标签： Asia

A coordinated group of over 150 Israeli settlers originating from the adjacent Navitar outpost – an illegal settlement built on expropriated land belonging to the Palestinian town of Beita, located south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank – launched a brazen incursion on Monday into Beita’s core industrial zone, triggering widespread, costly destruction to critical local livelihood infrastructure.

Witnesses and affected business owners confirmed the mob stormed the restricted industrial compound, hurling rocks at on-site Palestinian workers before systematically setting three heavy-duty excavators, multiple light commercial vehicles, and specialized stone-cutting workshop equipment ablaze. Ashraf Ghazaly, one of the most heavily impacted machinery owners, revealed that one of the destroyed excavators had been delivered just four days prior to the attack, with total verified losses across his personal assets alone surpassing 3.3 million Israeli shekels, equivalent to roughly $1 million. Ghazaly recounted that the group physically assaulted his brother and other on-duty staff, with no local residents able to intervene to halt the rampage.

The assault unfolded in a quarry yard sited 2.5 to 3 meters below ground level, where settlers used portable ladders to bypass perimeter barriers, igniting targeted fires across multiple facilities in a matter of minutes. Ziad Ghazaly, a co-owner of a family-run industrial operation on the site, noted that even as local residents rushed to the scene to contain the flames, arriving Israeli military forces blocked all entry and exit points to the zone, directly obstructing firefighting efforts and preventing property owners from accessing their burning assets.

This latest act of violence is far from an isolated incident: two prior raids on the Beita industrial zone in recent months saw settlers smash windows of heavy equipment and administrative offices, part of a pattern of 2 to 3 weekly settler provocations targeting the area. Abdul Rahman Salameh, a local stone-cutting workshop owner, explained that the attackers deliberately timed their incursion for the end of the workday, when nearly all staff had departed, leaving only 7 to 8 young family members on site. Five separate industrial facilities sustained major fire damage during the Monday raid. “The goal of these attacks is clear: to terrorize the owners and workers, forcing them to leave so that the settlers can seize more land and expand,” Salameh stated, emphasizing that local residents remain resolute in refusing to abandon their land, even as settler groups attempt to impose a new, violent status quo within Area B of the West Bank – a region formally under Palestinian Authority administrative control.

The Beita industrial zone functions as a critical backbone of the northern West Bank’s construction supply ecosystem, hosting dozens of stone-cutting operations and supporting more than 500 direct workers, whose livelihoods sustain an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 total household members across the region. Omar Diriya, chairman of the Palestinian Union of Stone and Marble Industry, warned that the ongoing wave of targeted attacks on West Bank industrial sites represents a dangerous, unprecedented escalation against the entire Palestinian industrial sector, which already operates under severe structural economic strain from longstanding movement restrictions, military checkpoints, limited export access, and soaring production costs. Diriya added that nearly all local insurance policies exclude coverage for damage stemming from political conflict, leaving affected business owners with no path to financial restitution, and criticized the absence of formal government support schemes to compensate impacted operators and reinforce the resilience of at-risk industrial facilities.

The Beita raid unfolds against a backdrop of a historic surge in documented settler violence across the occupied West Bank. Data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) records 397 separate settler attacks resulting in physical harm or property destruction between October 1 and October 26 of this year, marking the highest monthly total the agency has logged since it began systematic tracking of such incidents in 2006. Separate data from the Palestinian government’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documents 1,369 total settler attacks across the West Bank in October, representing a 111 percent year-on-month increase from September’s recorded figures.

As unforgiving winter storms swept across the besieged Gaza Strip in early November 2026, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinian families already grappling with three years of devastating Israeli military operations faced a new wave of life-threatening hardship. For 48-year-old Nahla al-Majdoub and her household of eight, the latest downpour marked the total destruction of the flimsy makeshift tent they had called home for nearly two years at Gaza’s port, after their original northern Gaza residence was flattened during Israel’s ground invasion.
The family was fast asleep when the tempest struck, jolting awake to the roar of thunder and frigid rainwater gushing through gaps in their tent’s tattered tarpaulin, pooling rapidly across the muddy ground beneath them. Soaking wet and surrounded by rising water, Majdoub and her children were left screaming in helpless despair as she scrambled to bail out the incoming flood, a futile effort against the relentless downpour. When gale-force winds began tearing chunks of the tent’s covering loose, she called on neighbouring camp residents to help reinforce the structure and pile sand around its perimeter, but the damage was irreversible. As the family rushed to evacuate to a nearby neighbour’s sturdier shelter, the remaining tarpaulin ripped free entirely, and the tent collapsed with one of Majdoub’s daughters still trapped inside. Every single one of their meagre belongings – clothes, mattresses, and personal possessions – was completely waterlogged, leaving the family wearing the same damp, cold garments for four straight days after they found temporary refuge with local neighbours.
This latest disaster compounds years of unthinkable suffering for Majdoub, who sustained critical injuries in an Israeli air strike back in October 2025 while out shopping for groceries for her family. Shrapnel from the missile tore through her intestines, requiring multiple emergency surgeries that left her dependent on costly weekly medication costing 170 shekels to manage her condition, a treatment she can no longer afford amid the enclave’s economic collapse. The persistent cold of the winter storm has amplified her chronic pain, and she lives in constant fear for her seven-year-old daughter Aya, who lives with diabetes and lacks access to consistent medical care or warm, safe shelter. “Our greatest dream right now is nothing more than a strong tent that can keep the rain out and shield us from the freezing cold,” Majdoub shared, noting that her family cannot afford to replace their shelter every time a winter storm hits, and often relies on the kindness of neighbours to feed her children.
Thirty-three-year-old Sameh Doghomoush, his wife Sana, and their three young sons are another family pushed to the brink by the extreme weather. The family has been occupying their partially destroyed home in Gaza City’s al-Sabra neighbourhood since the start of the war, and after witnessing last year’s winter flooding, Doghomoush spent two days and his last remaining savings buying extra tarpaulins to patch gaping holes in his shattered roof and reinforce crumbling exterior walls, even positioning basins and pots under the largest leaks to catch rainwater. All of their careful preparation was rendered useless within hours of the first storm surge, as floodwaters poured through broken windows and the fractured roof, leaving the entire family soaked, shivering, and stranded in darkness through the night. All three of his young sons developed severe colds from exposure, and Doghomoush said his household has never received a single tent or emergency shelter supply from aid groups, despite repeated pleas for support. Before the war, the family lived comfortably in their 180-square-metre home, owned a thriving fish restaurant and a private car, and regularly took their children to amusement parks and bought them new clothes and school supplies. Today, he cannot even afford the basic food, warm clothing, or textbooks his children beg for, and lives in terror that his already structurally compromised home could collapse under the weight of the saturated soil, trapping his family inside. “We have endured death from bombardment, starvation, and helplessness for years – now we are fighting to survive the cold, too,” Doghomoush said, calling on the international community to pressure Israel to open border crossings and allow critical shelter supplies into the enclave.
Official data from the Gaza Government Media Office confirms that more than 70,000 tents housing hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were fully flooded in the first 12 hours of the recent storm, with collapsing sand embankments and toppling half-damaged walls killing five people, injuring dozens more, and leaving two others unaccounted for. Initial estimates place the total financial damage from the storm at over $3 million, with officials warning that tens of thousands of buildings already weakened by years of Israeli airstrikes now face imminent collapse as rainwater saturates the ground beneath their foundations. The statement noted that Israel has systematically destroyed over 90 percent of Gaza’s core infrastructure, including sewage networks, forcing displaced populations to crowd into high-risk displacement camps that are uniquely vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Municipal civil defence teams are working around the clock to respond to the disaster, but are crippled by critical shortages of heavy equipment, fuel, and resources, with the volume of aid permitted to enter Gaza remaining a tiny fraction of what the 2.2 million residents of the enclave require. The Gaza Government Media Office issued an urgent appeal to the international community to move beyond symbolic statements of condemnation and take tangible action to force open border crossings, calling for an immediate shipment of more than 100,000 winter-resistant tents, tens of thousands of prefabricated temporary housing units, and construction materials to repair destroyed drainage and sewage systems.
Independent Palestinian political analyst Talal Abu Rokbeh emphasized that the deliberate restriction of shelter supplies and other critical humanitarian aid by Israeli authorities is a deliberate tactic to escalate pressure on Gaza’s Palestinian population, while the international community’s prolonged silence has made it complicit in the ongoing human suffering. He noted that Israel is actively attempting to reframe the decades-long Palestinian struggle for self-determination and statehood as a purely humanitarian crisis, diverting global attention away from the political solutions required to end the conflict. Abu Rokbeh added that any meaningful shift in United States policy toward Gaza must be measured by concrete, on-the-ground milestones: the empowerment of the Palestinian technocratic committee to govern Gaza, the deployment of an international stabilization force, full Israeli withdrawal from the 70 percent of Gaza territory it has occupied in recent months, and a massive, sustained increase in allowed aid deliveries. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, roughly 65 percent of Gaza’s total population – around 1.4 million people – currently reside in flimsy tents or other makeshift, unprotected shelters as the harsh winter season progresses.

A wave of unrest has swept across Bangladesh in recent days, as loyalists of deposed former prime minister Sheikh Hasina stage coordinated nationwide demonstrations demanding her return from two years of exile in India, prompting a forceful response from national security forces. Law enforcement units deployed tear gas canisters and fired rubber bullets to disperse crowds of pro-Hasina activists, as unrest flared most intensely in the Gopalganj district, where the formally banned student wing of Hasina’s Awami League party, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), engaged in direct, violent clashes with security personnel. A police patrol vehicle was completely set ablaze during those Gopalganj confrontations.

These coordinated actions mark the first large-scale, organized show of strength from Hasina’s support base since she was ousted in August 2024, when a sprawling mass popular uprising against her 15-year authoritarian rule forced her to flee across the border to India. The mobilization kicked off barely 24 hours after Hasina publicly confirmed she had submitted a formal passport application to the Bangladeshi High Commission in New Delhi, with the stated goal of returning to her home country in December.

Protesters erected makeshift roadblocks across multiple urban and rural corridors, stacking burning tires and igniting large fires directly in the middle of major thoroughfares to bring traffic to a standstill. A string of arson attacks on civilian passenger vehicles preceded the formal launch of the demonstrations: in the early hours of Tuesday in the city of Faridpur, a 60-year-old bus driver was trapped inside his burning vehicle and died of fatal smoke inhalation. Elsewhere, a crowd of roughly 200 pro-Hasina demonstrators staged a brief, disruptive sit-in on the 6.2-kilometer Padma Bridge spanning the Ganges River, a critical infrastructure link that connects the capital Dhaka to the country’s entire southwestern region. Local Bangladeshi media outlets also reported that dozens of low-yield crude explosive devices detonated across Dhaka and other regional population centers over the past 72 hours.

The country’s top interior official, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed, issued a stern public warning in response to the unrest, stating, “Any attempt to sabotage public order and manufacture domestic instability through cross-border conspiracy originating in India will never be permitted to succeed.” For their part, exiled senior BCL leadership based in an undisclosed foreign country denied all responsibility for the violent acts, claiming “unknown miscreants” carried out the arson and bomb attacks, and emphasizing that their movement remains committed to peaceful protest.

The backdrop to the current unrest stretches back to mid-2024, when initially small student-led demonstrations against controversial government job quota policies escalated into a nationwide mass uprising after a deadly police crackdown on peaceful protesters. The United Nations later estimated that as many as 1,400 people were killed during that 2024 popular movement, the vast majority fatally wounded by gunfire from government security units. After Hasina fled the country, her long-ruling Awami League party was formally banned from political activity and barred from participating in the February national general election held later that year. A specially constituted Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal subsequently sentenced Hasina to death in absentia, convicting her of systematic crimes against humanity. Hasina has repeatedly rejected all charges against her, dismissing the tribunal process as entirely biased and driven by partisan political motives.

The current interim Bangladeshi government has explicitly rejected Hasina’s passport application, labeling her a “terrorist” and a fugitive from justice. Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Humaiun Kobir confirmed that Dhaka is actively invoking its bilateral extradition treaty with India to demand Hasina’s forcible repatriation. A state prosecutor announced publicly on Tuesday that the pending death sentence against Hasina would be immediately carried out upon her arrival in Bangladesh, as the legal window for her to file an appeal against the tribunal verdict has already expired. Awami League representatives have also alleged that hundreds of their rank-and-file supporters have been killed in targeted mob violence and dozens more have died in security force custody in the two years since Hasina’s ouster, though Dhaka administration officials have categorically denied claims that the party’s supporters are facing systematic, state-sponsored persecution.

Recent weeks have witnessed a sharp, daily surge in armed exchanges between the Saudi-led military coalition and Yemen’s Houthi movement, officially known as Ansar Allah, triggering sweeping emergency precautionary measures across Saudi territory and exacerbating a long-running humanitarian catastrophe inside Yemen.

The Saudi-led coalition, which has waged a years-long military campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen, confirmed that its air defense systems successfully neutralized multiple incoming ballistic missiles targeting both the kingdom’s southern border regions and the capital city of Riyadh, in addition to shooting down an explosive-laden drone over the oil-rich Eastern Province, a critical hub for Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure.

The wave of persistent Houthi aerial assaults has upended routine civilian life across Saudi Arabia’s most populated regions. In an official notice distributed to parents on Monday, Riyadh education authorities announced a mandatory shift to fully remote learning for all city public schools starting the following Tuesday, as a protective precaution, with no public timeline provided for a return to in-person classroom instruction. For three straight consecutive days starting that Tuesday, Riyadh residents received urgent mobile phone emergency alerts notifying them of active aerial threats and instructing all civilians to immediately move to secure indoor shelter; each alert was lifted within minutes after air defense units eliminated the incoming hazards. Large swathes of Saudi private and public sector employers have already transitioned to long-term remote work arrangements to minimize civilian exposure to potential strikes. The disruption to daily life follows a deadly Houthi assault targeting Riyadh’s international airport on October 11, which prompted a full temporary suspension of flight operations. While a limited, partial resumption of commercial flights has since been permitted, Houthi officials have issued a public warning declaring the majority of Saudi Arabia’s national airspace unsafe for civilian air travel.

The tit-for-tat escalation of hostilities has inflicted catastrophic new harm on Yemeni civilian populations, worsening one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises. Houthi-controlled Yemeni health authorities, speaking via the pro-Houthi Almasirah television network, reported that a weekend Saudi aerial strike on the Alshariyah neighborhood in the Bani Hushaysh district, east of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, killed at least 44 people and wounded 40 more. Among the confirmed fatalities are 21 children and 10 women, according to the Sanaa-based Ministry of Health, which added that local search and rescue teams are still working to locate missing civilians trapped under collapsed building rubble. The intensification of Saudi airstrikes across populated Yemeni areas in recent weeks has pushed hundreds of thousands of additional people into forced internal displacement, stretching already depleted humanitarian aid resources to breaking point across the war-torn country.

On Tuesday evening, Malaysia’s disgraced ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak was escorted by a heavily armed police convoy in an SUV to his luxury Kuala Lumpur mansion, marking the end of his four-year in-prison stint following high-profile corruption convictions tied to the global 1MDB scandal. The 73-year-old politician was greeted by a throng of jostling journalists stationed outside his residence, located in one of the capital’s most exclusive neighborhoods, which had been formally designated as a federal prison ahead of his arrival. The landmark transfer came hours after the Kuala Lumpur High Court issued a ruling clearing all legal hurdles for Najib to serve the remainder of his reduced sentence under house arrest, following weeks of procedural delays that had pushed back a planned initial transfer date the previous Friday. The legal odyssey stretches back to 2020, when Najib was first handed a 12-year prison sentence for charges of abuse of power, money laundering, and breach of trust linked to 42 million ringgit (approximately $10 million) siphoned from SRC International, a former subsidiary of the state-owned 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund he co-founded. He began serving the sentence in 2022, before an appeal court later halved the term, and in September 2024, Malaysia’s King issued a conditional royal pardon allowing him to complete the remaining two years of his sentence at home — a deal that required Najib’s political party to pay a $12 million fine as a key term of the arrangement. The 1MDB scandal, which first came to light a decade ago, sent shockwaves across global financial and entertainment circles, ensnaring high-profile entities from Wall Street investment giant Goldman Sachs to A-list Hollywood figures. Official investigations estimated that a total of $4.5 billion was misappropriated from the public wealth fund into private accounts, with prosecutors alleging more than $1 billion of that sum flowed directly to accounts linked to Najib. Throughout the years of legal proceedings, Najib has consistently denied all wrongdoing, with his legal team arguing he was deliberately misled by his close advisers, most notably fugitive financier Jho Low, who has maintained his own innocence and remains at large to this day. Controversy has flared widely in the wake of the house arrest approval: critics of the decision argue it severely undermines Malaysia’s years-long anti-corruption efforts, and have publicly questioned the legal validity of the arrangement, pointing out that no explicit provisions for formal house arrest exist in the country’s existing penal code. Najib still faces a pending appeal against a 15-year prison sentence handed down in a separate December 2025 trial, where he was convicted of misappropriating nearly 2.3 billion Malaysian ringgit (around $569 million) directly from the 1MDB fund. Under current court orders, he will begin serving that 15-year term immediately after his two-year house arrest period concludes in August 2028.

Palestinian health authorities confirmed on Tuesday that a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager, identified as Moataz Iyad, was fatally shot by Israeli military personnel during a security operation in the village of Burqa, located in the occupied West Bank’s northwest region outside Nablus. According to official statements, Israeli security forces are currently withholding the minor’s remains, preventing the family from conducting a proper burial. Two additional teenage Palestinians sustained gunshot wounds in the same incident: a 17-year-old suffered life-threatening injuries to his abdomen and pelvis, while a 19-year-old was struck in the hand, as verified by the Palestinian official news agency Wafa. Witness and agency reports further detail that Israeli troops detained the slain boy’s father on site, blocked emergency ambulances from accessing the wounded for a critical window, and briefly took three volunteer paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society into custody. The Israeli military formally acknowledged that its soldiers discharged live fire in the Burqa area, releasing an official statement claiming the gunfire was deployed to “neutralize a threat” and that multiple confirmed hits were recorded during the exchange.

This deadly incident unfolds against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of settler violence sweeping across the occupied West Bank, where coordinated Israeli military raids and extremist settler assaults have inflicted widespread casualties on Palestinian communities, displaced entire families, and destroyed civilian property. Data compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documents more than 2,060 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian injuries or property destruction across roughly 300 West Bank communities between the start of 2026 and October 12 of this year. The rate of violence has spiked sharply in recent weeks: between September 29 and October 12 alone, OCHA recorded 244 separate attacks impacting 113 communities, averaging 17 violent incidents per day. During this two-week window, five Palestinians were killed and 246 others – 22 of them children – sustained injuries at the hands of Israeli forces or settlers, with three of the fatalities directly attributed to settler assaults. Independent conflict monitoring group the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) noted in a September 2026 analysis that the current year has already become the most violent on record for settler-related hostilities in the West Bank since the organization began tracking incidents in 2016. ACLED data shows that cases of settlers opening fire with live weapons reached 203 in the first nine months of 2026, surpassing the full-year total of 185 recorded for 2025. A separate October 2026 report from UNICEF confirms that at least 1,216 Palestinians, including 263 children, have been killed in the West Bank (encompassing East Jerusalem) since the outbreak of the latest regional conflict in October 2023, with thousands more sustaining permanent injuries.

Parallel to the West Bank developments, new reports of Israeli ceasefire violations have emerged from the Gaza Strip, 12 months after a formal truce was implemented on October 10, 2025. Local medical and on-the-ground sources speaking to the Anadolu Agency confirmed that Israeli gunfire wounded two Palestinians in southern Gaza on the same Tuesday as the West Bank killing: one was a fisherman targeted off the coast of Khan Younis, and the second was a young boy near a displacement camp’s tent settlement in the Batn al-Samin area. Wafa’s independent reporting corroborated the attack on fishing vessels, noting that Israeli naval craft opened fire on small fishing boats operating off Khan Younis, wounding the fisherman and damaging two vessels, while Anadolu’s sources added that two of the boats were completely set ablaze. Multiple witnesses also reported sustained artillery shelling and heavy live gunfire in zones south and east of Khan Younis, while local administrative sources confirmed that Israeli military vehicles carried out a ground incursion southeast of the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, during which troops demolished multiple Palestinian homes and other civilian infrastructure in the surrounding area. Gaza’s Ministry of Health released updated figures on Monday documenting that more than 1,613 Palestinians have been killed and 5,833 wounded by Israeli attacks in Gaza since the 2025 ceasefire went into effect. Cumulative data tracking the full scale of the conflict in Gaza since October 2023 shows the total Palestinian death toll has now exceeded 74,000, with over 175,000 people recorded as injured. This report is part of Middle East Eye’s independent, on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and adjacent regions.

The ill-fated multi-year round-the-world cruise ship Odyssey, which made global headlines last month after leaving 200 paying passengers stranded in the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, has been formally seized in Singaporean territorial waters, local port authorities confirmed this week. Operated by U.S.-based Villa Vie Residences, the vessel originally departed Belfast in October 2024 for a marketed 42-month voyage spanning 150 countries, with a unique pricing model that allowed guests to purchase permanent cabin residency for sums between $120,000 and $440,000, sign up for five-year onboard stays, or rent cabins for short-term trips. The company’s founder Mikael Petterson had previously advertised the offering as an accessible alternative to traditional homeownership, claiming customers could “own your home on a ship that travels the world for roughly the price of a car.”
Yet the ambitious voyage was plagued with operational and financial hurdles almost from its inception: its initial departure from Belfast was delayed by four months to resolve unplanned repair work and outstanding regulatory paperwork. As the journey progressed, signs of the operator’s impending collapse mounted. Local reports from Vietnam revealed crew members were forced to purchase groceries directly from neighborhood retailers after the company fell behind on payments to its official food supplier, which halted all deliveries entirely. Back in August, during an earlier stop in Singapore, Villa Vie Residences privately alerted passengers to its dire cash flow shortages, explicitly warning of the risk of the ship being detained and soliciting emergency funding from guests to keep operations afloat. Passenger Holly Hennessey later shared with the BBC that guests were also hit with requests for unexpected fuel surcharges, while the pre-planned global itinerary was repeatedly and drastically cut short.
The final breaking point came amid sharp spikes in global fuel prices tied to regional conflict in Iran, which the operator reported pushed monthly per-cabin fuel costs in Asian waters from a projected $1,800 to a staggering $8,000. Despite implementing aggressive fuel conservation measures, Villa Vie Residences announced it could not offset the unmanageable cost surge, abruptly suspending all operations mid-voyage and forcing all 200 guests to disembark in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, with little advance warning. The Odyssey later sailed uncrewed by passengers to Singapore, where it has since been anchored. Singapore’s port authority confirmed that no guests remain on board, and all current crew members are receiving welfare support coordinated by the vessel’s creditors. Local Singaporean law firm Helmsman LLC has been appointed as the legal representative leading the ship’s arrest process, though the specific party retaining the firm has not yet been publicly disclosed.