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Before the first light of dawn broke over southern Lebanon on September 3, Saleh, a local farmer who has refused to abandon his land and home despite escalating cross-border tensions, stepped outside to begin harvesting his fig crop in the border village of Halta. It took only a moment for him to recognize the danger: bright lights illuminated the yard of a neighboring home, a property that had been empty since the most recent round of open conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

The lights belonged to an Israeli infantry unit conducting house-to-house searches across the small village, which sits just kilometers from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The soldiers contacted three Halta residents by mobile phone, ordering them to exit their homes and surrender immediately. After hours of on-site interrogation, the unit detained all three men, among them Hatem Abdel-Aal, a sitting member of Halta’s municipal council. Abdel-Aal was eventually released and returned to the village around midnight, following instructions from soldiers to walk to the designated handover point without any vehicle.

“He couldn’t refuse. They told him exactly what to do, and he followed,” Saleh, whose name has been changed for personal security, told Middle East Eye in an on-site interview. During the entire raid, military loudspeakers blared warnings ordering all other villagers to remain locked inside their homes, while Israeli artillery repeatedly fired on the forested hills rising above Halta. “This is their standard practice everywhere they operate here,” Saleh explained. “They fire artillery to warn locals not to approach, to keep us locked in our homes. I’ve stayed here through every round of fighting because if I leave, I know I’ll lose everything I’ve built – my home, my land. We’ve learned to live with these patterns.”

Halta, a small Sunni community of roughly 350 people located on the outskirts of Kfarchouba, has escaped the total widespread destruction that gutted most majority-Shia border towns caught in the crossfire of the 2023-2024 Israel-Hezbollah war. But the village has been no stranger to repeated Israeli cross-border incursions and enforced detentions of local civilians.

This is not an isolated incident. Over the past three years, Israeli forces have repeatedly abducted Lebanese civilian residents during cross-border military operations, with the Israeli government framing the detentions as legal captures of enemy combatants. While no official government tally of detained Lebanese exists from the two most recent conflicts between the two states, a local committee tracking detainee cases has compiled a public list of 35 people held by Israel – including at least 12 members of Hezbollah and 16 confirmed civilians.

Just hours after the Halta raid, the Israeli government announced it would release five detainees, two of whom were Syrian nationals, after concluding the group had no links to Hezbollah. The fate of Lebanese citizens held in Israeli detention has long been a core sticking point in US-mediated negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, but little to no progress has been made on the issue, as larger disputes remain deadlocked. Most notably, Israel has yet to withdraw its forces from the contested “pilot zones” established under a 2024 framework agreement that was meant to allow the Lebanese army to fully take control of the southern border area.

Earlier the same week, US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a push to break the months-long negotiation impasse and address key Lebanese demands. The subsequent small-scale release of detainees was quickly praised by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam as a tangible success from Issa’s diplomatic outreach. But the Halta raid, which resulted in new detentions just as the release was being announced, has undercut that narrative.

The incident echoes a similar abduction in May, when Israeli soldiers seized three farmers from the Atiyyeh family as they worked their land near Kfarchouba. More than four months later, the fate of the three men remains unknown. Local municipal officials have repeatedly attempted to secure information on their whereabouts through the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), but all requests have gone unanswered.

“They have no connections to any armed group, no political affiliations at all. They are just working laborers, trying to earn a living to feed their families,” explained Lubna Salha, a member of Kfarchouba’s municipal council.

Regional analysts argue that Israel’s recent partial release of detainees is little more than a symbolic gesture, crafted to ease domestic pressure on the Lebanese government, which has faced widespread public criticism for failing to deliver meaningful results from the US-brokered talks. “Israel gave a little with one hand, and took more with the other,” explained Johny Mounayer, a Beirut-based political analyst. “They abducted new civilians from areas like Halta, while also asserting operational control over the Ali al-Taher ridge. In practical terms, they have given Lebanon nothing of substance.”

The Ali al-Taher ridge, a strategic high point that overlooks the major southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh on the edge of Israel’s self-declared border buffer zone, has been one of the most active flashpoints for cross-border clashes in recent months. Israel claims Hezbollah has built a command center and a network of attack tunnels under the ridge, claims Hezbollah has disputed.

Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center, added that the detainee release also serves as a diplomatic goodwill gesture to Washington, which has struggled to keep the faltering Israeli-Lebanese negotiations on track. “There are clear signs this move was done as a favor to the Americans,” Young noted. “A lot of Israeli actions in this process aren’t aimed at Lebanon at all – they’re aimed at the mediator.”

Late last week, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun released a public statement expressing gratitude to the Trump administration for its role in facilitating the detainee release. Local Lebanese media outlets have reported that the next round of formal negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese delegations is scheduled to take place on September 15 and 16. But for residents of border villages like Halta, every additional day of deadlock brings new uncertainty and danger.

From his home in Halta, Saleh describes a daily reality of occupation: “We sit locked in our houses, and Israeli flags fly on the hills and surrounding villages all around us. We are surrounded on every side.”

On Monday, following Israel’s formal approval, Kosovo officially became the latest member of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s divisive Board of Peace and its accompanying International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza, a move that has ignited sharp debate over geopolitics, human rights, and legal accountability. The signing ceremony, which saw ISF commander Major General Jasper Jeffers and Kosovo Security Force chief Lieutenant General Bashkim Jashari formalize the accession on September 7, 2026, was framed by the Board of Peace as a historic milestone. In a public statement posted to X, the organization emphasized the move demonstrates Kosovo’s unwavering commitment to the ISF mission and alignment with the core strategic goals laid out in Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan.

The Board of Peace also revealed that Kosovo deployed military personnel to the region as early as this past spring, months before the official signing, a deployment that was never disclosed to the public ahead of the announcement. According to the statement, Kosovar troops have already taken on leading roles in logistics planning and civil affairs coordination, in addition to carrying out unexploded ordnance clearance operations on the ground in Gaza.

The decision has proven deeply divisive within Kosovo, a majority-Muslim nation where widespread public sympathy for Palestinians amid the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has already spurred large-scale pro-Palestine protests across the country. Despite this widespread public opposition, Kosovo’s ruling political leadership has aligned itself with the Trump administration’s pro-Israel demands, a choice that analysts attribute to a mix of ideological alignment and geopolitical pressure.

In comments made back in March, Kosovo’s left-leaning Prime Minister Albin Kurti defended his government’s participation, drawing a parallel to the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. “We are ready to participate and help the people of Gaza, because we ourselves have been and are beneficiaries of international forces since 1999,” Kurti said. That 1999 intervention, led by U.S. forces, involved two and a half months of airstrikes against Serbia to halt the ethnic cleansing campaign targeting Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population. While Kurti’s framing is designed to win over a domestic audience that broadly condemns the violence in Gaza, conflict experts say the comparison is deeply flawed.

Brunilda Pali, assistant professor of conflict dynamics and resolution at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Political Science, called the parallel fundamentally unconvincing in an interview with Middle East Eye. “The international intervention in Kosovo followed a genocidal war in which the international community had identified a grave humanitarian catastrophe,” Pali explained. “Gaza presents a fundamentally different problem,” she added, noting that “as a main supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the U.S. is not at all credible as a peacekeeper.”

This contrast is underscored by ongoing international legal proceedings against Israel: much like Serbia faced global scrutiny for its actions in Kosovo, Israel is currently facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over its military campaign in Gaza. In 2024, the ICJ — a judicial body Kosovo has repeatedly relied on to solidify its own claims to sovereignty — ruled that Israel’s longstanding occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem violates international law. The International Criminal Court has also gone further, issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.

Pali warned that Kosovo’s participation in the ISF carries tangible risks for both the Balkan nation’s government and its deployed troops. Unlike the 1999 intervention in Kosovo, Israel holds full veto power over all entry into Gaza and all participation in the ISF. “Participation could expose both Kosovar soldiers and the Kosovo government to significant legal and reputational risks, particularly if the international deployment were to facilitate forced displacement, consolidate Israeli control over Gaza, or otherwise contribute to internationally wrongful conduct,” Pali said. She also pointed out that Kosovar political leaders have largely ignored explicit public plans from Israeli officials to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population and replace it with Jewish-only settlements.

While Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population welcomed international forces in 1999 as protectors from violence, experts emphasize the U.S.- and Israeli-backed ISF serves an entirely different purpose in Gaza. “By participating in the ISF, Kosovo is effectively asking Palestinians to accept an international security architecture in which one of the principal parties responsible for the genocide in Gaza, which is the U.S., retains substantial influence over the security environment, while the Palestinian population has limited control over the institution determining its political future,” Pali explained.

The Board of Peace itself has already been widely condemned by global and Palestinian rights bodies. Eight independent United Nations experts have labeled the initiative an “illegal and illegitimate manoeuvre by powerful states driven by nostalgia and avarice.” The experts argue the board directly violates the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to self-determination and amounts to a modern colonial administration. Leading Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq has echoed that criticism, describing the Board of Peace and the ISF as a “blueprint for the indefinite alien occupation and de facto annexation of large parts of Gaza.”

Shpend Kursani, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Tartu’s Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies in Estonia, noted that Kosovo, alongside Albania and Morocco, was deliberately selected for the initiative as a handpicked group of majority-Muslim nations that had already secured full Israeli approval. The inclusion of these countries, Kursani explained, is intended to “sugarcoat” the deployment, framing it to Gaza’s population as a helping hand from fellow Muslim-majority states. Crucially, Kursani emphasized that the entire initiative is a private project with no legitimate international standing. “This is Trump’s private initiative. The Board of Peace has no international standing whatsoever,” Kursani said. “It is viewed as Trump’s private initiative, actually almost like a parallel initiative to the United Nations efforts and its main mission of peacekeeping.”

For Kosovo, which has still not secured full United Nations membership due to longstanding opposition from China and Russia, the geopolitical pressures of aligning with the second Trump presidency have left the small Balkan nation with limited room to maneuver. With no other major regional allies to rely on, and a large U.S. military base — Camp Bondsteel, the largest U.S. base in the Balkans, currently hosting around 1,000 U.S. troops — hosted on its soil, Kosovo’s leaders see alignment with U.S. policy as the only way to protect their own hard-won sovereignty against Serb revanchism. The U.S. force is widely viewed as the only meaningful bulwark against attempts by Serbia to reclaim control over the territory.

Sidita Kushi, assistant professor of politics at U.S.-based Mount Holyoke College, explained that Kosovo’s leadership is prioritizing its alliance with Washington in hopes of shoring up its own security and sovereign status by backing Trump administration foreign policy priorities. But Kushi also noted that even full alignment offers no long-term guarantee of favorable treatment from the Trump White House, pointing to Trump’s erratic approach to global relations, including threats to invade Greenland and revisit the United Kingdom’s claim to the Falklands. Trump has already threatened to upend European security by withdrawing U.S. troops from Germany over Berlin’s reluctance to back the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran.

“With few other natural allies in the region, both Kosovo and Albania are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and their political elites are choosing to follow perceived geopolitical interests and the status quo over undeniable human rights considerations,” Kushi added. For Kosovo, the cost of that choice may yet prove steep, as experts warn of growing legal and reputational damage from its involvement in a widely condemned initiative.

Beneath Dubai’s scorching midday sun, 32-year-old Hari Krishna kneels to lay bricks for an upscale residential development. But his mind is 2,000 miles away, wandering the waterlogged mud and splintered debris that was once his home in Nepal’s Bhote Khosi-Trishuli corridor.

For seven straight days, this construction worker — who sends the vast majority of his earnings back to his family in Nepal — has dedicated every free second to frantically dialing relatives through the messaging app IMO and refreshing local news streams on his cracked smartphone screen. In late August, catastrophic flash floods tore through Nuwakot, Krishna’s home district, leaving a trail of destruction that has reshaped hundreds of communities across the country. As of this reporting, the disaster has claimed at least 1,399 lives nationwide, with nearly 5,400 people still unaccounted for. Floodwaters swept away bridges, paved roads, and entire hillside villages, and for Krishna’s family, the damage was total: their home, all their personal belongings, savings, jewelry, and a livestock shed holding their cows and goats were all washed away. With their farmland left ruined by the disaster, Krishna says any future for the family through agriculture is now impossible. Worse still, the flood claimed the life of his 67-year-old grandfather in Bidur Municipality, where the family resides.

“I had planned to come home for Dashain, but now that dream is gone with my grandfather,” Krishna told Middle East Eye, his voice shaking as he described the devastating loss his family has endured. “Right now, my relatives are sleeping in a government relief camp, terrified that another landslide could hit at any moment, while they try to arrange my grandfather’s funeral.”

Krishna requested emergency leave from his supervisor to return home, but the barriers to travel feel insurmountable. He cannot afford the cost of a last-minute flight, and even if he could, all road access to his remote village has been completely destroyed by floodwaters. “I wish I had been home and died in the flood with them instead of being stuck here, helpless,” he said.

Krishna’s desperate situation is far from unique. Hundreds of thousands of Nepali migrants work across the Gulf Cooperation Council states, building the gleaming skyscrapers and iconic skylines of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia that draw global attention. As Nepal confronts one of the worst climate-driven disasters in its modern history, the entire weight of the country’s reconstruction will fall disproportionately on the shoulders of these migrant workers. Nepal’s economy is deeply dependent on its diaspora: remittances make up roughly one-third of the nation’s total gross domestic product, and data from Nepal Rastra Bank shows that 40 percent of all Nepali remittances come from Gulf nations.

United Nations agencies including the International Labour Organisation have long highlighted how systemic crises lay bare the extreme vulnerability of these migrant workers. Across every stage of their migration journey, Nepali laborers face persistent hazards, from withheld wages to extremely limited access to basic healthcare. Rameshwar Nepal, an investigator for Equidem, a global human and labor rights nonprofit coordinating disaster relief for affected workers and their families from Kathmandu, explained that most migrant workers are desperate to return home after the disaster, but logistical and regulatory barriers trap them thousands of miles from their loved ones.

“While their families and communities are living through total devastation back home, they are stuck here in the Gulf,” he said. “All they want is to get home, be with their relatives, confirm who is safe, and see the damage to their homes and property with their own eyes.”

Even when workers can secure permission to travel and scrape together flight fare, deep uncertainty hangs over their ability to return to their Gulf-based jobs after the crisis. “They have no way of knowing if they will be allowed to re-enter the country after leaving, if their employers will approve leave, or even if they can take unpaid leave, which most are forced to consider,” Nepal explained. Beyond immediate travel concerns, workers fear the long-term damage to their livelihoods: after losing everything back home, these jobs are their only lifeline, and they cannot afford to risk losing them by leaving.

Nepal added that the Gulf’s restrictive labor sponsorship framework, known as the kafala system, worsens this crisis of mobility, drawing a parallel to the mass stranding of migrant workers during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns. “The kafala system systematically strips migrant workers of their freedom of movement, and that cruelty becomes impossible to ignore during crises like this,” he said. “We saw exactly this same situation in 2020: workers were desperate to get home to their families, but they were blocked from leaving. It’s an inherently inhumane system.”

Thirty-seven-year-old Shiva Ujjwal, a Nepali driver based in Qatar, is living this nightmare. For the past three years, he has shuttled workers from sprawling labor camps on Doha’s outskirts to office parks and construction sites across the Qatari capital. Ujjwal was starting his pre-dawn shift when the floods hit, and before he could check social media for updates, fellow workers broke the news to him. When he finally got permission to use his phone, every call he made failed: floodwaters had destroyed regional communication networks entirely.

“My heart felt like it was breaking when I saw the first videos of the damage online,” Ujjwal recalled. “I knew from the scale of the flood that my house was almost certainly gone, but all I could think about was whether my family was alive.”

While Ujjwal’s wife, children, and parents managed to escape to safety before the flood hit, nine of his extended relatives were killed, and dozens more from his small village are still missing. “My family ran for their lives with nothing — they didn’t have time to grab identity documents, money, or any of our valuables,” he said. “We lost every single thing we owned in less than five seconds, that flood hit faster than a bullet.”

Before moving to Qatar three years ago, Ujjwal worked in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and he spent more than a decade slowly building his family’s home in Nepal one floor at a time, funding each phase with the modest wages he earned working abroad. Those earnings, while not lavish, were enough to keep his family fed and housed. Now, all that years of work is gone, and he is forced to start over from nothing. “We lost all our property in less than five seconds by a single hit of a live-bullet-type flood,” Ujjwal said.

His supervisor has agreed to let him return to Nepal on unpaid leave, but the weeks of total communication blackout at the start of the crisis have left deep emotional scars, and the distance weighs on him constantly. “It’s impossible to relax here when my family is stuck in a relief camp,” he said. “I have to think about how I’m going to build a new home for them all over again. I show up to work every day, but my mind is back home with them. My body is here, but I am not.”

Across the Gulf, the Nepali diaspora has mobilized quickly to respond to the crisis. Grassroots fundraising campaigns circulate widely on WhatsApp groups, where workers pool whatever small savings they can spare to ship emergency relief to the hardest-hit districts. But for workers like Krishna and Ujjwal, even the most generous financial support cannot replace being home with their families during this devastating time.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has recently uncovered new details about a covert U.S. economic campaign targeting Iran, revealing that its actual focus differs sharply from the official public narrative. In new reporting shared as context for an analysis from Asia Times, Hersh notes that the U.S. Treasury’s Operation Economic Outcast, framed as a measure targeting Iran’s ruling ayatollahs when announced by Secretary Scott Bessent, is instead designed to pressure ordinary rank-and-file members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The IRGC, one of Iran’s most powerful institutional actors, controls an estimated half of the country’s total state-held economic assets, including key sectors like oil and gas production and foreign trade, according to Hersh’s reporting. U.S. officials involved in the operation told Hersh their core strategy is to choke off funding flowing through the global financial system to the IRGC, with the end goal of eroding troop loyalty and weakening organizational morale enough to enable a popular overthrow of the Iranian government without triggering large-scale violent repression by the IRGC.

Hersh cited an anonymous U.S. official claiming the IRGC is already facing severe funding shortages. A well-placed Israeli source further told Hersh that many low-ranking IRGC members have gone months with little to no pay, with some forced to beg neighbors for food to support their families. Citing input from U.S. officials, Hersh added that most IRGC rank-and-file are not ideologically committed religious hardliners, but rather work for personal income, making them vulnerable to financial pressure. Current intelligence, including satellite imagery, confirms widespread fuel shortages across Iran, with motorists facing daily waits at gas stations and purchase limits of just five liters per vehicle, due in part to Iran’s limited domestic gasoline refining capacity. With the country already reeling from widespread shortages of food, clean water, jobs, and fuel, U.S. strategists believe a public street revolution could gain traction even without covert American or Israeli support, as a cash-strapped IRGC would be unwilling to mass-violently suppress protests.

Against this high-stakes geopolitical backdrop, University of Sydney researchers Hamideh Khaleghi Mohammadi and Ali Abbasi unpack how this escalating economic pressure is playing out for ordinary Iranians, documented from the ground up by Iranian social media users.

Long before Operation Economic Outcast launched on August 24, Iran was already grappling with a severe, cascading economic crisis. Decades of international sanctions, disrupted trade, restricted oil exports, and longstanding domestic economic mismanagement left the country on the brink. Recent official data cited by Reuters places Iran’s 12-month average inflation rate at 69.9%, with food, beverage, and tobacco inflation surging past 128% — nearly double the overall rate. Iran’s national currency, the rial, has plummeted to a record low, trading at more than 2.2 million rial to one U.S. dollar, up from roughly 1 million rial per dollar just one year prior. Official figures also lay bare the yawning gap between income and basic needs: the average monthly salary in Iran equals roughly $125 USD, while the minimum cost of basic household necessities totals around $450 USD per month.

While these official statistics paint a grim picture, they fail to capture the day-to-day human experience of living through hyperinflation and economic collapse — a gap Iranian social media users are filling by creating an unofficial, bottom-up archive of national hardship. A widespread trend sees users sharing side-by-side comparisons of what a fixed amount of Iranian currency could purchase one or two years ago versus what it can buy today, using everyday goods from washing machines to bags of groceries and snack chips to illustrate the rapid collapse of purchasing power.

Other posts focus on current realities: users photograph supermarket receipts, capture images of half-empty store shelves, and list once-common household products that have now become unaffordable for most families. While academic economic indicators and government inflation data provide aggregate numbers, these social media posts convey the granular, personal experience of economic crisis: which items have disappeared from regular shopping baskets, what goods families have substituted with cheaper alternatives, which necessary purchases are being delayed indefinitely, and what products are now treated as unobtainable luxuries.

The tone of these posts varies dramatically across the platform. Some users express anger and despair over their lost purchasing power, while others use dark humor and memes to cope with the relentless rise in prices. Some posts call for boycotts, mass protests, and collective action against the government, while others frame the hardship as an unavoidable wartime condition and urge followers to practice endurance. Despite these divergent voices and political outlooks, all posts are united by their focus on grounding national economic crisis in everyday life.

Iranian government officials have not denied the severity of the current strain. Central Bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati has acknowledged that managing household livelihoods has become extraordinarily difficult, while parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has named inflation, unemployment, and currency instability as three of the government’s most pressing major challenges.

For researchers Mohammadi and Abbasi, these grassroots social media posts carry long-term historical significance beyond documenting the current crisis. Official economic records will capture inflation rates, exchange rate fluctuations, and aggregate spending data for future historians, but the unedited, personal accounts shared on social media will preserve how ordinary Iranians actually experienced this period of crisis. Decades from now, the full economic history of this era will be written not only from government spreadsheets and inflation charts, but also from the receipts, shelf photos, memes, and images of shrinking shopping baskets that Iranians chose to capture and share with the world.

On a Wednesday evening just off the coast of a popular Philippine tourist destination, a routine overnight ferry journey devolved into chaos and tragedy when a sudden fire tore through the MV June Aster, leaving at least five people dead and 86 others unaccounted for in what is shaping up to be one of the deadliest maritime disasters the Southeast Asian nation has seen in recent years.

The incident unfolded roughly 1.2 nautical miles (2.2 kilometers) from Marcilla village, near the port of Coron on Palawan province – a top beach and island getaway that draws millions of domestic and international travelers annually. Owned by local operator Atienza Shipping Lines, the ferry departed Manila’s Port of Baseco at 8:13 p.m. local time Tuesday, carrying more than 100 passengers and a cargo hold loaded with vehicles including motorcycles, an electric car, a forklift, and a pick-up van, bound for an arrival in Coron by 6 p.m. Wednesday. The first alert of the blaze was raised at 6:45 p.m. Wednesday by a shipping line staff member, according to the Philippine Coast Guard. Initial accounts from survivors point to a loud explosion originating in the cargo hold that sparked the fast-spreading flames.

For passengers on board, the spread of fire triggered a frantic race for survival. Roland Lerma, a 30-year-old construction worker from Leyte province who was traveling to Coron for work with five neighbors, recalled how screams of panic cut through the night as hot smoke and heat rapidly filled the vessel. As he scrambled to reach the deck and escape the advancing fire, Lerma slipped and fell, where he was trampled by other fleeing passengers before he could regain his footing and jump overboard into the dark ocean. To stay afloat, he discarded all his belongings – his clothing, mobile phone, and bags – before floating on his back for nearly two hours in cold water waiting for rescuers to reach him. “If the rescue had been delayed, I would have definitely died last night,” Lerma told the BBC from a Coron hospital, where he is recovering from bruises and chest pain. He recounted seeing other passengers, including children, jump into the water alongside him, and that two Chilean travelers had been staying in the bunks adjacent to his on the overnight ferry. Authorities later confirmed that the two Chilean nationals were among the 43 people pulled alive from the water.

In the aftermath of the blaze, search and rescue operations are still ongoing, but authorities confirmed Thursday that the fire on the half-submerged ferry has not yet been fully extinguished, with visible smoke still billowing from the vessel. Many of the rescued survivors remain in a state of shock following their harrowing escapes, a Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson told local media.

For the families of the missing, the hours since the fire have been an agonizing, sleepless wait for any word of their loved ones. Anelyn Magbanua, whose husband Marlon was on the ferry returning to Coron after visiting their two college-aged children in Manila, said she had gone to bed Wednesday night expecting him home within hours, only to be woken by news of the disaster. She rushed to the local hospital Thursday hoping he had been rescued, but officials have yet to account for him. “I have been crying and praying since last night,” Magbanua told reporters outside the hospital, describing her overwhelming anxiety as she waits for updates.

Shipping accidents are a relatively common occurrence in the Philippines, an archipelagic nation where maritime travel is the primary mode of transport between islands for millions of residents. This incident has already emerged as one of the deadliest such events in recent years, with the death toll expected to rise as search operations progress and the missing are accounted for. Atienza Shipping Lines, the operator of the MV June Aster, released a statement Thursday saying it is cooperating fully with government investigations into the cause of the fire and expressed “profound sadness” over the tragic outcome.