标签： Asia

A catastrophic flash flood that swept across the Nepal-Tibet border has triggered a massive human tragedy, leaving more than 150 people confirmed dead and hundreds more still missing, as anxious families gather in Kathmandu hospitals waiting for any update on their loved ones. A BBC reporting team has gained on-the-ground access to a major hospital in Nepal’s capital, where grieving and worried relatives have crowded waiting areas, clinging to faint hopes that their family members will be found alive amid the ongoing disaster response.

The sudden, destructive flash flood hit the cross-border region with little warning, catching local communities and travelers off guard. Rescue teams have been working around the clock to reach hard-hit, remote areas, but damaged infrastructure and unpredictable terrain have slowed search operations. As the death toll continues to climb, authorities across both Nepal and the Tibetan region have mobilized additional resources to step up recovery and search efforts for the still-missing victims. For families gathered in Kathmandu’s hospitals, every passing hour brings a new wave of uncertainty, as they wait for official confirmation of whether their relatives are among the survivors or the growing list of casualties.

A catastrophic natural disaster consisting of massive landslides and destructive flash floods has swept across the Nepal-China border region, leaving a trail of widespread destruction and leaving hundreds of people either confirmed dead or unaccounted for. Emergency teams from both nations have already launched active search and rescue operations to locate survivors trapped in the debris or cut off by floodwaters, as authorities on both sides of the border warn that the final human cost will likely be far higher than current preliminary counts.

The disaster has sparked immediate uncertainty over its root cause. Nepal’s top foreign affairs official initially told reporters that a small earthquake had been recorded along the border just minutes before the landslides began, leading to early speculation that seismic activity had triggered the movement of unstable mountain slopes. However, updated data analysis from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has found no evidence of a seismic event in the area prior to the disaster, leaving investigators still working to pinpoint what caused the massive slope failure.

Located roughly 64 kilometers north of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, the affected border region includes popular trekking routes that draw thousands of mountaineering tourists and religious pilgrims annually, making the disaster a cross-national humanitarian concern. Visual footage from Nepal’s Nuwakot district, one of the hardest-hit areas, captures a powerful surging wall of mud, rock and debris moving rapidly through the valley, sweeping away entire residential buildings, paved roads and parked vehicles as local residents run for higher ground to escape the advancing hazard. Multiple major river systems, including the Bhote Koshi, Trishuli and Narayani, have all recorded severe flood levels that have exacerbated the damage across the region.

As of the latest update, casualties have been confirmed on both sides of the border, with roughly 100 deaths reported jointly by Nepalese and Chinese authorities. Official data from Nepal’s national tourism board puts the current number of missing people at 403, a group that includes 341 foreign nationals. Indian nationals make up the largest share of missing foreign visitors, with people from 25 other nations also unaccounted for, including 47 citizens of the United States and 33 from the United Kingdom.

Satellite imagery captured by Reuters in the days immediately after the disaster dramatically illustrates the scale of flooding around the Khadga Bhanjyang community located along the Trishuli River, showing dramatic changes to the landscape and infrastructure between pre- and post-disaster captures.

National leaders across Asia have responded to the crisis with offers of support and pledges of coordinated action. Nepal’s Prime Minister released a statement saying the entire country has been left shocked and deeply distressed by the disaster, confirming that Nepalese authorities are working closely with Chinese officials to coordinate cross-border relief efforts. Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered an all-out search and rescue operation for missing people, and has directed officials to strengthen hazard monitoring and early warning systems to prevent secondary disasters that could threaten recovery teams. Neighboring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also announced that New Delhi stands ready to provide all possible forms of humanitarian assistance to Nepal as it responds to the crisis. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has added that the British government is committed to doing everything in its power to support British nationals affected by the disaster in Nepal.

In a move that has escalated long-running tensions over Palestinian refugee services in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli military and security forces seized the final remaining operational facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the city on Tuesday. The operation, personally led by controversial National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, targeted the Qalandiya Vocational Training Institute, a 70-year-old educational campus sitting on 8.8 hectares of land in Kafr Aqab, a Palestinian-majority area north of Jerusalem’s central urban core.

After entering the campus, Israeli forces evacuated the entire site, briefly detained and questioned roughly 40 institute employees before issuing orders barring them from ever returning to the property. For more than seven decades, the center has delivered free vocational training to hundreds of Palestinian refugee teens annually, equipping young people with marketable skills across 16 different trade specializations. Following the completion of the takeover, Israeli personnel raised the Israeli flag in the institute’s central courtyard.

Ben Gvir publicly celebrated the seizure in a social media video filmed from the office of the former UNRWA institute director, declaring “On my watch there is no UNRwa, there is no management, they will not be here.” Shortly after the operation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the raid had been conducted on his direct orders.

UNRWA issued an immediate formal condemnation of the incursion, emphasizing that armed Israeli personnel entered a designated United Nations facility without any prior authorization or consent from the global body. The agency noted that the Qalandiya Training Center is a UN property protected by formal privileges and immunities guaranteed under international law, and that its status as an inviolable UN site must be fully respected by all parties.

The seizure unfolded concurrent with a wider Israeli military assault on the adjacent Qalandiya refugee camp. Prior to entering the institute, forces opened fire with live ammunition and deployed tear gas against local Palestinians who had gathered to protest the impending operation. A 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot and wounded during the clashes, local sources confirmed.

Palestinian officials say the takeover of the last UNRWA facility in East Jerusalem is the culmination of years of targeted incitement by the Israeli government against the agency. In 2024, Israel’s parliament passed a national law banning UNRWA from operating across Israeli-controlled territory, a measure introduced following unproven allegations that a small number of agency employees participated in the October 7, 2023 cross-border attack from Gaza. The Israeli government began full enforcement of the ban in 2025, extending it to occupied East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1980 in a move that has never been recognized by the international community and violates core international law principles.

Since enforcement of the ban began, Israeli authorities have shut down six UNRWA-run schools, three UNRWA-operated health clinics, and the agency’s former East Jerusalem headquarters in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The Qalandiya Vocational Training Institute was the last surviving UNRWA facility still operating in the city.

Originally founded in 1952 on land donated by the Jordanian government, the Qalandiya institute was one of the first permanent UNRWA facilities established in East Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Its location carries unique strategic and political significance: while Kafr Aqab falls within the municipal boundaries Israel unilaterally set for Jerusalem, the area is physically cut off from the rest of the city by the Israeli separation barrier and Qalandiya checkpoint. More than 150,000 Palestinians reside in the Kafr Aqab and surrounding area, most of whom have relied on UNRWA for critical services including education, healthcare, and refugee support for generations.

Marouf al-Rifai, an adviser to the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem governorate, warned that the targeting of UNRWA carries implications far beyond the agency itself. “This is a very dangerous indication that institutions with international and UN immunity are being targeted,” al-Rifai told Middle East Eye, adding that Israeli authorities have expanded their crackdown to dozens of other international organizations operating in East Jerusalem in recent months. He reported that 36 international and non-governmental organizations have already been shut down, had their operating licenses revoked, or been ordered to relocate their offices from Jerusalem to Ramallah.

According to al-Rifai, Israeli plans call for converting seized facilities like the Qalandiya institute into Israeli public institutions that teach the Israeli national curriculum, a move widely seen as an effort to advance Israeli sovereignty claims over occupied East Jerusalem in densely populated Palestinian areas. “These projects will be built in the heart of a densely populated Palestinian area, as the area surrounding the institute is home to more than 150,000 Palestinians,” he said.

Local Palestinian leaders framed the raid as a deliberate show of force intended to intimidate Palestinian residents of the area. Mohammed Saeed, media director for the Qalandiya camp Popular Committee for Services, said the raid underscores Israel’s broader efforts to displace Palestinian presence and eliminate UN-backed refugee support in the city. “The message that the camp’s residents want to convey after the raid is their steadfastness on the land, and we call on the international community to take a clearer stance against Israeli actions,” he said.

For 30-year-old Algerian engineer Mokhtar Benabdelkader, childhood stories of his grandfather Mohamed have never faded—nor has the shadow of France’s first nuclear test in the Algerian Sahara. What Mohamed described to his grandson was no small desert rodent, but the 70-kiloton plutonium bomb codenamed *Gerboise Bleue* (Blue Jerboa), detonated on February 13, 1960, in Reggane, deep in the arid heart of the North African territory. At the time, Algeria was still under French colonial rule, and Paris had selected the remote Sahara as its testing ground to advance its nuclear ambitions.

Mohamed, who resided with his family in the small hamlet of Bahou, just dozens of kilometers from the blast site, woke that morning to an event that would shape the rest of his life and the lives of generations that followed. As Benabdelkader recounts his grandfather’s memory: A searing, blinding light seared across the sky, followed by a low, rumbling roar that tore through the ground like a violent earthquake. Mohamed survived the immediate blast, but the 70-kiloton device—four times more powerful than the U.S. nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945—left a trail of destruction that stretched across a radioactive fallout zone spanning 200 kilometers wide and 100 kilometers long. Plants, wildlife, and human communities alike were killed by the invisible toxic radiation. Mohamed ultimately died of liver cancer in 1992, a disease that had already felled dozens of other residents in his village.

After Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, Mohamed moved his entire family 1,500 kilometers away to Adrar, convinced that relocating would let them escape the threat of radiation. But the danger had already spread. *Gerboise Bleue* was only the first of 17 French nuclear tests—both atmospheric and underground—conducted across two Saharan sites, Reggane and In Ekker, that continued through 1966. To this day, France has refused to formally acknowledge the full scope of the public health and environmental damage caused by these tests, and has repeatedly declined to share detailed maps marking the locations of buried radioactive waste, ranging from small hand tools to decommissioned military vehicles contaminated with radiation.

In her work *Colonial Toxicity*, Algerian historian Samia Henni has documented how the remnants of these tests continue to poison the Sahara today. “Vast areas are littered with abandoned objects and materials… The waste scattered across them is likely to be contaminated and radioactive,” Henni writes. “Not only does it pollute the desert and the many forms of life it shelters, but it also infringes upon the dignity of the Saharan people, who are denied the right to live in uncontaminated territory.” Henni emphasizes that France’s ongoing refusal to address the geological and ecological harm of its nuclear tests is not an oversight—it is a core part of the enduring colonial project that deliberately erases the violence of colonial extraction and its long-term intergenerational harm.

Henni’s research lays bare the catastrophic demographic toll of the testing program. In the Reggane region alone, the total population has dropped by half, falling from 40,000 to just 20,000 residents. Exact casualty numbers remain impossible to calculate, because France keeps all documents related to the tests sealed under military secrecy. Paris argues that releasing the archives would expose sensitive nuclear technology and set a precedent for opening other classified military nuclear records.

Patrick Bouveret, a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and co-founder of the independent Arms Observatory in Lyon, describes France’s nuclear archives as being under “double lock.” A 2008 French heritage law created a permanent category of unreleasable archives covering weapons of mass destruction, including all nuclear materials. A 2021 anti-terrorism and intelligence law further tightened restrictions, granting French military authorities an absolute veto over the release of any documents related to radioactive fallout or waste burial at the Algerian test sites. Bouveret notes that leftover surface and underground waste can remain toxic for tens of thousands of years, contaminating groundwater and the regional food chain, and many of the bombs tested were 10 to 20 times more powerful than the weapons the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 2020, Bouveret and ICAN president Jean-Marie Collin compiled a partial inventory of radioactive waste sites in the Algerian Sahara, drawing on limited declassified records and accounts from former civilian and military personnel who participated in the tests. Today, Algerian authorities use this study to formalize their demands for France to take accountability for the legacy of nuclear testing. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune and army chief of staff Said Chengriha have repeatedly called on Paris to support Algiers in rehabilitating contaminated territories, but France has consistently ignored these requests, offering no official or unofficial information to Algerian authorities.

Collin outlines three core reasons for France’s persistent refusal to cooperate. First, the history of French colonial rule in Algeria remains a deeply divisive issue that fuels tensions within the French political class. Second, the French Ministries of the Armed Forces and Foreign Affairs fear that releasing information about the tests would open the door to demands for massive financial and moral reparations. Third, acknowledging the full human and environmental damage caused by the tests would undermine France’s long-held doctrine of nuclear deterrence, casting public doubt on the legitimacy of the country’s nuclear program.

Local communities in affected regions have already documented clear signs of growing public health crises. In 2021, El Geith El Kadem, a charity that supports vulnerable patients in Adrar, warned of a worrying surge in all types of cancer, congenital birth defects, and infertility linked to radiation exposure from the historic tests. “Diseases linked to radioactivity are passed down through generations,” says the NGO’s founder Abderahmane Toumi. He adds that the health and environmental risks will persist indefinitely until all contaminated sites are properly remediated.

Last year, Algeria’s parliament passed a formal law requiring France to decontaminate the test sites used between 1960 and 1966, compel cleanup of the polluted regions of Reggane and In Ekker, and hand over full topographic maps of all radioactive waste burial sites. But under current international and French legal frameworks, Paris faces no binding obligation to comply with these demands.

The 1962 Evian Accords, which ended the Algerian War of Independence and granted France permission to continue nuclear testing in the Sahara through 1966 (Paris conducted 11 tests after Algeria gained independence), included no provisions requiring France to rehabilitate contaminated sites. France has also refused to ratify the 2017 amendment to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that requires signatory states to clean up affected test territories.

While France agreed to open preliminary discussions with Algeria and establish a joint expert committee to assess hazards and draft a decontamination plan in 2008, the committee never made meaningful progress. Decades of inconsistent, roller-coaster diplomatic relations between Algiers and Paris have blocked all movement on the issue. Though French President Emmanuel Macron has made small symbolic gestures to ease historical tensions between the two countries during his two terms in office, he has taken no substantive action to meet Algeria’s demands.

Notably, in 2021 Macron formally acknowledged “France’s debt” to French Polynesia for the 193 nuclear tests Paris conducted in the Pacific between 1966 and 1996. That same year, France established a commission to open archives related to Pacific nuclear tests, created a monitoring service for cleanup operations, and expanded victim compensation under the 2010 Morin Law. The Morin Law established a compensation process for people suffering from radiation-linked illnesses caused by French nuclear tests, covering both French Polynesia and Algeria. To date, however, only one Algerian victim has received compensation out of just over 1,000 total claimants globally.

Collin explains that the Morin Law includes a requirement that makes compensation nearly impossible for most Algerian victims: To qualify, claimants must prove they resided near the test sites at the time of the explosions. But most Saharan residents at the time were nomadic, with no fixed address to document their presence. Under pressure from Polynesian activists, the French parliament passed a new bill in May this year that eliminated the requirement to prove a direct causal link between a victim’s illness and the tests—extending this exemption to Algerian claimants—but the residency requirement remains in place.

For Algeria, financial compensation is no longer the primary demand anyway. In 2024, President Tebboune made clear Algeria’s position in an interview with French weekly *Le Point*: “We respect our dead so deeply that financial compensation would be a humiliation. We are not a begging people.”

With France continuing to refuse to hand over maps of waste sites, Algeria launched its own independent decontamination operations in February 2025, relying on domestic investigations and research. The current strategy involves collecting contaminated waste and sealing it in specially prepared reinforced concrete containers for long-term storage. Military-led decontamination work began at the Taourirt Tan Afella site near In Ekker, the location of France’s second underground nuclear test, codenamed Operation Beryl. The test suffered a catastrophic containment failure, producing an explosion equivalent to 30 to 40 kilotons of TNT. Cracks in the underground test chamber allowed radioactive gas to escape, forming a toxic radioactive cloud and releasing molten radioactive material that destroyed the region’s entire ecosystem. A recent French parliamentary report confirmed that four of the 13 underground tests conducted in the Algerian Sahara were never fully contained, and the region still has dangerous levels of cesium-137 and plutonium contamination to this day.

A chaotic and frightening emergency unfolded at a hospital in Islamabad recently, forcing patients, staff and visitors to run for their lives when smoke began filling the building. Among those caught up in the crisis was Hivsa Walid, who described the split-second decision that saved a newborn’s life in an urgent first-person account of the disaster.

Walid was inside the medical facility when she first spotted the telltale haze of smoke curling through hallways. Recognizing the immediate danger, she did not hesitate: she grabbed her sister-in-law’s hours-old newborn, and the pair fled the building as fast as their feet could carry them. The harrowing escape unfolded in mere moments, capturing the chaos and uncertainty that faced everyone inside when the emergency broke out.

The incident has drawn renewed attention to public safety standards at healthcare facilities across Pakistan, where emergency preparedness protocols are often stretched thin by underfunding and overcrowding. For Walid and the family of the newborn, however, the focus remains on the miraculous outcome: both mother (who was recovering at the hospital after childbirth) and child escaped the emergency without serious injury, a small piece of good news amid a scary situation that could have ended in far greater tragedy.

Footage and witness accounts of the escape have circulated widely in local media, highlighting how quickly routine hospital visits can turn into life-or-death situations when safety protocols fail. Local authorities have not yet released full details on the cause of the smoke or any official count of injuries from the incident, but survivor accounts like Walid’s have underscored the importance of robust emergency planning at medical centers across the country.