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A fresh wave of violence orchestrated by Israeli military forces and Jewish settlers across the occupied Palestinian territories left at least three Palestinians dead and dozens more injured in a single day of unrest on Saturday.

Violence was concentrated primarily in the occupied West Bank, where multiple incursions and settler attacks unfolded across multiple communities. In the northern West Bank city of Tubas, Israeli military convoys pushed into urban areas, deploying infantry to secure key positions in the city center. Troops deployed tear gas against local residents, leaving 15 people in need of medical attention, which was provided on-site by teams from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

Southeast of Tubas, near Ramallah, Israeli forces launched a raid on the village of al-Mughayyir. During the incursion, soldiers fired tear gas directly into a private family home, leaving all household members, including minor children, struggling with respiratory distress from the chemical agent. Additional Israeli incursions were recorded across the broader Ramallah governorate, including entries into the nearby town of Turmus Ayya, the village of Abu Falah, and the village of Kobar, where tear gas was fired into public streets to disperse local populations.

Further south in the Hebron governorate, the violence escalated into armed attacks by Israeli settlers, who operated under explicit armed protection from Israeli military forces. In the Masafer Yatta community of Wadi al-Rakhim, settlers opened fire on local residents during a raid, wounding four Palestinians. A 57-year-old man was hospitalized after sustaining a bullet wound to his hand, according to local medical reports.

In Idhna, a town west of Hebron, settlers backed by Israeli troops stormed the area surrounding the Prophet Saleh Mosque. The settlers assaulted local residents, discharged live ammunition, and illegally erected a makeshift tent on privately owned Palestinian agricultural land. When the assault was underway, Israeli soldiers entered the mosque itself and detained seven worshippers, including the mosque’s lead imam, Mu’taz Sa’di Tmaizi. During the raid, troops deployed live bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas, while settlers vandalized a privately owned Palestinian vehicle parked nearby.

Settler violence also spilled over into Abu Falah, where armed groups fired weapons in close proximity to the village’s local school, endangering students and staff. Other separate groups of settlers entered the community of Beit Ur al-Tahta, and roamed through privately owned Palestinian farmland outside the village of Jaljalia, all while Israeli military forces provided armed security for the incursions.

The violence extended to the blockaded Gaza Strip, where Israeli troops shot and killed one Palestinian near the border in northern Khan Younis. The injured survivor was transferred to Nasser Medical Complex for emergency care. Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed that two additional Palestinians died on Saturday from injuries sustained during earlier Israeli attacks in the enclave. As of Saturday, the official Palestinian casualty count for the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which launched in October 2023, stands at 73,384 people killed and 174,242 others wounded. Even following the ceasefire that took effect in October 2025, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 1,257 Palestinians and wounded an additional 4,131 people across the occupied territories. This report is drawn from independent on-the-ground coverage by Middle East Eye, a media outlet specializing in original, unfiltered reporting on the Middle East and North Africa region.

As Typhoon Dolphin tracks toward eastern China after drenching northern Taiwan over the weekend, regional authorities have enacted sweeping emergency measures, including mass evacuations and widespread flight disruptions, to mitigate the impact of the powerful storm.

The storm’s outer rain bands first reached northern Taiwan, including the island’s capital Taipei, on Saturday, dumping heavy downpours across the region. In response, multiple Taiwanese air carriers scrapped all scheduled flights bound for mainland China on Sunday, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded at airports across the island.

As of Sunday morning, official meteorological data placed the typhoon’s maximum sustained wind speeds at roughly 162 kilometers per hour (101 miles per hour), marking it as a significant weather event capable of causing widespread damage. Forecasters projected the storm would make landfall along the coasts of Zhejiang province and the northern section of neighboring Fujian province by late Sunday, bringing torrential rainfall that raises major risks of flash flooding and dangerous landslides.

In the most hard-hit forecast zones, accumulated rainfall over the coming days is expected to reach between 200 and 400 millimeters (7.9 to 15.7 inches), according to Chinese national meteorological services. Officials in Zhejiang have issued repeated urgent warnings about elevated landslide risks across the province’s mountainous and hilly areas, urging residents to heed evacuation orders immediately.

In Shanghai, the country’s busiest aviation hub, both of the city’s major international airports – Pudong and Hongqiao – have canceled more than 1,300 flights scheduled for Sunday, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the day’s planned operations, per reports from Shanghai-based state media outlet The Paper.

Emergency evacuation efforts have been underway across the region since Saturday evening. In the Zhejiang city of Taizhou alone, officials have relocated more than 390,000 residents from low-lying and high-risk areas. Shanghai authorities have also evacuated more than 30,000 people from coastal and flood-prone zones, bringing the total number of relocated residents across the affected regions to more than 720,000.

In additional safety measures, Zhejiang provincial authorities have suspended all water-based recreational and commercial activities, including inter-island ferry services and passenger cruise operations, until the storm passes and safety inspections can be completed.

Uncertainty over the status of Iran’s supreme leader and deepening internal power rifts have pushed the country to the brink of state failure, sending ripple effects of instability that reach all the way to China’s doorstep and leaving Beijing facing a tricky diplomatic dilemma. At the center of current regional tensions is a newly emerging Iran-Oman agreement that regime-affiliated media in Iran claims will formalize Tehran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz, the critical chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies pass daily. From Washington’s perspective, any international recognition of Iran’s full control over the strait would deliver a major blow to U.S. and global commercial interests, granting Tehran a powerful strategic tool to blackmail the international community during future political disputes by threatening to block traffic through the waterway.

With U.S. midterm elections approaching and high-stakes multilateral negotiations underway with Beijing across a range of issues, the Biden administration is strongly motivated to block international recognition of Iran’s claim, a move that carries major stakes for U.S. global influence. But behind what appears to be a political win for Tehran lies a far more concerning, underreported transformation inside Iran’s ruling regime that points to accelerating fragmentation of central power and looming systemic chaos.

On August 5, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency published remarks from Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who openly acknowledged that communication with Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has become extremely difficult in recent weeks. Analysts say this unusual public comment, amplified by a major Chinese state media outlet, may be a quiet signal that Beijing itself is struggling to establish reliable lines of communication with Tehran’s top decision-makers, raising questions about who actually holds power in the country. Iranian media reports have further fueled these doubts, claiming Pezeshkian was only granted a brief meeting with a figure presented as Khamenei, held in a dark, tinted-window vehicle at a secret location outside the capital.

It remains unclear whether Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran’s late long-time supreme leader Ali Khamenei, even exercises full control over his own circumstances, let alone the affairs of the entire country. These disclosures from Iran’s own elected president confirm long-running rumors of bitter, intractable splits at the highest levels of Iran’s leadership. The most radical factions within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are widely believed to have seized de facto ultimate power, using Mojtaba as a largely powerless figurehead to legitimize their rule. This arrangement has isolated both Mojtaba and the hardline IRGC leadership, creating a cascade of disruptive internal power dynamics that threaten to unravel central governance.

To compound this instability, Iran’s military command structures were deliberately decentralized and devolved to local regional units years ago to pre-empt the risk of U.S. decapitation strikes on top leadership, and there is little sign these structures can be re-centralized any time soon to restore clear top-down command. Unconfirmed but persistent rumors also suggest Israeli intelligence has cultivated close contacts with senior Iranian officials who are prepared to launch a coup against the current hardline regime, fueling a culture of pervasive paranoia and mutual suspicion across all levels of government. Under this climate, any official, for any reason, can be targeted and purged on accusations of treason, making it nearly impossible to build consensus or implement consistent policy.

The result is a broken decision-making system: any proposed compromise with external powers can be immediately vetoed by radical factions that dismiss any deal as a “traitor’s surrender,” while the official supreme leader remains a distant, opaque figure controlled by unelected hardline factions behind the scenes. Despite this political chaos, Iran still retains active production capacity for missiles and drones, as well as large stockpiles of these weapons, creating a dangerous scenario: a fractured state with plentiful tools to project destabilizing force across the region.

This portrait adds up to a country mired in deep institutional disarray, on the edge of full state failure. Yet history shows that failing states can survive for years while remaining a major threat to regional security, as seen in Myanmar, where years of brutal civil conflict have failed to unseat the ruling military junta. A collapsed, failing Iran would expand a broad arc of instability stretching from Central Asia all the way to the Mediterranean coast. The U.S. has thus far avoided being drawn into the messy Iranian quagmire, but even if Tehran retains de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, the country’s political fragmentation poses unique new risks to regional security and global oil markets.

One potential path to de-escalation that has been floated by geopolitical analysts involves offering security guarantees to Mojtaba Khamenei and other top Iranian leaders in exchange for Tehran rolling back its claims to full control over the strait. On a more positive note, Iran’s growing internal instability has paradoxically helped unify regional states that were once deeply divided over how to address Tehran’s expansionist threats. Middle Eastern nations are now converging on coordinated strategies to limit Tehran’s harmful regional influence, building new medium- and long-term pressure campaigns to constrain the regime. This has also accelerated regional plans to build oil and gas export pipelines that bypass the Strait of Hormuz entirely, a shift that will ultimately restrict Iranian trade and further isolate the country’s hardline religious leadership.

For China, the current situation creates a tricky diplomatic balancing act. While Beijing would likely welcome any setback to U.S. interests in the region, its demonstrated inability to intervene and mediate the dispute for Gulf allies has left China sidelined from evolving regional political dynamics, which are increasingly dominated by the U.S. and Israel. Finding common ground with Washington and Jerusalem to address the Iranian crisis would be a major challenge for Beijing, in large part because it is not clear what strategic benefits Beijing would gain from such collaboration. However, the emergence of a large, unstable political black hole along China’s western border will almost certainly create new security and economic risks for Beijing in the near term. The Iranian meltdown is unfolding at the same time that Russia faces ongoing military setbacks and struggles to hold its position in Ukraine, meaning China could soon find itself bordered by multiple zones of active instability – a outcome that Beijing has long sought to prevent.

In a moment laden with religious and geopolitical symbolism, the leaders of three major Muslim nations gathered this week in Islam’s holiest city of Mecca to perform Friday prayers together, capping years of gradual reconciliation and marking a new chapter in regional security cooperation. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif joined the collective worship at the site, a public display of unity that follows years of strained ties between Ankara and Riyadh.

The symbolic prayer service comes on the heels of a landmark breakthrough: the signing of a historic trilateral joint defense agreement between the three countries, which for the first time places the three regional powers under a unified security framework. While Pakistan has long maintained warm, stable diplomatic and economic ties with both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the relationship between Ankara and Riyadh has been defined by centuries of rivalry and decades of alternating détente and open rupture.

To understand the gravity of this week’s developments, it is necessary to trace the long, fraught history of relations between the two nations. Tensions over claims to leadership of the global Sunni Muslim community date back to the founding of both modern states in the early 20th century, with roots stretching even further to the 19th-century Ottoman-Saudi war, when Ottoman forces crushed an early Saudi expansion across the Arabian Peninsula. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, the House of Saud defeated local rivals to seize control of Mecca and Medina in 1925, ending more than 350 years of continuous Ottoman rule over Islam’s two holiest sites. Formal diplomatic relations between the newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Republic of Turkey were not established until the 1930s, and the two sides maintained generally cordial ties for decades after: both backed Iraq during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War (with Saudi support far more public) and aligned with the United States during the 1991 Gulf War.

Even during this period of calm, however, low-level frictions persisted. Turkey repeatedly criticized Saudi Arabia for demolishing historic Ottoman-era sites across the kingdom, including fortresses, cemeteries, and 19th-century railway infrastructure. The most high-profile dispute came in 2002, when Turkey’s culture ministry condemned the demolition of the 220-year-old Al-Ajyad Fortress, which overlooked Mecca’s Grand Mosque. Turkey’s then-parliament speaker called the destruction “sinful behaviour in breach of the moral values of Islam”, but Saudi Arabia defended the move as a exercise of its sovereign right to redevelop the site to accommodate growing numbers of religious pilgrims. The site was later redeveloped to house the Mecca Clock Tower, one of the tallest structures in the world.

This era of cordiality, interrupted only by minor disputes, collapsed into deep strategic disagreement after the 2010 Arab Spring. While both Riyadh and Ankara backed efforts to oust longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, their approaches to regional uprisings diverged sharply across the Middle East. In Egypt, Turkey openly supported the first democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi and fiercely condemned the 2013 military coup led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a close ally of Saudi Arabia. For years after the coup, Ankara hosted Egyptian opposition media outlets and dissident groups, and Erdoğan refused to recognize Sisi’s government, calling for the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners.

Strategic rifts widened across the region in subsequent years. During the 2017 Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, which accused Doha of supporting terrorism and meddling in regional affairs, Ankara sided openly with Qatar and deployed military forces to the Gulf state. In post-revolution Libya, where power fractured into rival factions after 2011, Turkey backed the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, while Riyadh threw its support behind eastern-based warlord Khalifa Haftar. Tensions boiled over into open hostility in early 2018, when Mohammed bin Salman labeled Turkey part of a “triangle of evil” alongside Iran and extremist religious groups.

Relations hit their modern lowest point later that year, following the killing of veteran Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a former contributor to Middle East Eye, who was murdered by Saudi operatives inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Turkish prosecutors indicted 20 Saudi citizens over the killing, building a case based on phone records, entry and exit logs, witness testimony, and analysis of Khashoggi’s personal devices. Erdoğan publicly stated the killing had been ordered at the “highest levels” of the Saudi government. In the years that followed, Riyadh imposed an unofficial boycott on Turkish goods that saw Turkish exports to Saudi Arabia plummet 92% year-on-year in 2021, after systematically pressuring local businesses to drop Turkish products from store shelves. Both sides also blocked each other’s state media outlets.

After more than four years of open rupture, Ankara and Riyadh formally ended their dispute in 2022, as part of a broader wave of regional rapprochement led by Saudi Arabia. That June, Mohammed bin Salman traveled to Ankara for his first visit since Khashoggi’s killing, meeting Erdoğan at the presidential palace and agreeing to deepen cooperation across trade, defense, energy, and tourism. A key concession from Turkey that cleared the way for reconciliation was the transfer of the Khashoggi murder trial to Saudi courts, meeting a core Saudi demand for restoring ties.

The reconciliation between Ankara and Riyadh fits into a broader regional shift: Saudi Arabia has moved to end disputes across the Middle East in recent years, including ending its three-and-a-half-year rift with Qatar, launching peace talks with the Houthi movement in Yemen, and restoring full diplomatic relations with Iran in a 2023 deal brokered by China. For Turkey, mending ties with oil-rich Gulf states was also an economic priority, as Ankara grappled with a collapsing national currency and widespread economic instability. Since the 2022 reconciliation, the two sides have signed a series of major deals on technology, defense, and renewable energy, highlighted by a 2023 Saudi agreement to purchase Turkish drones in what remains the largest defense contract in Turkey’s history.

In recent months, growing strategic alignment on regional issues has pushed the two countries even closer. In Syria, both now back the new government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa and have joined forces to lobby the United States to lift crippling sanctions on Damascus. In Libya, once a point of sharp division, both now back the internationally recognized unity government. In war-torn Sudan, both Riyadh and Ankara support the Sudanese Armed Forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, while the UAE backs the rival Rapid Support Forces. In Somalia, too, Ankara and Riyadh stand together in supporting the internationally recognized central government, while the UAE backs Somaliland’s bid for independence. Notably, a growing public rift has emerged between Saudi Arabia and its one-time closest Gulf ally the UAE, with Turkey increasingly aligned with Riyadh on these issues, even as Ankara avoids taking an open public stance to protect its own substantial financial ties with Abu Dhabi.

This week’s joint prayer service and historic defense pact cement the completion of a years-long reconciliation process, reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and creating a new trilateral security bloc connecting South Asia, the Anatolian Peninsula, and the Arabian Gulf.

A newly leaked photograph has reignited international scrutiny of Israeli military conduct in northern Gaza, offering fresh visual evidence of alleged human rights abuses against Palestinian civilians. The image, published by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi on the social platform X, depicts two blindfolded elderly Palestinian men from Beit Lahia, identified as Nadi Marouf and Ali Marouf, standing among Israeli military personnel. Tirawi confirms the photo was captured just hours before the pair were killed by Israeli forces in November 2024.

According to Tirawi’s previous reporting from October 2025, troops from the 92nd Battalion of Israel’s Kfir Brigade abducted the two elderly men from their hometown, holding them as human shields for multiple days before executing them. This account aligns with an earlier October 2025 report from *The Palestine Chronicle*, which detailed that the men were detained, stripped to their underwear, and shot after being released near al-Tawam roundabout. The report added that the pair were forced to enter buildings ahead of Israeli soldiers, a practice that independent investigations have repeatedly documented across Gaza. Ramy Abdu, chairman of the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, confirmed that relatives found the men’s bodies three days after their killing, confirming they were executed following their use as human shields.

This leaked photograph is the latest addition to a growing body of testimonies and visual evidence documenting the systematic use of Palestinian civilians as human shields during Israeli military operations in Gaza. Multiple independent probes have already confirmed the widespread nature of this practice: an Associated Press investigation published in 2025 gathered testimony from both Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers confirming the tactic was common, with Palestinians forced to enter potentially booby-trapped buildings and tunnels ahead of Israeli troops to clear for explosives or fighters. Al Jazeera later corroborated these findings, interviews with seven Palestinians and two Israeli military officers who described the routine use of this tactic. A United Nations investigation has previously ruled that forcing civilians to enter structures ahead of soldiers constitutes the use of human shields, a clear violation of international humanitarian law. In May 2025, the Israeli military acknowledged that the practice is “strictly prohibited” under its standing orders and announced it had opened investigations into multiple reported cases.

Alongside these latest allegations of extrajudicial killing and human shielding, reports continue to emerge of abusive conditions for Palestinian detainees held by Israel. On June 21, 71-year-old Dr. Mazen Rantisi — a prominent Palestinian physician widely known as the “doctor of the poor” and chairman of the Health Work Committees, a leading Palestinian medical services organization — was arrested during a pre-dawn Israeli raid on his Ramallah home. In statements relayed through his lawyer, Rantisi confirmed that prison authorities at Ofer Prison withheld his essential daily medication for the first 10 days of his detention, and continue to deny him access to one critical drug. He also reported repeated cell raids by prison security that have included beatings of detainees, and that he has suffered rapid weight loss due to inadequate, unfit food rations consisting of mouldy bread, near-rotten tomatoes, uncooked hummus and foul-smelling rice. Belgian human rights organization Viva Salud has issued a statement expressing grave concern over the health and access to care for Rantisi and a second Health Work Committees official arrested alongside him.

These developments unfold against the backdrop of a rapidly worsening humanitarian catastrophe across the Gaza Strip. Gaza’s Ministry of Health has confirmed that more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed since the outbreak of war in October 2023, a figure that is widely understood to be an undercount: thousands of bodies remain trapped beneath the rubble of thousands of destroyed buildings, making a full accounting of casualties impossible. On August 4, Gaza held a mass funeral for 112 people killed in an Israeli air strike in 2023, whose remains were only recovered in recent excavation efforts. Gaza authorities estimate thousands more people remain buried under collapsed infrastructure.

The crisis of food insecurity and malnutrition has reached catastrophic levels, according to United Nations data. The UN has already recorded 193 deaths from malnutrition in Gaza, 96 of which are children. In July 2025 alone, screening found 11,877 children between the ages of six and 59 months suffering from acute malnutrition, including 2,562 cases of severe acute malnutrition, the most life-threatening form of the condition. Projections cited by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimate that by October 2026, more than 100,000 children in the same age group will suffer from acute malnutrition, with over 31,000 facing severe, life-threatening cases. UN humanitarian agencies have repeatedly warned that critical levels of food insecurity and malnutrition will persist as long as severe restrictions on the entry of food, medicine and other essential supplies remain in place.

The growing accumulation of allegations of abuse against Palestinian civilians, detainees and the dead has intensified global scrutiny of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, as humanitarian organizations continue to document crippling restrictions on access to life-saving aid.