olive trees. In the first five months of 2026 alone, more than 10,000 trees have been destroyed, 6,700 of them olive trees, with 4,414 destroyed in April 2026 alone.

Tensions in the Middle East have reached a fresh boiling point, as the United States and Iran have exchanged targeted strikes near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints. This latest escalation comes on the heels of alleged Iranian drone strikes on a commercial cargo ship attempting to pass through the waterway, with both Washington and Tehran now accusing one another of violating the terms of a recently agreed 60-day interim peace agreement.

In the wake of coordinated attacks on Iranian targets by the U.S. and Israel, Tehran has increasingly signaled its intention to formalize permanent control over the strait, a move that has sparked global anxiety over potential permanent tolls on the roughly 130 commercial vessels that transit the waterway each day. While Iran has framed potential tolls as a stable new source of state revenue, international analysts argue that such a policy is neither legally justified nor practically enforceable.

Global concern over the situation is well-founded. Since the outbreak of the latest regional conflict, Iran has targeted more than 40 neutral commercial vessels passing through the strait, using drones, missiles, and sea mines to disrupt shipping. These attacks have left multiple innocent merchant mariners dead, and have brought regular commercial traffic through the chokepoint to a near-standstill for more than three months, triggering substantial ripple effects across global supply chains and energy markets.

Anxiety has been amplified by the careful wording of the 14-point interim peace deal, which only requires Iran to use its “best efforts” to guarantee free, uncharged passage of commercial vessels for the 60-day term of the agreement. The deal states that future transit arrangements will be negotiated between Iran, Oman, and other Gulf states “in line with applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.” This vague language has left policymakers and shipping industry leaders worried that Iran intends to formalize tolls once the interim deal expires.

However, under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Strait of Hormuz is classified as an international strait, meaning all commercial and military vessels hold an inherent right of unimpeded transit passage that no coastal state can legally suspend. While sections of the strait do overlap with Iran’s territorial waters, the International Maritime Organization’s official traffic separation scheme — the designated shipping lanes that act as maritime “roadways” for safe transit — lie almost entirely within Omani territorial waters, leaving Iran with no legal authority to restrict or charge for passage through the main shipping route.

Beyond legal barriers, permanent tolls face steep practical challenges that make enforcement nearly impossible. Many point to the Suez and Panama Canals as precedents for tolled waterways, but these routes are fundamentally different from the Strait of Hormuz. Both canals are narrow, man-modified transit routes that lie entirely within the territory of a single state, with a tightly controlled entry and convoy system that makes non-compliance impossible. The Suez Canal, for example, has a navigable channel of only roughly 200 meters wide, requiring all vessels to take on local pilots and follow a rigid schedule that enforces toll payment.

By comparison, the Strait of Hormuz is nearly 39 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, spanning territorial waters controlled by both Iran and Oman. This vast geographic scale makes it physically impossible to stop, inspect, and coerce every vessel that refuses to pay a toll. Unlike confined canals, there is no single entry point to monitor, and the wide expanse of the strait gives ship captains multiple routes to avoid Iranian enforcement.

Beyond geography, a permanent Iranian toll would face widespread global opposition. The issue extends far beyond added shipping costs: imposing tolls on transit through an international strait would set a dangerous precedent that undermines the fundamental principle of freedom of navigation enshrined in international law, threatening shipping routes through straits around the world. Even Oman and other neighboring Gulf states have publicly warned that tolling arrangements would destabilize global maritime trade.

Unlike canal authorities that charge tolls in exchange for maintaining the waterway and providing navigation services, Iran would be charging vessels to exercise a right that all ships already hold under international law. For shipping companies and flag states, there is no incentive to voluntarily comply with such a demand, meaning Iran would have to rely on ongoing coercion to enforce tolls.

Over the past three months of conflict, Iran has already used military tactics including attacks on commercial vessels to deter transits, killing innocent seafarers and disrupting global energy and commodity markets. However, continuing these aggressive tactics after the conflict ends would draw severe international backlash, including harsh new sanctions, widespread diplomatic condemnation, and pushback even from Iran’s key trading partners such as China. Without sustained coercion, Iran lacks the means to enforce a permanent tolling regime.

As regional security expert Jennifer Parker, an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia and UNSW Sydney, notes, Iran is currently leveraging its ability to disrupt shipping through the strait to gain bargaining power in ongoing peace negotiations. But leverage gained through temporary disruption does not translate to permanent, enforceable control. While Iran can disrupt commercial traffic in the short term, it is extremely unlikely to be able to impose and maintain permanent tolls on the Strait of Hormuz.