标签： Asia

High-stakes diplomatic and military discussions between senior Israeli defense officials and their Egyptian counterparts unfolded in Cairo this week, framed by Israeli public media as a wide-ranging strategic dialogue centered on evolving regional tensions, the crisis in Gaza, and expanded bilateral security collaboration.

Israeli public broadcaster Kan News reports that the negotiations focused on aligning policy coordination between the two nations, even as frictions persist over Israel’s ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Egypt has long been positioned as a central mediator between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, and is expected to play a defining role in shaping Gaza’s political and administrative future once hostilities end. In a rare informal moment during the visit, the delegations reportedly watched Egypt’s 2026 FIFA World Cup qualifier against Argentina together.

Israel and Egypt have maintained formal diplomatic ties since the historic 1979 Camp David peace treaty, with cross-border security and joint military cooperation serving as the cornerstone of their bilateral relationship. In recent months, however, relations have been strained by Israel’s large-scale military operation in Gaza, which Egyptian authorities have warned risks triggering widespread instability along Egypt’s northeastern border with the enclave.

Per Kan’s reporting, the primary goal of this week’s meeting was to formalize and strengthen Egypt’s mediation mandate between Israel and Hamas. Israeli officials have noted that Cairo has adopted a notably firmer, more hawkish stance in its negotiations with Hamas in recent weeks. As part of emerging proposals, Egyptian negotiators have offered to pressure Hamas to relinquish its weapons stockpiles, which would be placed under a third-party custodianship arrangement as a core component of a broader postwar governance deal.

The talks coincided with a landmark political shift within Gaza: Hamas announced this week it will dissolve the administrative body that has governed the blockaded enclave for nearly 20 years. Ismail al-Thawabta, head of Hamas’s government media office, confirmed to Agence France-Presse that Mohammed al-Farra, leader of Hamas’s emergency government committee, has formally submitted his resignation and dissolved the body to clear the way for a handover of power to the newly formed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).

The NCAG is a panel of independent Palestinian technocrats based in Gaza, established to manage day-to-day governance of the enclave under a framework agreed in a September 2024 ceasefire deal brokered by the United States, Qatar, and Egypt. Critically, the committee has not been able to enter Gaza to assume its duties and currently operates out of Cairo amid ongoing Israeli military operations.

These political developments unfold against a backdrop of persistent violence in Gaza, even after a temporary ceasefire was announced in October 2024. Data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirms that Israeli forces have killed at least 1,092 Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire went into effect. Since the start of Israel’s full-scale military campaign in October 2023, the total Palestinian death toll in the enclave has surpassed 73,000, according to ministry figures.

HAVANA – For decades, Cuba’s colorful vintage gasoline-powered cars were as much a symbol of the island nation as the blue waters of the Caribbean. Today, those iconic classics have nearly vanished from city streets, displaced by a new workhorse of daily transit: small electric tricycles, most originating from Chinese manufacturers. This quiet transportation revolution has been driven by a years-long economic crisis that has spiraled into a crippling fuel shortage, pushing hundreds of thousands of Cubans to adapt to new realities of movement and commerce.

The shift traces back to early 2025, when former U.S. President Donald Trump announced new threats of tariffs against any nation that exported oil to Cuba. The island has long produced just 40% of the petroleum it requires to meet domestic demand, relying on regular monthly shipments to keep its economy moving. Before the announcement, Cuba received an average of eight oil tankers per month. In the months following the threat, only one tanker arrived on its shores in late March. The sudden drop in fuel supplies sent shockwaves through every sector of Cuban life.

Public transit schedules were gutted, food and medicine shortages deepened, and rolling blackouts across the island exacerbated strains on an already fragile power grid that has struggled for decades. Even the vintage cars that once defined Havana’s streetscape were left idling, as gasoline became prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible to find.

It is in this context that compact electric tricycles have risen from a niche import to an indispensable part of daily life. Unlike the heavy smoke-belching vintage cars they replaced, these three-wheeled vehicles produce no tailpipe emissions, and can serve multiple purposes: many are used to cover fixed bus routes abandoned by state transit systems, haul commercial goods for small businesses, and even collect garbage in Havana neighborhoods. For Cubans who need to travel with heavy grocery loads, the tricycles fill a gap that has been left by collapsed public transit.

Most tricycles retail for between $2,000 and $4,000, a steep sum for Cubans where average monthly salaries hover around just $10 for state employees and $40 for private sector workers. Even so, thousands have found ways to obtain the vehicles: many sold their old gas-powered cars to raise funds, others received them as gifts from relatives living abroad where the tricycles are far cheaper, and small business owners have invested their profits to purchase the vehicles, calculating they can recoup the cost through fare and delivery revenue.

Major Chinese brands including Zonsen and Jinpeng dominate the market. Most units are purchased in third countries like Panama, then shipped to Cuba by relatives or independent importers for resale, running on gel or lithium batteries. Under a bilateral trade agreement with China, the Vedca brand is even assembled domestically on the island.

To adapt to the island’s persistent rolling blackouts and strained power grid, many tricycle owners have taken modifications into their own hands: outfitting their vehicles with small solar panels mounted on the seat awnings that allow them to recharge while parked or on the move, eliminating reliance on the unstable domestic grid. The solar panel upgrade adds roughly $500 to the total cost, but owners say the investment pays for itself quickly by letting them keep operating through fuel shortages and extended blackouts.

“There are so many tricycles in Havana that you can’t spend 10 minutes on a street without seeing countless numbers of them pass by,” said Carlos Álvarez, a 29-year-old engineer who runs a local workshop specializing in electric vehicle modifications, as he worked to install a solar panel mounting bracket on a customer’s tricycle.

Liecer de la Cruz, a 40-year-old tricycle owner, summed up the new reality: “This is how people get around now.” The rides are far from luxurious: slow, un-airconditioned, and often cramped, riders say, but it remains a far better option than walking for miles.

For Berta Ferrer, a 52-year-old store clerk who works four days a week in central Havana, the 500 Cuban peso (less than $1) fare for a tricycle ride is a major monthly expense, but one she cannot avoid. “If you can pay for it, you just take it; otherwise you can’t go anywhere,” she explained.

Ricardo Quintero, an engineer who uses his tricycle to haul fresh produce to the family vegetable stand he operates, said he believes the shift to electric three-wheelers is permanent. “I think this is here to stay,” he said.

In a move that deepens long-standing tensions in the occupied West Bank, Israeli authorities have ordered the seizure of large swathes of privately owned Palestinian agricultural land to expand a major settler highway. The project, which focuses on widening Route 60 — one of the West Bank’s largest settler-controlled transportation arteries running east of Ramallah and south of Nablus — aims to add new lanes and strengthen connectivity between illegal Israeli Jewish settlements scattered across the occupied territory.

Multiple Palestinian communities across the region face the loss of their historic farmland, with the town of Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya, located east of Ramallah, among the hardest hit. The highway expansion runs parallel to thousands of dunams of the town’s cultivated agricultural land, much of which has been held by local families for generations.

Unlike formal property seizure protocols that require direct notification to landowners, Palestinian farmers discovered crumpled confiscation orders discarded on their property rather than receiving them through official, direct channels. While the orders confirm the seizure of hundreds of dunams, the full extent of the land takeover remains unclear due to this haphazard notification process. Locals estimate the total confiscated land from Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya could reach thousands of dunams, including thousands of ancient olive trees, some of which are more than 1,000 years old and form the backbone of the local economy.

For families like the Salems, the order threatens to erase a multi-generational legacy. Taysir Salem, a landowner in Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya, told Middle East Eye that his family inherited 180 dunams (18 hectares) of land planted with trees by his grandfather, all of which is now marked for seizure. “Route 60 will be extended through our land, and at our expense, they will take it by force and bulldoze half of a hill that belongs to us,” Salem said. “All the neighbouring towns will also be subjected to land theft because of this road.”

Parallel to the official seizure order, Israeli settlers have launched a coordinated campaign of intimidation to bar Palestinian landowners from accessing their property. Last week alone, Salem said settlers arrived on tractors and expelled local farmers from their land at gunpoint, leaving residents in constant fear of further violence. “We are in great danger because they want to take the land by force,” he added.

All affected Palestinian landholders hold full, formal ownership documents proving their legal claim to the properties that have been their livelihoods for decades. Outraged by the seizure and what they call Israeli impunity, landowners are calling for urgent intervention from the international community. Salem criticized the United States’ long-standing refusal to confront Israeli expansion in the West Bank, noting that “The American government has the power to stop Israel from taking our land, but it won’t. If it were any other country, it would have stopped them, but it won’t force Israel.”

The Route 60 expansion is not an isolated incident. It aligns with a accelerating pattern of land seizure across the occupied West Bank that predates this latest order. Last June, Israel announced the confiscation of 464 dunams of land from the town of Sinjil, located north of Ramallah, which also sits along the path of the highway expansion. The current seizure will take land from at least five additional nearby Palestinian communities: Al-Sawiya, Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, Sinjil, and Turmusayya, in addition to Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya.

Palestinian analysts and community leaders view the Route 60 expansion as a core strategy to entrench Israel’s illegal settlement project in the West Bank. The highway connects dozens of Israeli settlements and unauthorized outposts to one another and to mainland Israel, enabling further settlement expansion while simultaneously fragmenting contiguous Palestinian territory, cutting off Palestinian villages and towns from their surrounding agricultural lands, and fragmenting the geographic basis for any future independent Palestinian state.

Abdul Samad Abdul Aziz, spokesperson for the Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya municipality, explained that farmers brought the discarded seizure notices to municipal offices just a few days ago. The orders allow a 60-day window for affected landowners to file appeals, but community leaders say the process is stacked against them. “The decision is dangerous for the town and the farmers, and it is unjust because it will cut off their livelihoods after stealing their land and trees. We don’t know what we will do,” Abdul Aziz said. “The residents will not be able to live without their land while settlers continue to attack farmers and shoot at them whenever they try to reach their land.”

Recent data from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission underscores the scale of ongoing land seizure in 2026. The group’s semi-annual report, released earlier this year, documents that Israeli authorities have seized more than 4,379 dunams of Palestinian land between January and the end of June 2026. Most of these seizures have been carried out through 40 separate military orders, under a range of official pretexts, to make way for four buffer zones around settlements, 16 new security roads, 12 military installations, and other Israeli state and settler infrastructure. The recent Route 60 land seizure fits directly into this broader trend of accelerated territorial takeover, Abdul Aziz said, leaving Palestinians with no option but to appeal to the global community for intervention to halt the expansion.

Concurrent with the Route 60 controversy, ongoing settler violence continues to roil other West Bank communities. In late April 2026, a confrontation broke out in the village of Masafer Yatta after settlers attempted to steal livestock from a local Palestinian family. When the family confronted the intruders, Israeli military forces intervened, assaulting multiple Palestinians and detaining six people, including one woman, according to on-the-ground reporting from Middle East Eye.

Tensions around the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz have escalated sharply in recent weeks, following a series of Iranian actions on commercial shipping that have drawn a direct military response from the United States and thrown global energy markets into uncertainty. What Tehran frames as a defensive assertion of sovereignty over its adjacent waters is increasingly being analyzed as a high-risk short-term tactical gambit — one that could backfire spectacularly, leaving Iran politically and economically isolated across the Middle East if Tehran does not adjust its course quickly.

The United States has launched a new wave of military strikes targeting Iranian assets, with an unclear timeline for operations but a clear, bounded core goal: guaranteeing unimpeded passage through the strait, which Iran has asserted full sovereign control over. This new round of confrontation has opened the door to both new negotiating possibilities and catastrophic escalation for Tehran.

Shipping data underscores the immediate disruption of Iranian actions: on July 8, only 13 oil tankers completed transits of the strait, down from a seven-day daily average of 33 crossings prior to the escalation. The sharp drop in traffic came after Iranian forces targeted at least three commercial vessels, reigniting open hostilities with U.S. military forces deployed in the region.

Global oil markets have not yet adjusted pricing to account for a full closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supplies transit. But analysts warn market volatility and anxiety will spike sharply in the coming week if the two sides fail to reach a temporary truce to de-escalate.

Current discussions around a potential truce center on a vague compromise framework under which Iran would drop open threats to block the strait, without formally committing to unrestricted passage in writing. This tactical, short-term agreement masks far deeper medium- and long-term strategic calculations for all involved.

By following through on threats to disrupt Hormuz traffic, analysts argue Iran has already squandered its most powerful long-term strategic leverage: the implicit threat of closing the strait, a tool that only retained value as long as Tehran never actually used it. As regional powers move to bypass the choke point entirely, that leverage has been permanently weakened. Gulf Cooperation Council states have already accelerated development of alternative pipeline routes that would carry oil exports around Hormuz, connecting production fields directly to the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Once these alternative routes are fully operational, the only oil that will remain dependent on Hormuz transits is Iranian crude itself, leaving Tehran trapped by the very blockade it imposed.

Some factions within Iran’s leadership argue that leveraging the strait for short-term gain is a net strategic win. Their calculation holds that even a partial disruption of traffic, limited to sporadic attacks on commercial shipping rather than a full closure, can be enough to push global insurance premiums for shipping through the strait higher, driving up global oil prices and achieving maximum geopolitical impact with minimal direct military commitment. Even with 90% of traffic continuing as normal, the elevated risk premium would shift global markets in Iran’s favor, per this reasoning.

In response to this threat, hardline factions in U.S. policy circles have floated a far more extreme option: a full military occupation of Iran’s Kharg Island, the major oil export terminal that controls northern access to the Strait of Hormuz. Critics warn this is a reckless proposal that would drag the U.S. into another open-ended Middle Eastern quagmire, echoing the costly failures of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. If U.S. forces occupied Kharg, they would immediately become fixed targets for Iranian missile batteries that have been pre-positioned and hidden across the Iranian mainland, forcing the U.S. to escalate further to protect occupying troops and sinking Washington deeper into an unwinnable conflict.

While Israeli leadership has openly pushed for full regime change in Tehran to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program and regional influence, most other major regional powers — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan — oppose this outcome. These states currently maintain a transactional, pragmatic alignment with the U.S. but have fraught, tense relations with Israel. A full regime change that installed a pro-U.S., pro-Israel government in Tehran would completely upend the regional balance of power, forcing every state in the Middle East to renegotiate their strategic relationships, a prospect no existing government views as desirable. While no regional power supports a nuclear-armed Iran or Iranian control of the strait, a pro-Israel Tehran is seen as a far greater threat to their national interests.

Against the backdrop of already overlapping global crises — an open, grinding war in Ukraine, tense undefined strategic competition with China, and accelerating nuclear rearmament in North Korea — analysts question whether launching an open-ended military adventure in Iran makes any strategic sense for the U.S.

Currently, Iran’s entire strategic approach to the standoff remains rooted in short-term calculus, combining ongoing threats to Hormuz with incremental progress in enriching fissile material for a potential nuclear weapon. Both the U.S. and Iran are currently pursuing competing election-tied strategies: the Trump administration is seeking a quick resolution to the standoff to avoid it becoming a liability for Republican candidates in November’s midterm elections, while Iran aims to keep the threat of disruption alive through the election cycle to extract maximum concessions.

But this Iranian strategy, much like its threats to block Hormuz, has a very limited shelf life. Trump’s willingness to negotiate concessions will disappear almost immediately after the midterm votes are counted. Furthermore, the combination of Iran’s nuclear progress and its chokehold on Hormuz has created an unexpected convergence of interests among regional powers opposed to Tehran, cutting across pre-existing divides. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and India all share an interest in pushing back against Iran’s actions, and with sufficient time and diplomatic outreach, could be convinced to join a coordinated effort to reopen the strait and roll back Iran’s nuclear program. Such a coordinated regional push would look very different from the U.S.- and Israeli-led efforts Iran has faced to date, creating new strategic openings and risks for both Israel and Iran. For Tehran, the window to adjust course and strike a favorable deal is closing rapidly.

Six days after a joint US-Israeli air strike killed Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at his Tehran compound on February 28, the 86-year-old leader was laid to rest in the holy Shia shrine of his hometown of Mashhad. The multi-city funeral procession drew an unprecedented turnout of participants, drawing global attention to the shifting dynamics of the ongoing conflict between the US-Israel alliance and Iran.

According to official Iranian media reports, an estimated 41 to 43 million Iranians took part in public ceremonies held across the country and neighboring Iraq. Iran’s state-owned broadcaster Press TV described the gathering as “the largest procession the world has ever witnessed.” State-led funeral rituals kicked off on Saturday, when tens of thousands of mourners packed Tehran’s Grand Mosalla religious complex to pay their final respects beside Khamenei’s flag-draped coffin. Commemorative events were staged across five major cities: Tehran and Qom in Iran, and Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, before the procession concluded with burial in Mashhad.

Many attendees openly expressed anger at the attack that killed Khamenei, alongside his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter. Mourners chanted anti-US slogans including “Death to America,” carried banners calling for the assassination of former US President Donald Trump, and raised red flags emblazoned with the word “Martyr” to honor Khamenei.

A towering figure in Iranian politics, Khamenei first took office as president during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, and succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader in 1989, leading the country for nearly 34 years. The strike that killed Khamenei marked the opening day of the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, launched with the stated core goals of forcing Iran’s surrender and achieving regime change by removing the country’s top leadership. To date, the campaign has failed to meet these initial objectives,

Rather than fracturing Iranian society and destabilizing the government, the strike has consolidated domestic support for the Iranian government and allowed Tehran to strengthen its strategic position in the region. Iran has since seized full control of the critical Strait of Hormuz, a major chokepoint for global oil trade, and forced the United States to enter diplomatic negotiations. Domestically in the US, widespread opposition to the conflict has dragged down former President Trump’s approval ratings, with a recent public poll showing a majority of American voters view the war in Iran as “not worth it.”

Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has kept a low public profile since assuming office, but three of Khamenei’s sons, who had not been seen publicly since the outbreak of the war, were present at the funeral service. A wide range of international delegations also attended the ceremony to pay their respects, including senior diplomatic and government officials from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, China, and Turkey. Representatives from regional armed groups allied to Iran also took part: Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah from Lebanon, and Ansar Allah (the Houthis) from Yemen.

The funeral takes place amid escalating tensions that threaten a fragile ceasefire between the two sides. The truce was formalized in a memorandum of understanding reached one month ago, but on Wednesday, Trump officially announced the end of the ceasefire and launched a verbal attack on Iranian leadership, calling them “scum.” Fighting has since resumed, leaving regional and global stability at heightened risk.