标签： Asia

Tensions are rising across the Persian Gulf as a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran is set to expire Wednesday, with the United Nations calling for urgent action to preserve open navigation through the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz. Against a backdrop of conflicting rhetoric from both sides and ahead of a second round of peace talks scheduled in Islamabad, global powers are scrambling to prevent a wider regional conflict that could upend global energy markets.

During a Monday press briefing, Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, outlined the world body’s deep concern over recent maritime disruptions and escalating incidents in the strait over the prior 48 hours. The UN chief is calling for the immediate full restoration of international navigation rights through the waterway, which Dujarric noted has been plagued by conflicting reports and widespread uncertainty over its operational status. Dujarric emphasized that freedom of navigation must be respected by all parties involved, and rejected any military actions that target civilian infrastructure or intentionally harm civilian populations.

Diplomatic efforts are continuing to de-escalate tensions, with Pakistani-mediated peace talks set to open in Islamabad early Wednesday. Unnamed Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity due to their lack of authorization to speak publicly, confirmed to The Associated Press that US Vice President JD Vance will lead the American delegation, while Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf will head Tehran’s negotiating team. Multiple regional media outlets have confirmed additional high-profile members of the US delegation, including Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the US president’s son-in-law and senior advisor.

US President Donald Trump has delivered stark warnings about the outcome of the talks, telling PBS NewsHour Monday that if no agreement is reached before the ceasefire expires, “lots of bombs” will be launched against Iran. Trump has also left open the possibility of making a surprise appearance at the talks, after previously telling the New York Post that he would be willing to meet directly with senior Iranian leaders if negotiators are able to secure a preliminary breakthrough.

Iranian leaders have pushed back against American pressure, issuing firm statements rejecting what they describe as coercive diplomacy. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote Tuesday on the social platform X that honoring commitments is the only foundation for meaningful negotiation. He noted that Iran holds deep, historically rooted mistrust of US actions, and that contradictory and unconstructive signals from Washington make clear the US is seeking Iran’s unconditional surrender — a outcome Pezeshkian said will never happen. “Iranians do not submit to force,” he wrote.
Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghchi echoed that sentiment during a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, saying contradictory US positions undermine Washington’s claims of pursuing diplomacy. According to Iran’s Mehr News Agency, Araghchi reaffirmed that Tehran will take all necessary steps to protect its national interests and security.

Senior Iranian military commander Ali Abdollahi also issued a warning Tuesday, saying Iranian armed forces are fully prepared to deliver immediate, proportional responses to any aggression from the US or its allies. Speaking in a statement marking the anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Abdollahi said the Iranian people are proud of the IRGC’s recent heavy missile and drone strikes against Israel and US targets. He added that Iranian forces will not allow the Trump administration to manipulate the situation or spread false narratives about battlefield conditions, especially developments surrounding the Strait of Hormuz.

Tensions spiked further this week after US military forces seized an Iranian container ship, the Touska, off Iran’s southern coast in the Sea of Oman Monday. Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the action as an act of “maritime piracy” and a blatant violation of international maritime law, per Iran’s official IRNA news agency. The ministry called on the United Nations, International Maritime Organization, and the international community to issue a firm, decisive response to what it called a criminal attack on legitimate international commercial shipping, adding that Iran will use all available tools to defend its national security and interests.

A second maritime incident followed Tuesday, when the US Department of Defense announced that US forces had boarded the Tifani, an oil tanker previously sanctioned for smuggling Iranian crude oil to Asian markets. The Pentagon said the operation was a routine right-of-visit maritime interdiction and was completed without incident.

The escalating conflict has already triggered serious consequences for global energy security. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told France Inter radio that the ongoing US-Iran tensions have sparked what he described as “the world’s worst-ever energy crisis” in modern history. With roughly 20% of global oil shipments passing through the Strait of Hormuz daily, any prolonged disruption to navigation through the waterway would send global energy prices soaring, exacerbating already strained energy markets worldwide.

A leading Israeli security research institution has issued an urgent warning: the sharp, ongoing drop in Israel’s public approval across the United States has evolved into a major threat to the country’s national security, and cannot be ignored if Israel hopes to preserve decades of robust backing from Washington. The new analysis, published Monday by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) — a think tank with formal ties to the Israeli military and Tel Aviv University — draws on recent polling data to highlight the far-reaching implications of this shifting public sentiment, arguing that without a dramatic reversal in American opinion, Israel will soon face a critical loss of support in the U.S.

The INSS analysis centers on April polling from the Pew Research Center, which confirms that 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% just one year prior. Newly released joint data from INSS and Pew breaks down this trend by age, revealing that 75% of young American adults between 18 and 29 hold negative views of Israel, with 67% of 30 to 49-year-olds sharing that sentiment. Partisan divides are even starker: 80% of Democratic voters hold unfavorable views of Israel, compared to 41% of Republican voters. For younger Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, the negative rate climbs to 85% among 18-29-year-olds and 83% among 30-49-year-olds.

The erosion of support is not limited to age or partisan groups, the report notes: falling approval cuts across nearly all major U.S. religious demographics, with majorities of Catholics, Protestants, and white evangelical Christians under 50 holding unfavorable opinions of Israel. Catholics are the most critical, with 74% of under-50 Catholic adults viewing Israel negatively. Even among white evangelicals — a core demographic of former President Donald Trump’s conservative political coalition — half of adults under 50 now hold negative views of Israel, versus just 47% who view it positively.

A separate recent survey adds further evidence of this trend, finding that support for Israel has also dropped sharply among American Jews, with a majority opposing any U.S. war with Iran. Conducted by GBAO Strategies for Washington-based liberal Zionist group J Street, the poll found that 70% of American Jews oppose unconditional U.S. military and financial aid to Israel. Thirty percent of respondents reported greater sympathy for Palestinians than Israelis, a statistic INSS cites as further proof of the scale of Israel’s declining popularity.

On Capitol Hill, shifting sentiment among elected Democrats was on display last week, when the U.S. Senate voted down two resolutions to block the sale of military bulldozers and the transfer of 12,000 1,000-pound bombs to Israel. Even with the resolutions failing, a historic number of Democratic senators supported the measures: 40 of 47 backed halting the bulldozer sale, while 36 voted against the bomb transfer. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current administration “helped launch the Iran war, has unleashed an offensive in Lebanon and continues to harm civilians in the West Bank and Gaza,” adding that “we shouldn’t send taxpayer-funded bombs and equipment to facilitate this brutality.”

INSS emphasizes that the growing negative trend among both the American public and political leaders poses a grave threat to Israeli national security, given Israel’s decades-long dependence on U.S. backing. According to an October 2025 report from the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. has provided more than $300 billion in total aid to Israel since the country’s founding in 1948. While Washington has extended large foreign aid packages to other Middle Eastern nations, including Egypt and Iraq, Israel has received more military and economic support than any other country in the world. Today, just 37% of the American public holds a favorable view of Israel — a rating lower than that of longstanding U.S. adversaries Russia, Iran, and China, the report notes. Netanyahu himself also carries an unfavorable rating among most U.S. adults, the Pew data confirms.

The report frames this shift in American public opinion as a long-term trend that has been drastically accelerated by the Gaza conflict, with the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, widely viewed in the U.S. as initiated by Netanyahu, causing further damage to Israel’s reputation. While the recent ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran could help modestly improve Israel’s standing, INSS warns that a fundamental shift in how the U.S. public perceives Israel is already taking hold. Even if Israel sees a small rebound in approval, the report argues that without significant policy changes from the current Israeli government, this negative image is likely to become permanent. Pushing the current U.S. administration to provide maximum support for Israeli military escalation across multiple fronts, the report adds, could eliminate any chance of repairing Israel’s standing in the long term.

The warning comes as Israel prepares to mark its Independence Day Tuesday evening, a celebration overshadowed by combative rhetoric from top Israeli officials. Speaking Sunday, Netanyahu stated that Israel’s fight against Iran is “not over yet,” warning that “any moment could bring us new developments.” On Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he and Netanyahu had ordered the military to “operate with full force, both on the ground and from the air, even during the ceasefire” in Lebanon. Katz also confirmed the Israeli military would continue demolishing residential properties in Lebanon and issued a direct death threat to Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem.

In the occupied West Bank south of Hebron, a peaceful student demonstration demanding unimpeded access to education was broken up by Israeli forces on Sunday, capping more than a week of blocked school access for dozens of Palestinian children in the village of Umm al-Khair.

The crisis began more than 10 days ago, when Nivo, a settler leader who serves in a security role at the adjacent Israeli settlement of Carmel, erected a 50-meter barbed wire fence across the only direct, safe road connecting Khirbet Umm al-Khair to the local school. The 1.5-meter-wide thoroughfare is the primary route for residents to access school and other essential external services, leaving no viable alternate routes that do not put children at grave risk.

The only alternative path cuts through an unauthorised Israeli settler outpost, a site stained by recent violence: it was here that an Israeli settler fatally shot Awdah Hathaleen, a prominent Palestinian activist and English teacher. Settlers have pushed this dangerous alternate route as a so-called solution, forcing children to walk 3 kilometers across terrain that local residents describe as incredibly hazardous. This proposal has been uniformly rejected by local families, who say they will not compromise on their children’s right to a safe education.

In total, 55 students have been barred from reaching their classes for a second straight week, including the two children of Khalil Hathaleen, a local education official. Speaking to Middle East Eye, Hathaleen outlined the community’s core demands: “Our message is clear: today, they are attempting to take away our right to education. Our goal is clear: we demand the right to education for our children through safe routes, a safe learning environment, and an end to home demolitions in Khirbet Umm al-Khair.”

When local residents, led primarily by school-aged children, organized a peaceful protest to demand action, heavily armed Israeli forces accompanied by security dogs and military vehicles were deployed to disperse the demonstration. Local resident Ahmad Hathaleen framed the road closure as part of a broader pattern of intimidation rather than an isolated incident. “This issue is more than just a route closed off by a settler, because these settlers do not stop at a certain point,” he explained. “These children are being denied a simple and vital right to education, which children all around the world are entitled to have. The actions settlers have committed in Khirbet Umm al-Khair are a violation and consist of vicious acts against children, aimed at depriving them of the most basic right: education.”

Umm al-Khair, located in the Masafer Yatta region of the southern occupied West Bank, has long been a flashpoint for displacement and settler aggression. The village’s current residents are descendants of refugees displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled by Jewish militias during the creation of Israel. The community has lived on the land, which they purchased more than five decades ago, while the neighboring Carmel settlement was built on privately owned Palestinian land in the 1980s.

Settler violence targeting Palestinian communities in the West Bank, which has long received implicit backing and protection from Israeli military forces, has accelerated dramatically since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. A United Nations report released on March 17 documented a sharp surge in attacks: between November 2024 and October 2025, more than 36,000 Palestinians were displaced across the West Bank amid a wave of settler violence that included arson, infrastructure vandalism, property destruction, and targeted shooting at civilians. Over the same period, 1,732 violent incidents resulting in casualties or property damage were recorded, marking a 25% increase from the previous year. Since October 2023, more than 1,150 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by either Israeli forces or armed settlers, according to collective data from regional monitors.

It has been exactly 12 months since a brutal militant attack targeting tourists in the scenic Himalayan town of Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, snatched 26 innocent lives and shattered dozens of families forever. The attack, counted among the deadliest assaults on civilians in the restive region in decades, did not just trigger a dramatic escalation of cross-border tensions between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan – it also left a generations-long trail of private pain that time has not erased, only reshaped. For the widows and parents of the victims, learning to live with absence has become a daily, quiet act of resilience, carried out in vastly different ways that all bear the weight of unthinkable loss.

The contested region of Kashmir has been claimed in full by both India and Pakistan since the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, with the two nations splitting control of the territory and fighting multiple full-scale wars over it. On April 22, 2025, militants opened fire on civilians visiting Baisaran Valley, a stunning alpine meadow that draws thousands of tourists to Pahalgam every year. Most of those killed were young Hindu men, many of whom were at the very start of their adult lives: newlyweds, rising professionals, whose futures were cut down in an act of targeted violence.

In the immediate aftermath, New Delhi formally accused Pakistan of enabling the attack, claiming the assault was carried out by a militant group based on Pakistani soil – a claim Islamabad quickly and firmly denied. Two weeks after the killings, India launched preemptive air strikes targeting what it said were militant group training bases inside Pakistani territory. The strike set off four days of intense cross-border shelling and aerial exchanges that pushed the two nuclear-armed powers to the brink of full-scale conflict, until a widely unexpected ceasefire was announced to de-escalate tensions. While international attention has long moved on from that crisis, for the families of the 26 victims, the grief remains an unshakable daily presence.

For 26-year-old Aishanya Dwivedi, the attack stole her husband Shubham just two months after their wedding. Today, in the Kanpur home she once shared with Shubham, the bedroom they lived in remains frozen in time. Every item – the unmade bed, the standing cupboard, even the small wall mirror Shubham installed after she joked about the empty space above their dresser – sits exactly where it was the day they left for their Kashmir holiday. “That side of the bed is still Shubham’s,” Aishanya explains, gesturing to the unused half she keeps piled with pillows. “I never sit or lie there. I even avoid it in my sleep.”

Aishanya still recalls the day of the attack in sharp, unwavering detail. After arriving in Kashmir with a group of 11 family members, the couple ventured alone to the Baisaran Valley meadow while the rest of their group stayed behind in Pahalgam. As they walked through the grass, a man approached them, asked Shubham what his religion was, and opened fire. Aishanya says she begged the attackers to kill her too, but they left her alive, alone with the grief that would shape the rest of her life.

“I didn’t get enough time to build a lifetime of memories with him,” Aishanya told BBC Hindi in an interview marking the one-year anniversary. “But the memories he did give me are enough to carry me through the rest of my life.” Her phone lock screen still holds an unposed candid from their wedding day, and she often scrolls through her photo gallery to find old pictures of Shubham, replaying old voice notes and videos to hold onto the smallest details: the sound of his laugh, the way he would giggle at bad jokes.

In the months after the attack, Aishanya found that speaking publicly about Shubham and her grief became a form of quiet therapy. What started as answering questions from reporters and family friends became a way to keep his memory alive, even when it drew harsh online backlash. After she publicly called out Prime Minister Narendra Modi for failing to name the Pahalgam victims in his parliamentary address following India’s air strikes, she was targeted by online trolls who criticized her public grief. But the harassment has not silenced her. “I will speak, I will go out, I will do everything I want,” she says. “Those people have no right to tell me how to grieve my husband.”

Every evening, Aishanya sits with her in-laws for an hour, and the three of them talk about Shubham, circling back to the same small stories and memories, each time softening the edge of the pain just a little. She has started writing down her feelings, and even though she often ends up crying mid-entry, she says releasing the pain is a necessary part of healing. A trained classical dancer, she has not yet been able to return to the stage – “My feet just won’t move,” she says – but she holds out hope that she will find her way back to the art one day. Small, unexpected moments still feel like signs Shubham is with her: a rainbow visible from a plane window while playing one of his favorite songs, a glance at the full moon from her balcony that brings a split second of feeling he is right beside her. “The grief of losing a husband will never go away completely,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean we have to stop living.”

For another family, grief takes a far quieter form. Rajesh Narwal lost his 26-year-old son Vinay, an Indian naval officer who was just six days into his honeymoon in Kashmir when he was killed in the attack. In the hours after the shooting, a photograph of Vinay’s bride sitting motionless beside his body spread virally across Indian social media, becoming a searing symbol of the attack’s senseless brutality. Today, back at the Narwal family home, none of Vinay’s belongings have been unpacked from the bags he brought on his honeymoon. Most family members still cannot bring themselves to say his name out loud, and the family has not hung a single photograph of him anywhere on the walls.

“None of us can find the courage to talk about it,” Rajesh says. “We can’t even bear to put his photo up.” But the memories do not stay buried. Rajesh still finds himself automatically falling into old routines: when he comes home from work every day, he still half-expects Vinay to be waiting in the courtyard, ready for their daily game of cricket, a ritual they kept from Vinay’s childhood through his early adulthood. “We just don’t know how to process this pain. We’re still grieving, every single day,” Rajesh says. “I can distract myself at work, but the second I walk through the front door, it feels like someone presses on a raw nerve. The pain is unbearable.”

One year after the attack that upended their lives, both families have carved out different ways to live with the hole the violence left behind. One keeps memory alive through open, unapologetic speech; the other holds it close through silence. Both are learning to rebuild their lives around the absence of the people they loved, carrying their memories forward even as they learn to breathe again. The attack that shook South Asia and brought two nuclear powers to the edge of war is now remembered most vividly not in official statements or security briefings, but in the frozen bedrooms and quiet courtyards of the families who will never be the same.

A growing international movement of artists and cultural figures is escalating pressure on the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to bar Israel from the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, with more than 1,100 signatories backing a public boycott call over Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza that critics label genocide. The open letter, released jointly Tuesday by campaign coalitions No Music for Genocide and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (a core part of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement), argues that allowing Israel to compete serves to whitewash the country’s military actions against Palestinian civilians.

Co-signed by high-profile names including rapper Macklemore, British singer Paloma Faith, Irish rap group Kneecap, British trip-hop collective Massive Attack, and multiple former Eurovision champions, the letter challenges the moral legitimacy of holding the 70th edition of the contest in Vienna next year against the backdrop of crisis in Gaza. “How can any performer or Eurovision fan in good conscience participate at the contest’s next edition in Austria amidst US-Israeli plans for hyper-surveilled concentration camps in ‘New Gaza’?” the letter reads. “There are moments in time when passive silence is not an option. We refuse to be silent when Israel’s genocidal violence soundtracks and silences Palestinian lives.”

A core pillar of the signatories’ criticism is the EBU’s widely decried double standard in its handling of conflicting geopolitical conflicts. In 2022, just weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EBU quickly moved to ban Russia from competing, arguing that the “unprecedented crisis” meant Russian participation would “bring the competition into disrepute.” More than 30 months into Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which the Gaza Ministry of Health reports has killed over 72,000 people, the EBU has repeatedly rejected calls to eject Israel and upheld the eligibility of Israeli public broadcaster Kan to enter the contest.

“The EBU’s hypocritical responses to Russia’s and Israel’s crimes have removed any illusion of Eurovision’s claimed ‘neutrality’,” the letter continues. “Yet more than 30 months of genocide in Gaza – alongside ethnic cleansing and land theft in the besieged West Bank – aren’t considered sufficient to apply the same policy to Israel.”

The boycott call comes after a months-long chain of protests that have already split the 2026 contest. When the EBU rejected a proposal to hold a binding vote on expelling Israel during its December governing body meeting, five member broadcasters from Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain announced they would withdraw from the Vienna event entirely. Reporting from Israeli outlet Ynet last year confirmed that Israeli President Isaac Herzog assembled a dedicated lobbying team to pressure EBU member states directly, with the explicit goal of blocking the binding vote that Israeli officials anticipated they would lose.

The open letter praised the withdrawing countries for their stance, adding that organizers also commend “the many national selection finalists committing to refuse to go to Eurovision.” This wave of protest follows a high-profile individual act of resistance from 2024 Eurovision champion Nemo, the Swiss winner who returned their trophy earlier this year after the EBU confirmed Israel would be allowed to compete in the 2025 contest. As the 2026 event approaches, the boycott campaign continues to gain momentum among cultural workers, putting increasing pressure on the EBU to reverse its stance on Israeli participation.

On a Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, a deadly attack carried out by Israeli settlers at a local school left two Palestinians dead and at least four others wounded, according to regional medical and official sources. The Palestinian Ministry of Health released the identities of the fatal victims: 14-year-old student Aws Hamdi al-Nassan and 32-year-old Jihad Marzouq Abu Naiem. The assault unfolded at a school in al-Mughayyir, a village located northeast of the Palestinian administrative center of Ramallah.

Local human rights group Al-Baidar documented escalating tensions in the area just moments before the shooting. The organization confirmed that groups of settlers, wearing uniforms nearly identical to standard Israeli military attire, had launched an earlier attempt to forcibly expel local Palestinian farmers from their agricultural land south of al-Mughayyir. When the settlers entered the cultivated plots to block farmers from accessing and working their property, tensions rose rapidly, setting the stage for the subsequent violent attack. A post from Quds News Network on social platform X (formerly Twitter) further clarified that five students were hit by live fire during the incident, with one suffering a life-threatening gunshot wound to the head.

The deadly school attack is not an isolated incident: it comes amid a dramatic, well-documented spike in daily settler violence targeting Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank. On the same day as the al-Mughayyir shooting, separate incidents of Israeli settler disruption and infrastructure destruction were recorded across the region. In the northern Jordan Valley’s Khirbet Samra area, Israeli settlers backed by Israeli military forces intercepted and detained a passing commercial truck, blocking it from continuing its route and disrupting local transportation routes. Hours later, Israeli forces carried out the demolition of al-Maleh primary school, another blow to Palestinian civilian infrastructure in the area.

While settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is a longstanding issue, data confirms that the frequency and severity of these attacks have increased sharply since October 2023. In addition to growing use of live ammunition by settlers, the region has seen a systematic campaign of forced displacement targeting Palestinian nomadic communities. Official figures from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission underscore the scale of the escalation: the group recorded 497 separate attacks against Palestinians and their property across the occupied West Bank in March alone, a surge that left nine Palestinians dead in that single month.

This report was originally published by Middle East Eye, an outlet that provides independent, in-depth coverage of developments across the Middle East, North Africa, and surrounding regions.