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Dramatic footage has captured the moment massive scaffolding was torn violently from the side of a Hong Kong building as Typhoon Noul, the most powerful tropical cyclone to hit Chinese territory so far this year, makes landfall. According to Chinese state media reports, the storm has already brought destructive winds and severe weather conditions to southern coastal regions, with Hong Kong among the areas hardest hit by its advance. The video of the collapsing scaffolding, which has circulated widely across local and international media, underscores the raw destructive power of the typhoon as it moves across southern China. Local authorities have issued multiple weather warnings, urging residents to avoid unnecessary travel and secure loose outdoor structures that could become dangerous projectiles in high winds. As of the latest updates, emergency response teams have been deployed across the region to conduct rapid damage assessments and respond to any weather-related emergencies. Meteorological agencies are continuing to track the storm’s path, providing regular updates to help communities prepare for ongoing impacts from Noul’s landfall.

For 75 years, the political and military architecture of the Middle East was structured around an American-led framework. While Washington never claimed exclusive influence over the region, it served as the ultimate reference point for all regional action: its naval fleets, military bases, and outsized diplomatic clout set hard limits on what rival regional powers could do to one another, acting as the de facto guarantor of the existing status quo.

This framework is not entirely collapsed, but its authority has eroded dramatically. What is taking shape in its wake is not a neatly structured new regional order, but the return of a long-dormant dynamic: an authentic multipolar competition between core regional powers, strategic hedging by outside global actors, and a United States that now intervenes selectively rather than presiding over the region continuously.

### Debunking the “Power Vacuum” Myth

It has become a common trope to frame American strategic retrenchment in the Middle East as creating a “power vacuum.” Yet this metaphor is fundamentally misleading. By definition, vacuums are quickly filled, and the space abandoned by a retreating hegemon is never claimed evenly. Instead, it is carved up unevenly by whichever regional actors hold the greatest capacity and clearest strategic interests in the moment.

In this post-hegemonic Middle East, this dynamic has played out not as a transition to a single successor order, but as three overlapping, simultaneous contests for influence.

The first is a competition for economic and diplomatic primacy in the Gulf region. Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have built independent foreign policies that often diverge openly from Washington’s preferences. This shift includes de-escalating tensions with Iran, pursuing deeper economic and strategic ties with China, and sourcing military arms from whichever global power offers the most favorable terms.

This shift should not be misread as anti-American sentiment. It aligns exactly with what realist international relations theory predicts: when a patron power’s security guarantees become less reliable, capable regional states will naturally seek to diversify their strategic dependencies to reduce risk.

The second contest centers on Iran’s future role in the region. This struggle unfolds not through direct, open war between states, but through proxy conflicts, targeted sabotage operations, and occasional overt military strikes. The core unresolved question hanging over this competition is whether an economically squeezed, internationally isolated Iran will retrench within its own borders, or double down on building its deterrent architecture—most notably nuclear latency, which becomes a more, not less, attractive strategic asset as Iran’s conventional military capabilities weaken relative to its rivals.

The third contest is a reordering of Israel’s regional diplomatic relationships. This process has seen Israel move toward normalization with multiple Arab states, even as the core conflict over the Palestinian question remains unresolved and has arguably worsened. This fundamental contradiction is one that outside powers have largely chosen to manage rather than resolve, because a final resolution of the Palestinian issue was never actually required for normalization talks to move forward.

Notably, none of these shifts required a full American withdrawal from the region. All that was needed was for regional actors to stop assuming that Washington’s ability to veto regional outcomes would last forever.

### Clarifying What Post-Hegemony Actually Means

It is critical to draw clear lines around what has not changed in the region. The United States still maintains more military capacity in and around the Middle East than any other outside power, and it has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to deploy that power—through aircraft carrier strike group deployments, targeted airstrikes, and sweeping sanctions regimes that most global economies still cannot fully evade.

Post-hegemony does not mean American absence from the region. What it does mean is the end of the long-held presumption—shared for decades by both Washington and regional capitals—that all major regional outcomes would ultimately be arbitrated by the United States.

The core realist critique of the old American hegemonic project was never that U.S. power was insufficient to stabilize the region. Instead, it argued that the project itself—attempting to stabilize the Middle East through permanent forward military deployment, open-ended security guarantees, and periodic wars of choice—generated more instability than it resolved, at a cost far out of proportion to any actual core American national interest.

The 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq is the textbook example of this failure, while the intervention in Libya and decades-long entanglement in Syria serve as supporting footnotes to the same argument. A superpower that ties its global credibility to outcomes it cannot fully control will eventually find its credibility held hostage to local actors—client states, insurgent movements, rival powers—that have far more at stake regionally than Washington does globally.

### Why China and Russia Are Not Rival Hegemons

Much mainstream American commentary frames Gulf states’ strategic hedging with China and Russia as evidence that a new rival hegemonic order is displacing American influence in the region. This reading overstates both China’s appetite for a leading security role and Russia’s current capacity to fill such a position.

Beijing has consistently prioritized commercial access and energy security in the Middle East, and has shown almost no interest in taking on the security guarantor role that the United States has occupied for decades. China has no network of permanent military bases in the region, no mutual defense treaties with core Gulf states, and no willingness to referee long-running disputes between Sunni and Shia factions or between Arab states and Israel.

Russia, meanwhile, has been severely degraded by its ongoing war in Ukraine. It retains limited influence through arms sales and its military foothold in Syria, but lacks the spare economic and military capacity to guarantee the security of any regional state during a major crisis.

What both China and Russia offer regional states is not a replacement for the American security patronage, but valuable negotiating leverage against the incumbent hegemon. This is exactly the kind of strategic diversification that any rational middle power will pursue once it doubts the long-term reliability of its existing patron.

### The Uncomfortable Realistic Path Forward

The most likely trajectory for the region in coming years is not the emergence of a stable new equilibrium, but a far rockier, more costly, and more ad-hoc form of regional politics. Conflicts will be managed rather than prevented, deterrence relationships will shift with every new crisis, and outside powers—including the United States—will be drawn back into conflicts episodically rather than maintaining continuous control.

This is not a comforting picture, but it is the most realistic one. Honest assessments of the new regional context are a far better foundation for policy than the nostalgic fantasy that American primacy in the Middle East was ever cost-free, or that its gradual erosion is a crisis that must be reversed, rather than a new reality that must be managed.

For American policymakers, the core question is no longer how to restore the old American-led framework. Instead, it is whether Washington can define a narrow set of genuine core national interests—including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, freedom of navigation in international waterways, and preventing any single power from gaining exclusive control over Gulf energy exports—and pursue those goals without re-assuming the role of universal security guarantor for every other regional dispute.

This narrow, targeted approach is a harder discipline than either full withdrawal or full-scale re-engagement. But for realist analysts, it is also the only approach that is likely to be sustainable in the long term.

In a historic and deeply controversial secret ballot held Friday at United Nations headquarters in New York, 82 of the International Criminal Court’s 125 member states voted to dismiss British chief prosecutor Karim Khan from his post over unproven sexual misconduct claims, after the United Kingdom privately withdrew its backing for Khan and refused him a meeting with senior government ministers, exclusive reporting from Middle East Eye confirms.

The dismissal caps an 18-month disciplinary process that critics, including Palestinian rights advocates, former ICC judges, and Khan’s own legal team, have labeled as a politically motivated effort to undermine the court’s ongoing investigation into war crimes committed during the Gaza conflict. The sequence of events begins in March 2024, when an independent panel of judges appointed by the ICC’s governing Assembly of State Parties (ASP) bureau unanimously cleared Khan of all wrongdoing, finding that findings from a prior UN investigation into the allegations “do not establish misconduct or breach of duty under the relevant framework.”

Khan has continuously denied all allegations against him, rejecting claims of a sexual relationship with the complainant and refuting her core assertion of non-consensual sexual conduct. Despite the independent panel’s full acquittal, a coalition of largely Western and European ASP bureau members voted to set aside the judges’ ruling and issue its own adverse finding against Khan based on the original UN report. Last month, the bureau concluded that a sexual relationship had occurred, arguing that the power imbalance inherent in the connection made the relationship inherently inappropriate – a conclusion that directly contradicted the independent judicial review.

Contested summary documents distributed by the bureau to all member states ahead of the vote compounded this irregular process. While the UN investigation never issued formal factual findings confirming the allegations, the bureau’s summaries presented the unsubstantiated claims as confirmed fact, skewing the information available to voting delegates.

As a founding signatory of the Rome Statute, the ICC’s governing charter, the UK’s position on the vote carried outsize influence. According to sources with direct knowledge of internal discussions, a UK government official notified Khan on June 17 that the British government would not support his retention in office, despite having backed his election to the role in 2021. The official confirmed the UK’s decision was made after reviewing the same bureau-distributed summaries that misrepresented the allegations as proven fact. When Khan requested a meeting with a senior British minister to personally brief officials on his side of the case, the request was formally denied on July 1, the sources confirmed. The dismissal unfolded amid a rapid change in UK leadership, occurring days after Andy Burnham succeeded Keir Starmer as prime minister and appointed Ed Miliband as the new foreign secretary. Miliband has framed his tenure as a commitment to upholding democratic values and international law on the global stage, though he has not commented publicly on the UK’s position in the vote.

Critics across the global human rights community have already drawn a clear connection between Khan’s ouster and his office’s groundbreaking decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges related to the 2023-2024 Gaza conflict. United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese summarized the widespread concern in a post on X Saturday, noting that “Khan’s removal lines up neatly with the fight to neutralise Netanyahu’s arrest warrant. Coincidence is a luxury intl law can no longer afford.”

Israeli media confirmed Friday that an official lobbying task force led by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar actively pressured ICC member states to vote against Khan. Saar welcomed the dismissal as “long-delayed” in a public statement following the vote, and called on the ICC to abandon the arrest warrants against Israeli leaders immediately.

The pressure campaign against Khan predates the disciplinary process, as documented by Middle East Eye in 2024. After Khan’s office requested the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in May 2024 – which the court ultimately issued that November – the United States imposed formal sanctions on Khan, his two deputy prosecutors, and multiple ICC judges. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaffirmed Washington’s aggressive stance earlier this month, stating that the U.S. would “dismantle the ICC – brick by brick, if necessary.”

Tayab Ali, Khan’s lead defense lawyer, released a statement Friday expressing deep regret over the ASP’s decision to ignore repeated warnings about due process from more than 180 global human rights groups and legal experts. “The decision is unsupported by any lawful or properly reasoned finding that Mr Khan KC committed misconduct or breached his duties as prosecutor,” Ali said.

In a development that underscores the irregularity of the final vote, the complainant gave her first public interview on the case to CNN last week, reaffirming her allegation of non-consensual conduct – but member states never held a vote to confirm or reject this specific claim.

The UK’s opposition to Khan also aligns with previously reported threats against the ICC. In June 2024, Middle East Eye revealed that then-UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron called Khan in April 2024, weeks before the prosecutor submitted his request for the Israeli arrest warrants, and threatened to cut UK funding and withdraw the country from the court entirely if the warrants were issued. The UK Foreign Office has repeatedly refused to comment on the call, despite repeated calls from cross-party members of Parliament for an official investigation and a formal inquiry by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Middle East Eye, which first broke the story of the UK’s behind-the-scenes opposition to Khan, provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and global human rights issues.

On a Sunday in late July 2026, Israeli settlers carried out a coordinated wave of violent attacks spanning multiple districts across the occupied West Bank, leaving two mosques destroyed, infrastructure damaged, and dozens of Palestinian residents terrorized. Palestinian officials confirm the assaults were conducted under the direct protection of Israeli military forces, marking one of the broadest single-day settler offensives targeting Palestinian communities in recent months.

The most destructive attacks targeted places of worship, in what Palestinian religious leaders call a deliberate attempt to inflame religious tensions. In the village of Qusra, located south of Nablus, settlers set large portions of the newly completed al-Rahma Mosque ablaze. Local activist Abdul-Azim Wadi told Middle East Eye that he was alerted to the arson at 2:30 a.m., when residents rushed to the scene to battle the fire before fire crews could gain access. Just one day prior, villagers had finished renovating and recarpeting the mosque in preparation for its official opening in the coming days. The blaze left extensive damage, including partial collapse of several interior walls. Investigating the site after the attack, residents found racist Hebrew-language slogans spray-painted across the mosque’s outer walls, including phrases reading “Israel will be established with blood” and “Mosques will not frighten us.” The graffiti made clear the arson was carried out as revenge for the recent killing of settlers in the nearby Tell area. Wadi added that Qusra has been a repeated target of settler aggression: in 2011, settlers burned another village mosque, in 2023 they killed six Palestinian residents in a single day of violence, and in 2024 they set fire to 47 residential and agricultural structures across the village.

A second mosque was attacked in the village of Kur, south of Tulkarm, where settlers also set the building on fire and left revenge-themed racist graffiti on its walls.

Beyond religious sites, settlers targeted Palestinian economic infrastructure and private property across eight additional West Bank governorates: Ramallah, Hebron, Salfit, Qalqilya, Jericho, and Jerusalem. In the Ain Samia region, northeast of Ramallah, assailants raided a privately owned Palestinian stone quarry, setting more than 10 pieces of heavy industrial equipment including excavators, bulldozers, and transport trucks on fire. Quarry owner Abdel Samad Abdel Aziz estimates total damages at 2 million Israeli shekels, equal to roughly $666,000. The assault left three security guards injured after settlers beat them and attacked them with pepper spray. Abdel Aziz noted that while his quarry has been targeted by vandalism in the past, this was the first large-scale arson attack. He added that the Israeli military delayed entry for Palestinian fire crews, allowing the fires to burn uncontrolled for hours and significantly worsen the total damage.

Across other West Bank communities, the violence extended to civilian infrastructure and residents: in Beitillu, northwest of Ramallah, multiple Palestinian-owned vehicles were set ablaze. In Beit Furik, east of Nablus, settlers attempted to burn down a private home after spray-painting inciting slogans on its exterior, but were forced to flee by alerted local residents. Near the Karnei Shomron settlement, built on expropriated Palestinian land east of Qalqilya, settlers blocked and attacked an ambulance transporting a critically ill patient, forcing the vehicle to turn back to its point of origin. Near Mitzpe Yericho, southwest of Jericho, settlers stoned passing Palestinian civilian cars. In Bani Na’im, east of Hebron, assailants blocked a key access road to the desert region east of Yatta with piles of excavated soil. East of Jerusalem, armed settlers opened live fire on residents of a Bedouin community near the village of Jaba’, before setting a residential home and a civilian vehicle on fire. Along the Wadi Qana highway connecting Salfit and Qalqilya, settlers stoned passing Palestinian vehicles, while simultaneously establishing a new unauthorized settlement outpost on privately owned Palestinian land belonging to the village of Deir Istiya, according to Palestinian officials.

Palestinian authorities have issued widespread condemnation of the attacks. The Palestinian Higher Fatwa Council called the assaults part of a deliberate, systematic campaign targeting Palestinian religious sites. “The burning of al-Rahma Mosque in Qusra and the mosque in Kur represents a new crime that falls within the systematic and dangerous policy of the Israeli occupation targeting holy sites and places of worship,” the council said in an official statement. The body also warned that repeated attacks on holy sites, including repeated incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem, carry a severe risk of escalating regional tensions across the entire Middle East.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs echoed the condemnation, framing the violence as organized state-backed settler terrorism. “Targeting mosques and other places of worship, and writing racist and inciting slogans on their walls, reflects the true face of the racist, settler-colonial occupation and its ongoing attempts to transform the political conflict into a religious one, in order to fuel hatred and justify its crimes against the Palestinian people,” the ministry said. The statement emphasized that the attacks are the direct result of a long-standing policy of impunity for settler violence, where Israeli forces provide protection for assaults and do not hold perpetrators accountable. The ministry called on the international community, the United Nations, and all relevant global bodies to implement binding practical measures to halt the violence, designate armed settler groups operating in the West Bank as terrorist organizations, and impose harsh deterrent sanctions on settler perpetrators and their backers to ensure accountability for crimes against Palestinian civilians.

Data collected by Palestinian advocacy groups shows that this recent wave of violence is part of a rapidly escalating trend of settler aggression in 2026. The Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission reports that Israeli forces and settlers carried out roughly 11,074 separate attacks against Palestinian communities in the West Bank during the first half of 2026 alone. The Palestinian Information Center documented 6,856 separate violations of Palestinian rights just in the month of June. Currently, approximately 750,000 Israeli settlers reside in the occupied West Bank, distributed across 141 officially recognized Israeli settlements and 224 unauthorized outposts, built on expropriated Palestinian land. Roughly 250,000 of these settlers live in settlements east of Jerusalem, amid daily attacks targeting Palestinian residents, their agricultural land, and their private property.

A large-scale cross-border search and rescue mission is ongoing Sunday after a Vietnamese cargo vessel sank in severe weather in the disputed South China Sea, leaving 17 crew members unaccounted for, officials from multiple nations have confirmed. The 62-person ship, identified as the Khoi Nguyen 18, went down late Saturday in waters close to Fiery Cross Reef, a Chinese-constructed artificial island that operates as a military outpost in the contested Spratly Islands archipelago. So far, rescuers have successfully located and recovered 45 members of the vessel’s crew, but 17 remain missing as search operations continue.
Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang confirmed that the ship sank while carrying out its operations amid hazardous bad weather conditions in the region, which Vietnam refers to as the East Sea. In response to an official assistance request from Hanoi, the Philippine Coast Guard rapidly mobilized resources to join the effort, deploying both a dedicated search patrol vessel and an aircraft to cover more area. Chinese rescue assets, including surface ships and helicopters, alongside multiple other commercial and civilian vessels already operating nearby, also joined the multinational operation shortly after the distress call was issued.
Local Vietnamese authorities confirmed that dozens of local fishing boats have also joined the search effort, and that all family members of the crew on board the sunken vessel have been notified of the incident. Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson Commodore Noemie Cayabyab noted that the service maintains constant close coordination with Vietnam’s national coast guard to share real-time operational updates that refine search strategies and improve response efficiency. She added that Philippine teams are using a specialized search planning system to narrow priority search zones and boost the odds of locating the missing 17 crew members. The Philippine Coast Guard has also issued a formal navigational warning for all commercial and private ships transiting the area, asking vessels to maintain a sharp lookout and provide assistance if it can be done safely.
A Philippine Coast Guard statement clarified that the search operation is being carried out in full compliance with international maritime conventions and existing bilateral cooperation agreements between Manila and Hanoi. Hanoi’s Foreign Ministry has already issued public gratitude to Beijing for its rapid deployment of rescue resources, and expressed hope that all parties will continue the search effort to locate the remaining missing crew.
The sinking comes in one of the world’s most geographically and politically contested waterways, where China asserts expansive territorial claims over nearly the entire South China Sea. The strategic sea route carries roughly $5 trillion worth of global trade every year, and geologists estimate it holds massive untapped reserves of undersea oil and natural gas. Alongside China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan all hold overlapping, competing territorial claims to different parts of the waterway, creating long-running geopolitical tension in the region.

In a landmark and unprecedented move that has sent shockwaves through international legal circles, 82 out of 125 member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC) voted in a secret ballot at a special New York session to remove sitting chief prosecutor Karim Khan from office over unproven misconduct allegations. This marks the first time in the court’s history that an incumbent chief prosecutor has been dismissed, and the move has already sparked fierce debate over its political motivations.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has publicly connected Khan’s removal to a coordinated global campaign to invalidate the ICC’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Writing on the social platform X on Saturday, Albanese emphasized that Khan’s ousting lines up perfectly with efforts to neutralize the outstanding arrest warrant, arguing that coincidence is not an acceptable explanation in the framework of modern international law. She added that the effort to remove Khan proves that accountability mechanisms genuinely threaten the apartheid regime in Israel and its allies, and called on legal practitioners and judicial bodies across the globe to step up their work for justice if the ICC itself is weakened by political pressure.

Albanese’s remarks were made in direct response to an Israeli media report alleging that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar led an intensive diplomatic campaign and oversaw a dedicated task force to push for Khan’s removal from his post. This effort began shortly after Khan made the landmark decision in May 2024 to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over their roles in alleged war crimes in Gaza. The move immediately unleashed a widespread campaign of threats and economic sanctions against Khan and other ICC officials who supported the court’s investigation into potential crimes in Palestinian territories.

This is not the first time Albanese has warned of a coordinated push to oust Khan. Earlier this year, after a panel of three independent judicial experts appointed by the ICC’s own oversight body unanimously cleared Khan of all misconduct allegations—finding that evidence from UN investigators failed to prove any breach of duty or professional misconduct—the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, an executive body of 21 diplomats, voted to set aside the panel’s clearing. In an additional move first revealed by Middle East Eye, the bureau altered voting rules ahead of the final dismissal vote, collapsing a planned two-stage voting process into a single motion and lowering the threshold required to remove Khan from office. Albanese warned back in March that despite the judicial clearing, the so-called pro-apartheid camp would still push for Khan’s removal, and called on supporters of international justice to block the attempt.

Pressure against ICC officials has intensified steadily since the announcement of the arrest warrants, with the United States imposing sanctions on multiple ICC representatives. The Donald Trump administration placed sanctions on Albanese in July 2025, just days after she published a report naming more than 60 companies that she argued were profiting from Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. Khan became the first ICC official to be sanctioned under the same executive order in February 2025, and by the end of last year, 11 ICC officials—including both deputy prosecutors and multiple judges who ruled against Israel’s position on the Gaza investigation—had been targeted with sanctions. Currently, the two acting heads of the prosecutor’s office, Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, were also sanctioned by the U.S. in August under the same executive order.

The arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant remain active, as only ICC judges have the authority to withdraw them. Israel, which is not a state party to the ICC’s founding Rome Statute, has repeatedly called for the warrants to be scrapped and has launched multiple legal challenges to invalidate them, two of which are still pending before the court. Before Khan’s dismissal was officially confirmed, Saar repeated Israel’s long-debunked claim that the warrants were rushed and issued only to distract from the misconduct allegations against Khan, writing on X that “These warrants, issued against a country that is not even a member of the ICC, should never have been sought in the first place and should be revoked immediately.”

In the aftermath of the dismissal vote, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor released an official statement confirming that its work, including the investigation into potential crimes in Palestinian territories, would continue without interruption. Elections to select a new permanent chief prosecutor will be held in the coming period, though the ICC’s governing body has not yet released an official timeline for the process.