标签： Asia

The arrest of prominent dual American-Jordanian investigative journalist Ali Younes, orchestrated at the direction of Jordanian General Intelligence Department director Major General Ahmad Husni, has ignited international controversy over press freedom and strained Jordan’s long-standing financial and diplomatic ties with Washington, reporting from Middle East Eye confirms.

Younes, a veteran correspondent who has contributed to major global outlets including Drop Site News, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, CNN, Fox News and the BBC, was taken into custody by Jordanian intelligence officers on August 17 immediately upon his arrival at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman. Following hours of interrogation, authorities ordered him to appear before local prosecutors and imposed an exit bar that prevents him from leaving the country.

Local Jordanian outlet Ammon News, which multiple sources confirm maintains close ties to Jordanian intelligence services, was the first to publicly disclose details of the state’s actions against Younes last week. The outlet framed the arrest as a response to alleged offenses including “attacks on the Jordanian Armed Forces” and the distribution of what it called “misleading information originating from a Jewish source” — referring to Middle East analyst Aaron Magid, author of the article Younes is accused of reposting.

The core charges against the journalist center on a seemingly minor act: his reposting of Magid’s 2023 commentary published in *The American Conservative*, which questioned the justification for decades of large-scale U.S. economic and military aid to Jordan. Over the past 75 years, Jordan has received a total of $33.8 billion in U.S. assistance, with additional billions in scheduled funding locked in through ongoing bilateral agreements with Washington.

Younes’ U.S.-based legal team, led by attorney Abed Ayoub, has forcefully refuted all charges brought against their client. Ayoub emphasized that Younes never launched any attacks against the Jordanian Armed Forces, and has a long record of complying with local laws in every country where he has worked, including Jordan.

In a public statement, Ayoub called the charges “troubling as it is outrageous,” noting that the arrest of a journalist over a social media post shared outside Jordan’s borders raises urgent, serious questions about the state of press freedom in the kingdom. He added that the detention is inconsistent with the close, mutually respectful relationship between King Abdullah II — who is widely respected across U.S. political circles — and the United States.

The case has already stoked significant fears for Younes’ safety, particularly given Jordan’s recent history of violent targeting of journalists. In 2016, Jordanian journalist Nahed Hattar was assassinated by a gunman outside a courthouse shortly after he was detained for reposting a political cartoon that drew conservative backlash. Younes has also faced widespread online death threats and intimidation as part of a coordinated state-aligned media campaign against him.

Multiple U.S. figures have called for immediate action from the Trump administration and Congress to secure Younes’ release, warning that the case puts Jordan on a direct collision course with Washington. Magid, the analyst whose article is at the center of the case, described the detention as deeply disturbing, noting that Younes is a U.S. resident who merely shared an article from an American mainstream media outlet on the social platform X.

“It is imperative that the State Department ensure his safe return to the United States and press Jordan to rescind the exit ban against him,” Magid said, adding that the crackdown directly contradicts public promises King Abdullah has made to protect press freedom. He also criticized the lack of public response from U.S. officials, noting that if Younes is ultimately convicted for simply sharing an article, Washington should reevaluate its multibillion-dollar aid commitment to the Hashemite Kingdom.

Jason Jones, a prominent conservative Republican figure closely aligned with former President Trump and founder of the Vulnerable People Project, went further in his comments to Middle East Eye. Jones argued that the U.S. should issue an explicit ultimatum to Jordan: release Younes and drop all charges immediately, or forfeit U.S. funding.

“Jordan is risking its international standing and billions of dollars in U.S. funding in a grave international incident: the arrest and draconian prosecution of an American citizen,” Jones said. He also pointed to ongoing corruption allegations against Major General Husni, noting that it is surprising Jordan’s government has allowed the intelligence chief to pursue a case that threatens the kingdom’s core financial and diplomatic relationship with the U.S.

When Middle East Eye reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Amman for comment on the case, a spokesperson confirmed the embassy is aware of the detention but declined to share any further information. As of this report, the U.S. State Department has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

KATHMANDU, Nepal — Catastrophic flash flooding and subsequent mudslides along the Nepal-China border have left a devastating trail of destruction, with the confirmed death toll surpassing 950 and thousands more still unaccounted for. As of Monday, Nepalese rescue teams have launched an urgent race against the clock to reach hundreds of construction workers who remain trapped in flooded and mud-buried tunnels at a Himalayan hydropower project.

Disaster response experts emphasize that the first 72 hours after a disaster event are the most critical for saving lives, as survival prospects plummet rapidly without access to basic necessities like clean drinking water. Jennifer Horney, a disaster epidemiologist at the University of Delaware, explained that the outcome for trapped workers will largely depend on whether the hydropower site had pre-established emergency protocols for natural disasters or infrastructure outages.

“If emergency plans were in place, workers would likely have been trained to locate emergency exits, but the extreme force of this flood has packed solid mud across the site, which could block even marked escape routes and make executing pre-planned rescue strategies incredibly difficult,” Horney noted.

A core unanswered question remains: did the tunnels stock emergency supply caches that the trapped workers can access right now. Without clean, safe drinking water, even people with limited physical activity cannot survive longer than roughly three days, Horney added.

Alongside clean water, access to breathable oxygen is another foundational factor for survival. Six days after the flood hit, concerns about suffocation are growing by the hour, though early reports suggest some workers have secured limited oxygen supplies. Jakob Steiner, a Dhaka-based geoscientist from the University of Graz in Austria, pointed out that the tunnels themselves are large enough to accommodate large construction vehicles, which leaves open some air pocket space for trapped people.

“From what we have learned, rescuers have managed to route small amounts of oxygen to some groups of trapped workers, and active extraction efforts are ongoing,” Steiner said. “But this is still a race against time. Beyond oxygen, the trapped workers urgently need food and potable water to hold on.”

Disaster preparedness experts add that there are multiple other factors that will shape survival outcomes beyond access to basic supplies. Thomas Chandler, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, noted that the presence of serious injuries among trapped workers and the ability to deliver emergency supplies through temporary access routes are also critical variables. Chandler pointed to a 2023 Himalayan tunnel collapse triggered by a landslide, where 41 Indian workers were successfully rescued after 17 days trapped underground—an outcome made possible by pumping in consistent supplies of food, water and oxygen through narrow pipes during the rescue effort.

The internal climate of the tunnels also impacts how long workers can survive. If the tunnels are hot and humid, dehydration will set in far more quickly, even for people who are conserving energy. For those who are eventually pulled out alive, disaster experts note that comprehensive physical and mental supportive care will be essential, as the stress of prolonged isolation and harsh conditions takes a major toll on survivors.

This report was produced in collaboration with Associated Press journalists Shristi Kafle in Kathmandu and Huizhong Wu in Bangkok. The AP Health and Science Department receives funding support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and retains full editorial independence over all content.

An Israeli veterans’ organization composed of current and former military service members has leveled serious allegations against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), claiming the military routinely carries out lethal strikes on Palestinians in Gaza before retroactively assembling evidence to frame those killed as Hamas affiliates — a practice the group calls “retrospective incrimination.”

Breaking the Silence, a nonprofit founded in 2004 that offers a confidential space for Israeli soldiers to share their on-the-ground experiences in the occupied Palestinian territories, laid out the claims in comments from its executive director Nadav Weiman during an interview with France 24.

Weiman outlined a clear pattern he says emerges from dozens of soldier testimonies collected by his organization: the IDF conducts strikes first, kills targets, and only then launches an effort to dig up links to Hamas or other armed groups to justify the deadly operation. Soldiers executing strikes on the ground, he emphasized, do not possess the affiliation evidence that is later used to defend the attacks to the international community.

“First, we shoot, we kill, and then we think, and then we try to find a reason why it happened,” Weiman stated in the interview. He pointed to multiple high-casualty incidents as examples, including the IDF’s large-scale operations surrounding Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics in Rafah, and multiple air strikes that have left large numbers of civilian non-combatants dead.

Weiman explained that after strikes are completed, Israeli intelligence pulls the identities of all people killed, then analysts comb through records to find any potential connection — no matter how tangential — to armed groups. Common justifications used after the fact, he noted, include the killed person being located near a building the IDF associates with Hamas, having a family member with alleged links to the group, or having previously been listed on a movement payroll. From there, the IDF constructs a narrative to frame the strike as a targeted operation against legitimate military targets.

To illustrate the disconnect between on-ground action and post-strike justification, Weiman drew a comparison to operations around Nasser Hospital: “I don’t think that the tank that fired the tank shells at the hospital had a booklet with 25,000 Hamas members, and they looked photo after photo and said, ‘Ah, there are Hamas members over there’. This is something that we do after we shoot.”

The group says this practice is not a series of isolated mistakes by individual soldiers, but rather the product of intentionally permissive rules of engagement that have opened the door to widespread human rights violations throughout the ongoing Gaza war. The core motivation for the retrospective labeling, Weiman argued, is the Israeli government and military’s desire to secure international legitimacy for their military campaign in Gaza.

“Suddenly the IDF spokesperson in the state of Israel needs to explain to the international community what we did over there, who are the targets for the attack,” Weiman said. “And that’s why I said legitimisation before, because the IDF in the state of Israel wants international legitimisation to do what we are doing in Gaza.”

Soldier testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence show the pattern of post-killing classification as terrorists extends even to unarmed Palestinians and children under the age of 18, the organization confirmed. The group also highlighted another consequence of the current permissive rules of engagement: the IDF has classified any person carrying a camera in Gaza as a potential threat to Israeli forces, treating camera operators as legitimate military targets.

That policy, Breaking the Silence says, directly explains the extraordinarily high death toll among journalists reporting on the war in Gaza. Just as with other civilian deaths, the group claims the IDF has retroactively justified the killing of journalists by linking them to armed groups after the fact to defend its actions to global audiences.

Original reporting for this story was published by Middle East Eye, a media outlet that provides independent coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding global regions.

In the wake of catastrophic flash floods that swept across the Nepal-Tibet border, an urgent, multinational rescue operation is underway to reach more than 600 hydropower project workers trapped in a network of mud-choked tunnels along Nepal’s Trishuli River, as anxious families hold out fading hope that their loved ones will be pulled alive from the debris.

As of Monday, Nepalese Army teams leading the search have turned to controlled explosives to blast through rock and debris on the collapsed hillside to clear access routes to the tunnel network, after which rescue crews pump compressed air into the trapped space to sustain any possible survivors. Disaster management officials have confirmed the overall death toll from the flood disaster has climbed to 939 in Nepal, with the official count of missing people revised upward to 3,925 – 592 of whom are foreign nationals. Roughly 14% of all missing people are workers employed at the damaged hydropower projects along the river, where 279 people have already been pulled to safety, according to Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah.

The massive search and recovery effort is being jointly spearheaded by Chinese and Nepalese military teams, with specialized technical experts from India, South Korea and Australia also contributing expertise to the complex underground operation. The Trishuli River basin, located in Nepal’s mountainous northern region, is home to a suite of major hydropower projects that the country, which relies heavily on hydroelectric power for its energy supply, has spent decades developing. Officials confirmed at least 11 operational and under-construction hydropower projects suffered severe damage when the floodwaters hit.

For families waiting at the operation’s perimeter, every passing minute feels like an eternity, and many have criticized the pace of the rescue for being unacceptably slow. “I still have a 50% hope that he is alive because there is an oxygen system inside,” Sita Pandey, whose husband was working in the plant when the floods hit, told Nepalese daily newspaper Kantipur. Anushila Bhandari, wife of 33-year-old missing engineer Aurus Bhandari, shared her desperate plea with BBC Nepali: “I wish we could find him. I wish he would come home.” Jiban Khadka, who has a relative trapped in the tunnel network, echoed the widespread frustration: “The longer it takes, the more our hope dies. This operation must move much faster because every second is meaningful to us. It’s a frustratingly slow operation.”

Rescue teams made limited progress on Monday, when one search team managed to advance into a tunnel leading to one of the hydropower plants, only to withdraw after finding no signs of trapped workers. Air pumping operations into accessible tunnel segments began over the weekend, but family members argue that life-saving efforts should have been launched far earlier.

Australian tunneling expert Arnold Dix, who is advising Nepalese authorities on the search remotely, explained the extraordinary challenges rescuers face in navigating the transformed landscape. “The actual signature of them has gone – everything is just missing. It looks like a lunar landscape,” Dix told BBC Radio 4’s *World at One*. The former head of the International Tunneling Association added that massive boulders, some larger than residential homes, have blocked all original access points, forcing crews to rely on controlled blasts to clear paths: “I’ve never seen that before in my life. It’s just an extraordinary operation.” Even amid the logistical hurdles, Dix remains cautiously optimistic that some survivors may be found, noting that the enclosed tunnel environment could have provided protection from the fast-moving floodwaters.

Downstream in Nepal’s Chitwan District, the tragedy has moved to the grim phase of recovering and identifying victims. Floodwaters carried nearly 300 bodies to the district’s riverbanks, overwhelming local authorities who have been forced to arrange makeshift burials for unidentified remains, as there are not enough refrigeration units to store all the corpses. Local chief district officer Ganesh Aryaal told BBC Nepali: “We don’t have enough freezers here… We had to choose this last alternative of temporary burial system. We are really overwhelmed.” Medical teams and volunteers have begun extracting DNA samples from the remains to enable future identification, so relatives can claim their loved ones once testing is complete.

Across the border in Tibet, Chinese state media reports a death toll of 16, with another 546 people listed as missing. Footage and first-hand accounts of the disaster have been heavily censored on Chinese digital platforms, and authorities have issued administrative penalties – ranging from fines and warnings to short-term detentions – for social media users who speculate that the actual casualty count is far higher than the official figure. Nepalese authorities have also taken steps to curb what they classify as misinformation, ordering the removal of social media content that spreads unconfirmed claims about the flood disaster.

To date, Prime Minister Shah confirmed that a total of 11,379 people have been rescued from flood-affected areas across Nepal, and that rescue operations have been intensified to accelerate progress for the trapped hydropower workers.