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A dangerous escalation of conflict between the United States and Iran has left the small Gulf nation of Kuwait reeling from deadly missile and drone attacks, pushing an already fragile ceasefire to the breaking point. On Tuesday night, Iranian forces launched a heavy barrage of projectiles that targeted Kuwait’s main airport, leaving at least one person dead and 63 others injured. Graphic footage from the scene confirms widespread destruction: Terminal 1 is engulfed in active fire, its partial roof has collapsed, and thick plumes of dark smoke have blanketed the airport area.

Kuwaiti officials have issued a sharp denial of Iranian claims that the country allowed the U.S. to use its airspace to launch pre-emptive strikes against Iran. In an official briefing, Kuwaiti Defense Ministry spokesperson Brigadier General Saud al-Otayan publicly denounced the assault as “criminal Iranian aggression.” In a coordinated diplomatic response, Kuwait summoned Iran’s acting chargé d’affaires to formally protest the attack and ordered two Iranian embassy personnel to leave the country within a 24-hour window.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed its responsibility for the assault in an official statement posted to its Telegram channel, noting that the strikes targeted two key sites: Ali Al Salem Air Base, a major facility that hosts U.S. military helicopters, and the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters based in neighboring Bahrain. The attack followed a chain of escalating tit-for-tat strikes that began when U.S. forces targeted an empty oil tanker Tehran was reportedly attempting to bring to one of its ports. This action came amid a broader U.S. naval blockade on Iranian shipping, imposed after Iran took control of key transit areas in the Strait of Hormuz and began demanding new transit fees for commercial vessels passing through the strategic waterway. U.S. officials say Iran first opened fire on American sailors after the tanker strike, prompting the U.S. to launch its own counterstrikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island. Following the Iranian assault on Kuwait and Bahrain, U.S. military officials announced they had “successfully defeated” the wave of missile and drone attacks and reaffirmed their counterstrikes on Qeshm Island.

This latest attack marks one of the most severe strikes on Kuwait since Iran launched a series of retaliatory assaults against Gulf states earlier this year, in response to a joint U.S.-Israeli offensive that began on February 28. Kuwait currently hosts approximately 13,500 U.S. troops, one of the largest American military deployments in the entire Gulf region. Earlier this year, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council states pushed the U.S. to avoid military confrontation with Iran, but regional alliances have shifted rapidly in recent months: the United Arab Emirates has launched dozens of its own strikes against Iran, while Saudi Arabia initially granted the U.S. expanded access to its military bases before shifting its stance to back Pakistani-mediated diplomatic negotiations.

The latest flare-up has thrown already shaky ceasefire talks between Washington and Tehran into further disarray. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed the two sides are close to reaching a new negotiated deal, but Iranian officials have consistently denied any willingness to compromise on either their nuclear program or their demands to impose transit fees in the Strait of Hormuz. Just this week, Iran’s official Tasnim News Agency confirmed Tehran has cut off all direct contact with U.S. negotiators, though Trump insisted Tuesday that discussions remain ongoing. Talks have stalled over two core sticking points: the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to unrestricted commercial traffic and the full sanctions relief Iran has demanded to extend the current fragile ceasefire.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on Washington’s hardline stance, saying Iran will only qualify for sanctions relief if it completely abandons its nuclear enrichment program. “Iran is being sanctioned because they’ve highly enriched uranium. Iran is being sanctioned because of their nuclear activities; if they agree to give up those things, there will be sanctions relief,” Rubio told lawmakers. “They have to agree on negotiating severe and long-term limitations and/or cancellation of enrichment activity.”

Rubio claimed Iranian negotiators have recently begun discussing aspects of their nuclear program that were previously off the table, but he offered no concrete details to support the assertion. Iranian officials flatly rejected the claim Friday, stating explicitly that “no negotiations” are currently underway over the country’s nuclear program. Rubio’s comments also make clear the U.S. has no immediate plans to release the billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets that Tehran has made a core requirement for any permanent ceasefire agreement.

Caught between competing regional and global powers, Kuwait finds itself in an increasingly vulnerable position. With a total population of around five million, the country lacks the extensive military capabilities of larger Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and has less diplomatic leverage than neighboring Qatar to de-escalate tensions. As fighting reignites along the Gulf, this small nation has become an unintended casualty of the escalating standoff between the U.S. and Iran.

For decades, the South China Sea has remained one of the world’s most intractable territorial flashpoints, with overlapping claims from multiple regional powers turning submerged reefs and tiny atolls into focal points of geopolitical tension. Now, a startlingly fast transformation at one remote outpost has underscored a new, shifting phase of this long-running conflict: quiet land-building by every major claimant, reshaping the strategic map faster than diplomatic efforts can catch up.

Antelope Reef, a teardrop-shaped submerged formation located in the northwestern Paracel Islands chain, stood as little more than a faint turquoise mark on nautical maps until this year. Over the course of just six months, an unprecedented dredging operation has turned this once-underwater feature into a 6-square-kilometer crescent of solid reclaimed land, dotted with early construction and ringed by a protected lagoon that hosts dozens of working vessels. Those vessels are almost exclusively large cutter-suction dredgers, part of China’s globally unmatched fleet of maritime construction equipment — some units can extract up to 6,000 cubic meters of seabed sediment per hour, a volume equivalent to filling two full Olympic-sized swimming pools. Maritime analysts say the speed of the Antelope Reef project is likely unprecedented in the history of large-scale land reclamation.

China is not the only claimant pursuing this strategy, however. After years of observing China expand its territorial footprint through land reclamation, Vietnam has accelerated its own building activities on the reefs it controls in the region. Smaller-scale reclamation is also underway by other claimants, including the Philippines.

The Paracel Islands, where Antelope Reef is located, are one of two major disputed archipelago chains in the South China Sea, alongside the Spratly Islands. Multiple nations, including China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, lay competing claims to the area’s landforms, resource rights, and maritime boundaries. Most of the islands and reefs in the chains were submerged and uninhabited until recent decades. China first took full control of the Paracel Islands in 1974, following a short armed conflict with then-South Vietnamese forces.

In recent years, China completed large-scale reclamation on three major Spratly Islands — Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef, and Subi Reef — transforming them into permanent landmasses large enough to host military airports and defense infrastructure. These projects supported China’s long-standing claim to nearly the entire South China Sea under the widely contested nine-dash line it marks on official maps. Today, large fleets of Chinese coast guard vessels and maritime militia patrol the area within the nine-dash line, effectively outmatching efforts by smaller claimants to challenge Chinese control. Frequent standoffs and clashes between Chinese forces and the far smaller Philippine coast guard have become common in overlapping claim areas in recent years.

Visible straight shoreline grading on the new Antelope Reef has led some analysts to speculate China is preparing to build another military-grade runway, matching the infrastructure it already operates on the three Spratly outposts. But given that China already maintains a fully operational airbase on nearby Woody Island in the Paracels, and the region is already within easy strike range of major Chinese military facilities on Hainan Island, a new runway would likely be redundant. Instead, analysts say the rapid reclamation is almost certainly a calibrated strategic message to Hanoi.

Vietnam and China have a long history of territorial disputes over the South China Sea, which Hanoi refers to as the East Sea. In recent years, Vietnam’s leadership has softened public anti-China rhetoric and prioritized building closer bilateral ties with Beijing. Vietnam’s newly elected President and Party General Secretary To Lam made his first international state visit to China in 2026, where both sides used unusually conciliatory language to acknowledge their ongoing differences over the Paracel and Spratly chains. While Vietnam has issued a formal diplomatic protest over China’s Antelope Reef construction, the statement was deliberately restrained and measured.

Behind this diplomatic softening, however, Vietnam has pursued its own aggressive campaign of land reclamation across the reefs it controls, using the same large cutter-suction dredger technology China pioneered. According to the Washington-based Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), Vietnam has carried out sand pumping operations on at least 20 reefs over the past three years, creating 11 new purpose-built harbors. Hanoi now controls more than 11 square kilometers of reclaimed land in the region — roughly half the total area held by China. Vietnam has also begun constructing military-aligned infrastructure such as navigation beacons, leading observers to summarize Hanoi’s approach as: if you cannot outcompete China, you match its land-building strategy.

“The Vietnamese have been less willing to be at the forefront of the public diplomatic battle over their disagreements with China,” explained Greg Poling, director of AMTI. “They’re much more comfortable letting the Filipinos lead that public push. But on the water, we have seen the Vietnamese being far more willing to stand up to Beijing. As a result, China has mostly backed off from efforts to block Vietnamese oil and gas drilling, for example.”

Ray Powell, director of Stanford University-based South China Sea monitoring program Sealight, says this quiet Vietnamese expansion is exactly what prompted China’s rapid work on Antelope Reef. “Vietnam has been taking advantage of China’s focus on tensions with the Philippines… The reclamation at Antelope Reef could be considered as China’s answer, reminding Vietnam who the major power in the region is.”

So what does this new wave of land reclamation mean for the other claimants locked in the dispute? For 30 years, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has led attempts to negotiate a binding code of conduct between China and the four ASEAN member states that are also South China Sea claimants. A non-binding Declaration of Conduct was reached in 2002, but it carried no legal weight, and China has largely disregarded its provisions for de-escalation. Every year, ASEAN leaders reiterate their commitment to reaching a binding agreement, but no meaningful progress has materialized after decades of talks.

Frustrated by the stalled diplomatic process, the Philippines launched a formal case against China’s territorial claims at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2013. The court issued a sweeping ruling in favor of the Philippines, concluding that China’s sovereignty claims within the nine-dash line had no basis in historical or international law, and that its reclamation activities violated the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone rights. China has refused to recognize or abide by the ruling, prompting the Philippines to adopt a new strategy of public confrontation, sending outnumbered coast guard vessels to challenge Chinese fleets in contested waters. These encounters have resulted in frequent tense clashes, but have done little to shift the region’s vast power imbalance.

In recent years, the Philippines has also deepened military cooperation with the United States, and built new security partnerships with Japan and Australia. The U.S. has provided strong diplomatic backing for Manila’s position, alongside $500 million in military aid and new defense equipment. U.S. Navy vessels periodically conduct Freedom of Navigation Operations through the South China Sea alongside allied partners, to affirm the region’s status as international waterways open to all traffic, despite China’s claims. But these missions are largely symbolic, and have not altered the on-the-ground status quo.

Today, the Philippines is also expanding its own limited footprint in the Spratlys. Manila is lengthening the runway on Thitu Island (known locally as Pagasa Island), building a new coast guard base there, and reinforcing the grounded landing craft BRP Sierra Madre, which has hosted a small Philippine military detachment on Second Thomas Shoal since it was run aground in 1999, despite constant harassment by Chinese vessels.

Poling notes that most claimants have now abandoned hope of reaching the binding code of conduct that was once the core goal of regional diplomacy. “China just continues to do whatever it wants on the water, eroding the sovereignty of other claimants. So what I think you are eventually going to see is a non-binding agreement. But perhaps that will open up diplomatic space for Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and the others to pursue more effective negotiations among themselves without having to go through ASEAN.”

This new landscape, where every claimant pursues incremental expansion of the territory it already holds, while accepting China’s position as the region’s dominant and most assertive power, has become the new reality of the South China Sea dispute.

Two years into the war that began in October 2023, a new study from an Israeli genocide scholar has upended the Israeli government and mainstream media’s repeated denials, concluding that the widespread starvation ravaging the Gaza Strip was the result of deliberate, pre-planned state policy.

Authored by Shmuel Lederman, a researcher specializing in genocide studies, the report titled *Data for Denial: The Smokescreen Behind the Starvation of Gaza* was published last month by the Forum for Regional Thinking at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute. Lederman told Middle East Eye he launched the research in response to what he calls pervasive denial across Israeli society of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, a pattern he says aligns with public responses to historical cases of mass violence.

“There is a thirst for denial,” Lederman explained, noting that most Israeli citizens seek to frame the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and the broader occupied territories as entirely morally justified and free of systemic abuse. A separate August 2025 investigation from Israeli news outlet Walla corroborates this pattern of denial, confirming that mainstream Israeli television outlets routinely minimize or erase coverage of Gaza’s starvation crisis entirely.

Lederman’s study pushes back against the belated, limited acknowledgement of food insecurity that emerged in some Israeli circles by mid-2025, where commentators framed starvation as an accidental, isolated bureaucratic miscalculation rather than a product of intentional state decision-making. Drawing on core principles of famine research, which holds that hunger is driven not just by total food availability but by equitable access to food, the scholar documents how Israeli policy systematically stripped Palestinians of access to sustenance. Restrictions on the entry of aid, fuel, and cooking gas, the deliberate destruction of critical food infrastructure including bakeries, and repeated disruption of humanitarian operations all combined to create catastrophic levels of food deprivation.

The study’s core conclusion leaves little room for ambiguity: Gaza’s starvation is the product of “deliberate planning, experimentation, and manoeuvring around the humanitarian ‘red line’”, designed in large part to manage mounting international pressure on Israel throughout the course of the war.

A central point of contention in public debates over Gaza’s hunger has been the number of daily aid trucks required to meet the enclave’s basic needs, a metric that Israeli officials have repeatedly manipulated to downplay the crisis. COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for civil administration in occupied Palestinian territories, claimed in August 2025 that just 80 daily aid trucks would be enough to meet Gaza’s population’s needs, a figure that was widely repeated by sympathetic Israeli researchers and journalists.

This claim has been rejected by nearly every independent and international body: human rights organizations, UN agencies, and even the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden disputed the number. The Biden White House estimated roughly 250 trucks per day were required to avoid mass hunger, while international humanitarian organizations put the necessary number between 500 and 600. What is more, COGAT’s own past data undermines its current claim: in 2008, when Gaza’s population was 1.5 million people, 500,000 less than its current population, COGAT itself stated 178 trucks per day were needed to meet basic needs. As recently as last month, Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported that COGAT urged the Israeli government to cut aid truck entries to 250 per day after an October 2025 ceasefire, claiming that level met basic needs. For Lederman, this revelation is an implicit admission that the earlier 80-truck claim was a deliberate falsehood: “In practice, this is an admission of starvation,” he told MEE, speaking after COGAT released its post-report statement.

Lederman traces the origins of Gaza’s starvation to the very start of the war in October 2023. For the first five months of the conflict, until March 2024, Israel allowed only a tiny fraction of the recommended number of aid trucks into the Strip, rapidly deepening the food crisis. UN agencies, human rights groups, and on-the-ground Palestinian testimonies all documented extreme food shortages during this period, with women and children bearing the brunt of the deprivation.

In May 2024, mounting U.S. pressure following Israel’s deadly assault on Rafah forced Israel to allow more commercial trucks into Gaza, but the government simultaneously restricted access for humanitarian convoys. Last month, Wala also revealed that 11 major Israeli supermarket chains won an exclusive tender to supply food and aid to Gaza, generating hundreds of millions of shekels in profit. Lederman argues that this privatization of aid delivery created a profit-driven monopoly that actively worsened the humanitarian crisis, allowing a small number of connected actors to enrich themselves, often in coordination with Israeli authorities, while the vast majority of Gazans go hungry.

While U.S. pressure produced a brief easing of the crisis, Israel reversed course in October 2024, slashing aid shipments back to minimal levels. By March 2025, Israel imposed a full blockade on all food and humanitarian aid entry, pushing Gaza over the edge into full-scale famine. In August 2025, the Integrated Food Phase Classification (IPC), the UN-backed global body that monitors hunger, officially declared famine in Gaza City.

The report also reveals that even as COGAT publicly disputed international warnings about growing hunger, the agency privately warned the Israeli government as early as 2025 that Gaza was on the brink of catastrophic famine. Despite this internal warning, the Israeli government pressed ahead with its policy to advance a clear strategic goal: using starvation as a tool to pressure Palestinians to relocate south out of northern and central Gaza, and ultimately to leave the territory for third countries. This tactic aligns with the controversial “voluntary emigration” plan publicly backed by both the Israeli government and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Lederman cites the creation of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as further evidence of this strategy, writing: “Severe food deprivation in Gaza that would compel Gazans to travel to aid distribution centres was not a ‘mistake’, it was part of the plan.”

Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the study frames the territory as a testing ground for a new model of population control through hunger. “Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has served to a large extent as a testing laboratory not only for methods of warfare, but also for the architecture of starvation and the management of a population through deprivation,” the report reads. Lederman warns that the implications of this experiment will extend far beyond Gaza’s borders, noting that while starvation has been used as a weapon of war in other recent conflicts, few if any cases have so systematically and openly undermined the long-standing international norm banning the practice.

Lederman also emphasizes the shared responsibility of the United States, under both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as other Western governments, for enabling Israel’s policy, arguing that their diplomatic and military support made the starvation campaign possible. He warns that Israel’s tactics will spread to other conflicts around the globe, as other actors feel empowered to adopt similar methods, shielded from criticism by charges of Western hypocrisy. “What Israel did in Gaza will not stay there, it already has not remained there,” Lederman said. “Therefore, this is not only a struggle against what Israel did to the Palestinians in Gaza, but a global struggle against these kinds of actions.”

Seven months after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire was supposed to end the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip that launched in October 2023, rising violence has pushed monthly Palestinian fatalities to their highest level of 2024, according to official Palestinian health data. The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed Tuesday that Israeli forces killed at least 119 Palestinians across Gaza in May, a toll that includes 19 children and 10 women.

The surge in deaths comes amid a clear escalation of Israeli bombardment and ground operations across the blockaded enclave, with multiple ceasefire violations recorded on a near-daily basis. Local Palestinian media outlets documented 11 separate Israeli breaches of the truce agreement in just a 24-hour period, each leaving a trail of deaths and injuries among civilian populations. On Wednesday morning, fresh attacks were reported: Israeli military vehicles opened heavy fire on locations in eastern Khan Younis, a densely populated area in southern Gaza, while separate strikes hit eastern zones of the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern part of the territory.

Cumulative data from Gaza’s Government Media Office paints a far broader picture of sustained violence since the ceasefire took effect. Officials report more than 3,000 total Israeli violations across all of Gaza, encompassing everything from heavy shelling and precision air strikes to direct targeting of civilian communities, the complete demolition of entire residential neighborhoods, and ongoing ground incursions into populated areas. These violations have already killed more than 933 Palestinians, wounded an additional 2,868, and left at least 82 people abducted by Israeli forces since the truce went into effect.

The mounting death toll from these attacks pushes the total number of Palestinians killed since the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023 to 72,942, with thousands more still unaccounted for, trapped and presumed dead under the rubble of destroyed buildings across Gaza.

Gaza’s de facto governing authority Hamas has issued multiple sharp condemnations of the continued Israeli operations, labeling them ongoing “crimes and violations” of the ceasefire. In a pre-recorded address released Tuesday, Abu Obeida, the movement’s military spokesperson, denounced the persistent daily killing of Palestinian civilians and resistance fighters, noting that Israeli forces have assassinated several high-ranking Hamas leaders over the past month.

“If our cowardly enemy imagines that it can weaken us by assassinating our leaders, then their blood is the fuel that propels our ship through difficulties and proof of the truth of our cause, our leadership, our unity with our people, and our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for them,” Abu Obeida said in his speech.

In a separate statement, Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem pushed back against recent claims that the movement refuses to cede administrative control of Gaza, dismissing the allegations as “misleading lies aimed at providing cover for the occupation to continue its aggression.” Qassem placed blame for the stalled administrative transition squarely on Israel and Nickolay Mladenov, director-general of the American Board of Peace, saying the two parties have blocked a proposed technocratic committee from entering Gaza to take over governance from Hamas.

Critics note that Israeli actions extend far beyond military strikes to undermine the terms of the truce. Beyond ongoing attacks and territorial incursions that have seen Israel seize additional land across Gaza, the Israeli government has also severely restricted the flow of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave, worsening an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis for the 2 million Palestinians trapped in the territory. These combined actions have effectively derailed progress toward the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, which was intended to cement a lasting end to hostilities.

An Australian court has handed down a two-year restraining order barring a 63-year-old local man that prohibits any contact with Norway’s Princess Ingrid Alexander — a Norwegian royal studying abroad in Sydney — and her immediate family. The ruling, finalized on Wednesday at Newtown Court House in Sydney, imposes clear limitations on David James Cook: he is banned from setting foot on the University of Sydney campus, conducting online searches for the 22-year-old princess, and reaching out to Ingrid or any member of her family through any channel.

This legal measure, officially classified as an Apprehended Violence Order under Australian law, is designed to shield individuals from potential violence, intimidation, and persistent harassment. Cook, speaking to reporters after leaving the court, claimed the entire incident stemmed from an innocent gesture: a friendship request card he sent to the princess, who is second in line to the Norwegian throne.

“I sent her a card just asking for friendship, that’s all,” Cook told Australia’s Nine News. “I did not intentionally upset her in any way and I wouldn’t do so. She’s a nice person. I bumped into her at an event and I followed up with the card.”

The situation took an abrupt turn immediately after the court proceeding, when Cook was charged with assaulting a news photographer covering the hearing. A formal police statement confirmed the photographer sustained only minor physical injuries from the altercation. Cook was subsequently released from police custody following his arrest, and has been scheduled to enter a plea and face trial for the assault charge at a future court date on July 17.

Princess Ingrid, the eldest child of Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit, relocated to Australia last year to begin a three-year undergraduate degree program in international relations at the University of Sydney, and has resided on the institution’s campus since her arrival. Recent local and international media reports indicate the princess recently departed Australia to return to Norway, where she will stay with her mother Crown Princess Mette-Marit, who is currently battling a serious illness.