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In a remote mountainous region of central Laos, a dramatic 10-day rescue operation has resulted in the safe extraction of four men who were trapped underground after flash floods flooded a narrow cave system, Thai rescue officials confirmed Thursday. The four survivors emerged from the dangerous cave network a full 24 hours after rescuers pulled a fifth man to safety last week.

The group of seven, all Lao nationals, had ventured deep into the interconnected tunnels of the cave in Xaysomboun province in search of gold deposits on May 20. Within hours of entering, sudden flash floods surged through the cave, collapsing access routes and cutting the group off from the outside world, leaving them stranded in total darkness hundreds of meters from the entrance.

Rescue teams, including highly trained specialist divers, were deployed immediately to the remote site, but their efforts were hampered by extremely challenging conditions. The cave system is not only extremely deep but also remarkably narrow, with some passageways measuring just 50 centimeters, or 20 inches, wide. Tight spaces and ongoing water hazards slowed progress as search teams worked systematically through the winding tunnels.

By Wednesday, rescuers had located five alive members of the original group. Following the successful rescue of the first man on Wednesday, the remaining four were brought out to safety on Thursday. Even as rescue teams celebrate the successful recovery of the five survivors, the operation continues: two members of the original group remain unaccounted for, with search teams continuing to comb the cave system for any sign of the missing men.

In a remote, rugged stretch of central Laos, an international team of rescue specialists is racing against harsh conditions to pull four surviving trapped villagers out of a flooded cave system, 10 days after flash floods cut off their exit. One of the five men found alive earlier this week was successfully evacuated to safety on Friday, capping days of dangerous preparation, as crews continue searching for two other missing villagers who remain unaccounted for.

The chain of events that led to the crisis began last week, when a group of seven local villagers entered the remote cave in Xaisomboun Province, roughly 120 kilometers north of the capital Vientiane, in search of valuable minerals. Unexpected flash floods rushed through the cave system, sealing off the only exit and trapping the entire group. Only one man managed to escape the rising waters quickly enough to alert local authorities to the emergency, setting the large-scale rescue effort in motion.

Three days ago, rescuers made a hopeful breakthrough: they located five of the six remaining trapped men alive, identified only by their first names: Khamla, Mued, Ee, Ing and Laen. Crews immediately delivered life-sustaining supplies to the stranded men, including clean drinking water, soft food and thermal foil blankets to ward off hypothermia in the cool, damp cave environment. Despite the aid, on-site footage shows the men’s health and physical conditions have continued to decline after more than a week trapped underground.

Friday brought the first major success of the operation. After months of preparation and hours of careful navigation through the cave’s flooded passages, crews extracted the first survivor in an operation that took roughly 30 minutes. On-site videos captured the tense moment of his emergence: the man exited the cave’s dark water alongside an expert cave diver, gasping for air before slowly pulling himself through a narrow, partially flooded passageway. When he finally reached stable ground, he struggled to stand steadily on unsteady legs. Rescuers noted he had suffered injuries to his hands, quickly wrapped him in a thermal blanket to stabilize his body temperature, and assisted him to a waiting medical team. A second video showed the man being helped out of the cave’s main entrance, a headlamp strapped to his forehead, supported by two rescue workers as he moved into the care of waiting medics amid a crowd of on-site responders. It has not been publicly confirmed which of the five identified survivors was the first to be evacuated.

Crews decided to hold off on evacuating the four remaining surviving men on Friday, as they determined the men were not yet physically ready to make the dangerous journey out. Instead, rescue teams worked overnight and through Saturday to drain more flood water from the cave system, with the goal of completing the extractions of the remaining four survivors later the same day. One participating Thai cave diver, Norrased Palasing, reaffirmed the team’s commitment in a Facebook post Saturday, writing “One person has made it out safely, and we will not stop until the remaining four make it home too.”

The rescue effort has drawn international support and expertise. Local Laotian rescue teams have been joined by specialist responders from neighboring Thailand, as well as crews from Japan and Malaysia, with additional specialists from Indonesia, France and Australia also arriving at the remote site. Notably, many of the participating Thai divers and rescue leaders took part in the dramatic 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, which successfully extracted 12 trapped schoolboys and their soccer coach from a flooded northern Thai cave, giving the team extensive experience in complex underground cave rescues.

Even with this expertise, the operation remains extraordinarily high-risk. In a video recorded just an hour before the first evacuation began on Friday, Thai rescuer Kengkaj Bongkawong of the Metta Tham Rescue Kalasin detailed the extreme challenges crews face inside the cave. The rescue’s forward operating base is set up in a large chamber deep inside the cave, which can only be reached by navigating more than 200 meters of twisting, narrow passages with sharp jagged rock walls, most of which are fully submerged. From that staging area, divers must complete an additional 30-meter dive through a fully flooded tunnel to reach the chamber where the survivors are trapped.

“To dive in a cave, there are issues with the temperature, narrow areas, control of movement, and managing the panic of the survivor, which will be difficult, but we have to do it,” Kengkaj explained. The greatest danger comes when guiding untrained survivors through zero-visibility flood waters, a task that carries significant risk of disorientation and panic for both the survivors and the rescue team. To prepare, divers have spent days training the trapped men in basic diving safety: on-site footage shows Norrased Palasing and Finnish diver Mikko Paasi walking the men through how to use diving breathing equipment, emphasizing the critical rule of breathing only through the mouth while underwater.

Alongside the effort to extract the four remaining survivors, crews are also preparing to search deeper into the cave system for the two missing villagers. Kengkaj said teams plan to explore a section of the cave 20 to 25 meters beyond the chamber where the five survivors were found, a region that is even more deeply flooded than the area where the men were trapped. “That area has a lot of water. The water goes there because it’s even deeper than this place,” he noted.

On Saturday, the head of Myanmar’s military-aligned administration launched an official diplomatic trip to India, a critical regional partner for the Southeast Asian nation, with a packed agenda of high-level talks focused on deepening bilateral cooperation. This trip marks Min Aung Hlaing’s first visit to neighboring India since he was inaugurated as Myanmar’s president in April, following a widely criticized election that opponents argue was carefully staged to cement the military’s ongoing authoritarian hold on national power. His most recent prior trip to India took place in 2019, when he served as the country’s military chief.

Myanmar state-controlled MRTV confirmed that Min Aung Hlaing, accompanied by a delegation of senior cabinet members, departed Naypyitaw, Myanmar’s capital, on Saturday morning. The delegation landed at Gaya International Airport in Bihar, an eastern Indian state located close to Bodh Gaya, one of the most sacred pilgrimage sites for Buddhist communities worldwide. Over the course of the visit, Min Aung Hlaing is scheduled to hold formal meetings with India’s top leadership, including President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as senior government officials and leaders of Indian business associations. The talks are expected to cover opportunities to expand collaboration across economic, religious, cultural and social sectors, alongside plans to inspect key joint infrastructure projects in the region.

For decades, New Delhi has maintained open diplomatic and economic ties with Myanmar’s successive military-backed governments, a policy that has continued even after the 2021 military coup that ousted the elected civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Following the coup, Western nations imposed sweeping economic and diplomatic sanctions on the junta, after military forces launched a brutal crackdown on political opponents that escalated into a nationwide armed conflict and a massive humanitarian catastrophe.

Geopolitically, Myanmar holds major strategic importance for India’s regional security agenda. The two countries share a 1,643-kilometer land border and a contiguous maritime boundary in the Bay of Bengal. For years, New Delhi and the Myanmar military have collaborated on cross-border security operations and intelligence sharing to counter separatist insurgent groups that operate along their shared frontier. India currently also hosts tens of thousands of Myanmar refugees, most of whom have fled escalating violence in Myanmar’s northwestern Chin State and other conflict-wracked regions.

Despite the diplomatic and security rationale for the visit, the decision to host Min Aung Hlaing has drawn sharp criticism from pro-democracy and human rights activists, who warn that the trip will grant undeserved international legitimacy to a junta accused of widespread human rights abuses. In a pre-trip emailed statement released Friday, Yadanar Maung, a spokesperson for activist group Justice For Myanmar, called Min Aung Hlaing a war criminal waging a campaign of terror against the people of Myanmar, and condemned India’s choice to welcome him. Yadanar Maung noted that India has a long history of supporting Myanmar’s military through official training programs and deep economic ties, and called on New Delhi to reverse its policy. “India must change course, stop awarding false legitimacy to the junta, stop profiting from the military’s campaign of terror against the people, and instead support the Myanmar people who are struggling and sacrificing daily for federal democracy,” the statement read.

A major diplomatic firestorm has erupted after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres published his annual Conflict-Related Sexual Violence report Friday, formally adding Israel to a global list of actors documented to perpetrate systematic sexual violence against vulnerable populations—prompting an immediate, sweeping retaliation from Jerusalem that includes cutting all official ties with Guterres’ office.

The escalation did not come out of nowhere. Twelve months earlier, Guterres had placed Israel on formal notice, warning that the country would be added to the report if it continued to block UN investigators from accessing conflict zones and detention facilities to probe allegations of abuse. Long-standing UN documentation has tracked allegations of Israeli institutional sexual violence against Palestinians for years, including a 2025 March report that labeled such abuse “systematic” across the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, followed by a July update that highlighted recurring patterns of genital assault and burns against detained Palestinians.

Israeli officials got an advance look at an internal draft of the new report earlier this week, and moved quickly to announce their break. In a Thursday statement, Israel’s UN mission said it would end all cooperation with Guterres, with Israeli ambassador Danny Danon confronting the secretary-general over the listing in a phone call before posting a blunt public rebuke on X: “WE’RE DONE WITH YOU! @antonioguterres.”

Speaking to Israeli broadcaster i24, Danon argued that listing Israeli service members alongside Hamas—an group Guterres also cited in the report for failing to address its own alleged sexual violence abuses during the October 7 attacks—crossed an unacceptable red line. “To put our soldiers, my son, my daughter, in the same list with the terrorists of Hamas, who committed the horrible crimes of October 7… There is a line, and we decided that enough is enough,” he said.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry doubled down on the criticism, dismissing the report’s findings as “shameful and absurd” and framing the UN as a deeply politicized, corrupt body that has abandoned its founding mission to target Israel unfairly. “Israel has decided to sever all ties with the Secretary-General’s Office and will wait until a new UN Secretary-General is appointed,” the ministry’s statement read. Guterres’ current five-year term is set to conclude on December 31.

The United States echoed Israel’s outrage, with US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz calling the UN’s decision to list Israel “ridiculous.” He claimed the move unfairly equates a democratic state with independent rule of law and mechanisms to hold abusive actors accountable with terrorist organizations.

For its part, the UN has refused to back down or revise the document. When Middle East Eye reached out to Guterres’ office for comment, spokesperson Stephane Dujarric confirmed that the secretary-general stands firmly behind the report’s findings, saying “the report has been issued and is not open for change.” A day prior, Dujarric had told reporters that Guterres’ door remains open to Israeli representatives despite the split.

The 2025 report, which documents cases of sexual violence occurring from 2023 onward, lists 31 verified instances of sexual abuse used as a tool of torture by Israeli security forces against Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were being held in Israeli detention. Ten of the documented victims are children. The report details a wide range of violations, including rape with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, targeted genital violence including deliberate shootings, unwanted sexual touching, unjustified invasive cavity and strip searches, forced nudity, and explicit threats of sexual assault.

Guterres found that perpetrators span multiple branches of Israel’s national security apparatus, including regular Israel Defense Forces units, the Israel Prison Service, the elite Keter special operations unit, and the national police Counter-Terrorism Unit, widely known by its Hebrew acronym Yamam. The documented abuses occurred at multiple detention and interrogation sites across Israel and the occupied territories, including military bases such as Sde Teiman, Etzion, and Majnunah, and civilian prisons including Megiddo, Ofer, Ramla, Hasharon, Shatta, Nafha and Damon, as well as Gush Etzion police station.

Victims include working journalists and human rights defenders, the report notes, with patterns of abuse differing by gender: female detainees primarily face threats of rape, forced nudity, unwanted touching, and dehumanizing unjustified strip searches, while male and minor male detainees are disproportionately targeted with rape, attempted rape, and severe genital violence. The report documents five male victims who suffered extended rectal bleeding and swelling that lasted for days or weeks, in many cases without access to any form of medical treatment.

Beyond the abuse itself, Guterres highlighted two key ongoing failures: the Israeli government’s persistent refusal to grant UN investigative bodies access to sites and detainees to probe allegations, and Hamas’ refusal to acknowledge or address any claims of sexual violence committed by its members. To date, Guterres added, no Israeli security force member has been indicted in Israel for the sexual assault of Palestinian detainees.

The UN report follows a high-profile investigative column published earlier this month by New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, who detailed graphic accounts of abuse including sexual assault with animals, vegetables, and batons that left victims with permanent internal injuries. Kristof drew direct connection to US policy, writing that American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, making the United States complicit in the documented abuse. He called on Washington to condition military aid to Israel on an immediate end to the abuse, and pressed US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an avowed Zionist, to meet with survivors and protect them from retaliation for speaking out.

Israeli officials swiftly condemned Kristof’s column as a “blood libel,” launching widespread calls for The New York Times to retract the piece and terminate Kristof’s employment. For years, the Israeli government has also blocked the International Committee of the Red Cross from accessing Palestinian detention facilities to inspect conditions, a long-standing restriction that has drawn little international attention until recent months.

In a high-stakes international rescue operation unfolding in the remote mountainous terrain of central Laos’ Xaysomboun province, the first of five men trapped for more than a week by sudden flash floods inside an isolated cave has been pulled to safety. The group had ventured into the cavern on May 20 to search for artisanal gold when unanticipated flash floods sealed off their exit, cutting them off from the outside world entirely. Two additional members of their original party remain unaccounted for as of Friday. Rescue divers located the five surviving men on Wednesday, huddled together on a small dry ledge roughly 300 meters (984 feet) from the cave’s entrance, after days of difficult searching. On Friday, a member of the Thai rescue contingent shared a photo on Facebook documenting the moment the first man was pulled out, confirming in a subsequent update that “the first victim has been successfully rescued out of the cave.”

This mission has been defined by a relentless race against time, with forecasters warning of incoming thunderstorms and a 60% chance of heavy rain across the region by Friday evening, conditions that would push cave water levels higher and further narrow the window for a safe extraction. The men, who are weak and malnourished after more than 10 days trapped with very limited resources, were recorded in video footage shot by rescuers on Wednesday covered head to toe in mud, reporting severe chest pains and extreme hunger.

Rescuers initially pursued a plan to pump floodwaters out of the cave to open an exit route, but that strategy failed to produce results, forcing teams to consider a last-ditch alternative: teaching the trapped men basic scuba diving skills so they could swim out with guide support. It remains unclear exactly how rescuers managed to extract the first man, with operation leaders saying full details will be released after the entire mission concludes. Kengkard Bonggawong, a member of the Thai rescue team, wrote on social media Friday that after confirming the first man’s safe extraction, teams would conduct assessments of the remaining four survivors overnight before resuming the search for the two missing men on Saturday.

The urgent plight of the trapped men has drawn international support from the global cave diving community, with specialist rescue teams from Thailand, Indonesia, France, and Australia arriving in Laos on Friday to contribute their specialized skills and experience to the operation. The operation bears striking similarities to the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, where a youth football team and their coach were extracted after 18 days trapped deep in flooded northern Thailand cave system. Mikko Paasi, a Finnish diver who participated in both the 2018 mission and the current Laos rescue, told CBS News Friday that the conditions in the cave remain extremely dangerous. “The environment is so hostile that anything can happen,” Paasi said.

Photos released to the media show rescue teams from the Metta Tham Kalasin unit working tirelessly to redirect floodwaters out of the cave system, pumping water to higher ground to create safe passage for extraction teams.

In a move that openly flouts the October ceasefire agreement brokered to end years of conflict in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday he has instructed the Israeli military to expand its territorial control in the strip to 70 percent. Speaking at a leadership conference hosted by the pre-military Ein Prat academy, Netanyahu confirmed that Israeli forces currently hold sway over 60 percent of Gaza’s total territory, and that his official order is to push that figure to 70 percent in the coming phase of operations. When audience members called for full Israeli control over the entire enclave, Netanyahu responded that the expansion would proceed in stages, with the 70 percent target as the immediate next step.

Netanyahu’s announcement came just 24 hours after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reaffirmed the country’s controversial plan to encourage what he framed as “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, a policy widely condemned as a push for ethnic cleansing. “Everything at the right time and in the right manner,” Katz stated of the plan.

The ceasefire agreement, signed by Israel and Hamas with U.S. backing in October, was intended to end the two-year armed conflict in Gaza. The text of the deal includes explicit provisions banning any Israeli occupation or annexation of Gaza, and guarantees that no Palestinian resident will be forced to leave the territory. It also froze the military positions held by both parties at the time the agreement went into effect, with planned later phases that would require incremental Israeli withdrawal from captured areas.

When the ceasefire first took effect, Israeli forces controlled approximately 53 percent of Gaza, including large swathes of the enclave’s northern, southern, and eastern regions. Since that time, Israel has already expanded its hold to reach the current 60 percent. A further expansion to 70 percent would leave Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents crowded into just 109 square kilometers of remaining land.

This latest announcement of territorial expansion is far from the only violation of the ceasefire that Israel has been accused of committing over the seven months the agreement has been in place. Gaza’s Government Media Office reports that total Israeli breaches of the deal have surpassed 3,000. The Palestinian Ministry of Health records that Israeli forces have carried out near-daily air strikes and ground shootings targeting Palestinian civilians, killing more than 922 people since the ceasefire began. The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) confirms that at least 229 of those killed are children.

Since the start of the latest conflict in October 2023, overall Palestinian deaths from Israeli attacks in Gaza have reached at least 72,800, with thousands more still trapped under rubble and presumed dead. The pace of attacks has accelerated this week, coinciding with the major Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha: the Palestinian health ministry recorded 16 Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israeli forces between Tuesday and Wednesday of this week alone.

Israel has also failed to uphold key ceasefire provisions related to humanitarian aid access. The agreement required Israel to allow up to 600 aid trucks carrying food, fuel, medical equipment, shelter materials, and commercial goods into Gaza every day. But Gaza’s Government Media Office data shows the daily average over the life of the ceasefire has been just over 200 trucks. International aid organizations warn that this restricted flow of assistance has left Gaza’s catastrophic humanitarian crisis largely unaddressed, with severe, ongoing shortages of life-sustaining supplies across the entire enclave.

In response to Netanyahu’s announcement and the ongoing pattern of Israeli violations, Hamas issued a formal warning Thursday that the entire ceasefire agreement is now at imminent risk of total collapse. The report was produced by Middle East Eye, an outlet that provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and global regions affected by the conflict.