标签： Asia

A controversial campaign billboard for Israeli opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot placed near Larnaca Airport in Cyprus has ignited widespread outrage, stirring debates over foreign political influence and national sovereignty on the Mediterranean island. The out-of-home ad, printed entirely in Hebrew for the upcoming Israeli national elections, greets passengers exiting the airport with the message: “Israelis, enjoy! You deserve it!” alongside a portrait of Eisenkot. A second billboard, positioned for travelers heading to departures, reads: “Have fun? Now come back and win!”

The incident was first brought to public attention by Cypriot Member of the European Parliament Fidias Panayiotou, who shared photos of the billboards on social media on July 26, 2026. “This photo was not taken in Israel, but in my country, Cyprus,” Panayiotou wrote in his post. “This is simply not right. We must defend Cyprus’s sovereignty.” In a follow-up TikTok video, Panayiotou described the move as “particularly concerning” and “unacceptable,” and has proposed new legislation that would ban non-European Union countries from running domestic election campaign advertisements on Cypriot soil.

The controversy comes amid shifting demographic and economic trends that have already fueled local unease. Cyprus has long been a top vacation spot for Israeli travelers, who made up the island’s second-largest group of international visitors in 2025. Following Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, the island has recorded a sharp rise in both Israeli tourism and permanent relocation, with a growing number of Israelis purchasing residential and commercial property across coastal regions including Limassol, Paphos and Larnaca. The spread of Hebrew-language real estate advertising across public spaces has already drawn quiet concern from local communities, and the political campaign billboard has pushed those anxieties into the public mainstream.

Melanie Steliou, a Cypriot actress and political activist, framed the debate as a question of reciprocal norms. “At a time when concerns are growing over the large-scale purchase of land and property by Israelis in Limassol, Paphos and Larnaca, this image raises legitimate questions about the limits of foreign economic and political influence in the public space of the Republic of Cyprus,” she wrote. “Would anyone expect to see a campaign billboard for a Cypriot or Greek politician on a motorway in the UK, Germany, Spain or Ireland?”

Critics of the billboards are not limited to Cypriot communities. The ad has also drawn pushback from Israeli social media users, many of whom have criticized Eisenkot for bringing Israeli domestic political campaigning onto foreign territory. One Hebrew-language post commented: “This sign is… only fueling the conspiracy that Israel is ‘conquering’ Cyprus. Take down the sign.”

In a statement on the incident, Niche Advertising, the Cypriot company that owns and leases the billboard space, clarified that it does not endorse Eisenkot or his political party, noting that the booking was processed as a standard commercial transaction.

For context, Eisenkot is a former chief of the Israeli Defense Forces and previously served as a cabinet minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government between 2023 and 2024. He is best known as the architect of the widely condemned Dahieh Doctrine, a military strategy that advocates for the use of disproportionate force against civilian populations and infrastructure in areas where armed groups are believed to operate. Eisenkot launched his campaign for prime minister in June 2026 as the leader of the new Yashar (Straight Ahead) party, running on a platform that criticizes the Netanyahu government’s handling of security after the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks, promises a formal public inquiry into the attacks, and calls for universal mandatory military service that would end longstanding exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and extend service requirements to Israeli Palestinian citizens.

Recent polling has positioned Eisenkot as the frontrunner in the upcoming October elections: a Channel 12 survey found that 43 percent of Israeli voters view him as their preferred prime minister, compared to just 34 percent supporting incumbent Netanyahu. Forecasts project Yashar will take 23 seats in the 120-member Knesset, while Netanyahu’s Likud party is projected to win 22 seats. Last week, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Netanyahu administration is exploring measures to restrict voting access for Israeli citizens residing abroad, over fears that this demographic will overwhelmingly back opposition parties. With the election race tightening, courting Israeli voters traveling or living abroad has become a key strategic battleground for both major factions.

Cyprus and Israel have deepened bilateral political, security and economic ties in recent years. The two nations signed a trilateral military cooperation agreement with Greece earlier in 2026, and Cyprus grants the Israeli military access to its airspace for training exercises. The growing Israeli economic presence on the island, particularly in the real estate sector, has become an increasingly divisive issue among Cypriot voters in recent months.

As of publication, Middle East Eye had not received a response to requests for comment from Eisenkot’s campaign or the Cypriot High Commission in London.

For millions of residents in India’s northeastern state of Assam, annual monsoon flooding is a grim, recurring reality. But the 2026 deluge is unlike anything living memory has recorded. What began as steady rainfall on July 19 rapidly escalated into a catastrophic disaster that has reshaped the lives of hundreds of thousands, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and uncertainty across the state’s floodplains.

Eighteen-year-old Shalini Patra, a resident of Jorhat’s Seleng Sumoni Pathar village along the banks of the Jhanji River – a major tributary of the Brahmaputra – describes how the disaster unfolded in minutes. As she watched the morning rain from her family home, Patra had no hint of what was to come. By mid-afternoon, the roar of rushing water and panicked shouts of neighbors cut through the quiet. Within minutes, knee-deep water surged into her family’s residence.

Patra quickly guided her elderly parents and younger brother to higher ground, then turned back to salvage what belongings she could. By the time she fought her way back through the churning current, the entire structure had been swept away. Every possession the family had spent decades building – a television, a wooden cupboard, a sofa, even basic kitchenware – was gone. “The floods took everything from us,” Patra told BBC Hindi from a government relief camp, where she now resides with her family.

Flooding is embedded into the geography of Assam: India’s National Flood Commission estimates that nearly 40 percent of the state’s total land area is classified as flood-prone. Stretching across the vast Brahmaputra floodplain, where the Himalayan river and its more than 50 tributaries carry glacial melt and monsoon runoff across flat terrain, the state has adapted to annual seasonal inundation for generations. When monsoon rains raise river volumes, silt and sand deposits build up on the riverbed over time, shrinking the channel’s water capacity and making overbank flooding inevitable. But in recent decades, experts confirm that flooding has grown increasingly severe, driven by a toxic mix of human activity and climate change: upstream deforestation that increases erosion and silt runoff, crumbling, century-old embankment systems that have not been upgraded, and more intense extreme rainfall events linked to rising global temperatures.

This year’s disaster was triggered by unprecedented rainfall across Assam and neighboring Nagaland that began in mid-July. State minister Pijush Hazarika has called the event the worst flooding Assam has seen in 60 years. As of late July, official data confirms at least 68 people have lost their lives over the past four weeks, with 58 of those deaths recorded in just the final week of the deluge. Nearly 40 people remain unaccounted for, and more than 600,000 people across the state have had their lives upended by the disaster. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes, with around 25,000 now sheltering in government-run relief camps, and thousands more staying with friends or relatives in unaffected areas.

On July 21 alone, 21 people lost their lives in a 24-hour period – most swept away by rushing floodwaters or drowned, while others died in rain-triggered landslides or when collapsing flood-damaged homes fell on residents. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma confirmed that parts of the two states saw rainfall between 435 percent and 490 percent above the seasonal average during that extreme weather event, causing rivers to swell at a rate no warning system could adequately prepare for. Upper Assam, where dozens of tributaries from the surrounding Naga and Meghalaya hills feed into the Brahmaputra, bore the full force of the disaster. Districts including Sivasagar, Charaideo, and Jorhat were the hardest hit, with floodwaters cutting off road access to entire villages, leaving rescue teams struggling to reach stranded families trapped by rising water.

Stories of harrowing survival have emerged from the hardest-hit regions, echoing the tenacity of residents facing the disaster. In Sivasagar’s Holang Katoni village, 32-year-old Rekhamoni Gogoi and her seven-year-old son spent 12 hours stranded in the branches of a large mango tree after floodwaters swallowed their entire neighborhood. On the afternoon of July 19, Gogoi told local reporters, water rose to chest level in just 60 minutes after overnight rains swelled local rivers. She first took shelter in a two-story neighbor’s home, but when water continued to climb past the first floor, she was forced to flee again. By 8 p.m. local time, the pair climbed into the tree’s upper branches, after other local women helped Gogoi, carrying her son, climb to safety first.

“There was darkness all around us. There seemed to be no hope of survival, but I refused to lose courage,” Gogoi recounted. Stranded overnight without food, water, or warm clothing, Gogoi’s son comforted his mother, telling her they could survive by eating tree leaves if they had to. “My son’s life is more precious to me than my own, so I was determined to protect him at any cost,” she said. A rescue team reached the pair at dawn the next day, and they are now staying in a relief camp waiting for floodwaters to recede.

State officials have mobilized emergency response teams to address the crisis. Assam Chief Secretary Ravi Kotta said that senior administrative officials have been deployed to the worst-hit districts to accelerate relief and restoration work, with priority given to distributing food, clean water, and emergency shelter supplies, and restoring damaged power and communication lines. Chief Minister Sarma added that the government’s focus is now shifting to long-term rehabilitation, with cabinet ministers deployed across every affected district to coordinate recovery efforts.

Even with emergency response underway, for survivors like Patra, the future remains deeply uncertain. Her parents work as daily wage laborers, and spent more than a decade saving to build their small family home. With all their possessions gone and no property left to rebuild on in the immediate term, Patra says her family has no clear path forward. “My parents spent years building that house. I don’t know what we will do now. It will take us years to build another one,” she said.

Following the sudden collapse of a negotiated peace agreement aimed at ending the US-Israeli standoff with Iran, Washington has reinstated a full naval blockade of all Iranian commercial ports, intensifying a decades-long campaign to cut the Islamic Republic off from global oil markets.

Iran, which holds the world’s third-largest proven crude oil reserves, has faced sweeping US sanctions designed to isolate its energy sector from international shipping for nearly 30 years. First introduced by the Clinton administration in 1996 over concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and its support for regional groups opposed to US influence, these restrictions were drastically expanded after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal in 2018. Cut off from the US-dominated global financial system that relies on dollar transactions, most major international shipping firms have avoided handling Iranian oil to avoid crippling secondary sanctions. In response, Iran built a sprawling network of unconventional vessels known as the “shadow fleet” — also called dark or ghost fleets — to sustain critical oil export revenues.

Shadow tankers operate on the margins of the global shipping industry, designed explicitly to skirt western sanctions on sanctioned countries. In addition to Iran, Russia (which faces widespread western oil sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine) and, until recently, Venezuela also rely on these networks. Most of the vessels are aging ships that evade detection by disabling mandatory location tracking systems or broadcasting falsified position data to marine monitoring databases. They are typically registered under “flags of convenience” — flags issued by countries with low shipping taxes, lax regulatory oversight, and opaque ownership disclosure rules, including Bermuda, Liberia, Panama, Malta, and the Marshall Islands. This structure intentionally obscures the ultimate ownership of the ships: many trace back to Iranian billionaires with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, while others are owned by business interests in China, Iran’s largest crude customer. Crews are most often recruited from Iran, China, and South Asian maritime labor markets.

Before the reimposition of the US blockade, industry analysts estimated Iran’s shadow fleet numbered roughly 400 vessels, though exact counts vary. The fleet relies heavily on ship-to-ship transfers at sea, where crude is unloaded from an Iran-departed tanker to a second vessel before reaching its final destination. While these transfers are not inherently illegal, they add an additional layer of opacity that makes tracing the origin of the cargo extremely difficult.

Unlike the US, European Union, and Canada, which have implemented full bans on domestic entities purchasing Iranian oil, most other countries do not prohibit Iranian crude imports under their own national laws. However, Washington’s far-reaching secondary sanctions authorize penalties and asset freezes for any entity worldwide — regardless of nationality — that buys, transports, or finances Iranian oil, forcing most legitimate commercial operators to steer clear. At the international level, there are no binding UN sanctions on Iranian oil trade, as China and Russia have repeatedly used their veto power on the UN Security Council to block western-led sanctions resolutions against Iran. This means Iranian oil trade is not inherently illegal under international law, though many shadow fleet vessels violate binding International Maritime Organization (IMO) rules on environmental protection, maritime safety, and labor standards.

Enforcement of IMO regulations falls primarily to flag states and port authorities, leaving most violations unaddressed outside territorial waters, where vessels are protected by international freedom of navigation laws. The age of most shadow tankers — many are over 20 years old, and some exceed 30 — creates major environmental and safety risks. Older vessels have a far higher risk of catastrophic oil spills, and disabling location tracking increases the likelihood of collisions at sea. In 2018, the Iranian-owned shadow tanker *Sanchi* collided with another cargo ship off the coast of Shanghai, sinking the vessel, killing all 32 crew members, and spilling nearly 1 million barrels of crude into the East China Sea. Even large-scale spills from very large crude carriers — which can carry more than 2 million barrels of oil, double the amount released during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster — remain a persistent threat.

China remains the largest buyer of Iranian crude, importing an estimated 1.4 million barrels per day in 2025, according to analytics firm Kpler — equal to 12% of China’s total crude oil imports. To avoid US secondary sanctions, China does not officially record these imports, instead mislabeling Iranian crude as originating from Malaysia or Indonesia. Analysts have long identified discrepancies between Chinese import data and the Southeast Asian countries’ export figures that confirm this practice. Iran sells its crude to China at a steep discount to global market prices, with payments settled in Chinese renminbi through Chinese financial institutions. The vast majority of these purchases are made by small, independent “teapot refineries” in China’s northeastern Shandong province; large state-owned Chinese refiners generally avoid Iranian oil to limit their exposure to US sanctions.

Laleh Khalili, a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and leading expert on global oil shipping, notes that China’s economic size and massive energy demand give it the leverage to disregard US sanctions. “China has enough economic power to not have to obey the US sanctions regime. And that economic power goes hand-in-hand with an extreme need for oil,” Khalili explained to Middle East Eye. Beyond Iran, China also uses shadow fleet networks to import discounted crude from Russia, and previously from Venezuela. Beyond major energy trade, Iran’s shadow fleet has also been linked to jet fuel sales to Myanmar’s military junta during the country’s ongoing civil war, drawing sharp criticism from human rights groups over fuel supplies used for air strikes against civilian targets.

The new US naval blockade, which launched in April 2026 when the USS Rafael Peralta began interception operations off Iran’s coast, is the cornerstone of a broader western crackdown on shadow fleets that undermine the effectiveness of unilateral US sanctions. However, marine intelligence outlets have already documented that multiple Iranian tankers have successfully evaded the blockade. Even before the recent escalation, the US and United Kingdom had been intercepting shadow tankers linked to Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan oil shipments, even in international waters. A common tactic is pressuring flag states to revoke a vessel’s registration, rendering it stateless, in violation of international law, and eligible for seizure by western forces. “When this happens, the seizure might technically fall under the letter of the law,” Khalili said. “But it’s also a form of the projection of US power, as it’s very much the US forcing the flag states to place those ships outside of the law.”

Washington has also pressured Malaysia to crack down on shadow tankers that exploit regulatory loopholes allowing unregulated ship-to-ship transfers in the Eastern Outer Port Limits, part of Malaysia’s territorial waters, though enforcement to date has been inconsistent. Western powers have launched a dedicated Shadow Fleet Task Force to coordinate crackdown efforts, and have sanctioned individual identified vessels to bar them from accessing global maritime infrastructure. The US has also extended sanctions to some Chinese teapot refineries that purchase Iranian crude, but Beijing has pushed back aggressively, ordering all Chinese companies to refuse compliance with what it calls illegal unilateral US sanctions. “The Chinese government has consistently opposed unilateral sanctions that lack authorisation from the United Nations and a basis in international law,” Beijing said in a May 2026 statement.

Tensions across the Arabian Peninsula have reignited sharply in recent weeks, after a series of tit-for-tat attacks between Yemen’s Houthi movement and Saudi Arabia pushed a key global energy shipping chokepoint to the brink of disruption. The current crisis traces its roots back to a decision by the Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, to restart direct commercial flights between Yemen’s capital Sanaa and Tehran — a move that would have marked the first such connection since a Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015.

For Riyadh, the resumption of these flights crossed a critical red line. Saudi officials and analysts view expanded direct air links between the Houthis and Iran as evidence of growing Iranian influence in northern Yemen, including the potential for unimpeded weapons transfers to the Houthi movement. Two weeks ago, Saudi warplanes launched strikes on Sanaa International Airport in response to the announcement, triggering a rapid escalation that has now pulled the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a narrow waterway connecting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, into the expanding regional conflict tied to the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran.

“Just as direct Sanaa-Iran flights were a red line for the Saudis and its allied Yemeni government, the attack on Sanaa international airport was a red line for the Houthis,” explained Hamish Kinnear, principal Middle East and North Africa analyst at global risk consulting firm Maplecroft, in an interview with Middle East Eye.

In the days following the airport strike, the Houthis followed through on their threats of retaliation: the group launched missile attacks against two Saudi cities, Jazan and Yanbu, and claimed responsibility for strikes on two Saudi oil vessels operating in the Red Sea. Saudi officials have confirmed one of the vessel attacks took place in the region.

The timing of this escalation could not be more consequential for global energy markets. Following Iranian restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Saudi Arabia has redirected more than 70 percent of its crude oil exports through the Red Sea to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, making the Bab al-Mandeb route the kingdom’s primary outlet for global oil sales. Houthi threats of a “maritime embargo” on Saudi ports have now put this alternative export corridor directly at risk.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree has made clear the group is prepared to ramp up actions in the coming days, saying: “We will not hesitate to expand our movements and escalate our steps based on the developments of the situation in the coming hours and days.”

The Bab al-Mandeb currently handles roughly 12 percent of the world’s seaborne oil trade and 8 percent of global liquefied natural gas shipments, though shipping has not yet come to a complete stop. Many crude tankers bound for Asia continue to transit the waterway, a sign Kinnear says indicates both sides remain open to de-escalation. “This indicates that the Houthis are open to negotiations with the Saudis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, which has also suggested that it does not want to expand the confrontation,” he noted.

Even so, any prolonged disruption to Bab al-Mandeb would leave global energy markets facing two major blocked oil chokepoints at once, a scenario that would send shockwaves through crude prices and force costly reroutes for Asian refiners. If the Bab al-Mandeb is closed to shipping, tankers carrying Saudi crude from Yanbu would need to sail through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and then back to Asia — a detour that adds weeks of transit time and millions of dollars in extra costs per voyage.

Saudi political analyst Khaled Almaeena, former editor-in-chief of Arab News, described the sudden escalation as “totally unexpected,” noting the Yemeni front had remained quiet for months and Riyadh had exercised significant restraint in the face of Iranian provocations. The 60-day ceasefire agreed under the June 17 Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was fragile from its start, and ultimately collapsed after the U.S. violated a core provision of the deal: the agreement required all new shipping arrangements through the Strait of Hormuz during the ceasefire to be negotiated with Iran and Oman, but Washington unilaterally created a new route through Omani waters without consulting Tehran.

That U.S. breach of the agreement reshaped the Houthis’ strategic position. With the Strait of Hormuz already a contested flashpoint, controlling pressure on the Bab al-Mandeb gives the Houthi movement far greater leverage over both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. To date, Riyadh has avoided direct participation in the war against Iran, but continued Houthi attacks could make that restraint politically unsustainable.

“To be quiet might be misconstrued as a sign of weakness, which the Saudis are not — they have the firepower and the will to use it,” Almaeena said, though he added that the kingdom still prefers to avoid full-scale conflict: “If the Houthis would like to negotiate peace its up to them because the kingdom would like to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”

The Houthis have repeatedly proven they are a resilient opponent that cannot be defeated through air power alone. In 2025, former U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up U.S. bombing campaigns against the group, then announced a withdrawal from the campaign two months later claiming the Houthis had “capitulated” — a claim that proved entirely unfounded. Like Saudi Arabia before it, the U.S. learned that sustained bombing does not force the Houthis into submission or cut off their popular support.

Kinnear argues that the Houthi threat to Bab al-Mandeb is closely aligned with broader Iranian goals to disrupt global energy markets and keep pressure on the U.S., though it is not a case of the Houthis simply acting on Tehran’s orders. Rather than seeking to close the strait entirely, the current escalation is a deliberate demonstration of power: the Houthis can raise the economic cost for Saudi Arabia at any time they choose.

For the Houthis, a limited, controlled escalation carries significant strategic benefits. Iran has already used its control over the Strait of Hormuz to extract concessions to fund its postwar reconstruction, and the Houthis now hold a similarly valuable leverage point: the ability to threaten Saudi Arabia’s only remaining major oil export route to global markets.