标签： Oceania

Last month, a massive wave of 72,000 aspiring migrants crossing from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta sent shockwaves across the Mediterranean, reviving haunting memories of Europe’s past migration emergencies. But this event carried a striking new twist: unlike earlier migration surges driven by war or extreme poverty, many of those who joined the crossing were not fleeing immediate destitution or conflict.

On paper, Morocco’s economy is in the middle of an impressive expansion. The country registered 5% gross domestic product growth in 2025, fueled by billions in large-scale infrastructure investments tied to its co-hosting role for the 2030 FIFA World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal. Even with this visible growth, however, the dream of building a life in Europe retains an unshakable grip on many young Moroccans, rooted in deep-seated social and economic anxieties that official growth figures fail to capture.

In the immediate aftermath of the mass crossing, Moroccan security forces pushed roughly 70,000 migrants back across the border, and dozens of people lost their lives during the dangerous journey. Still, the allure of Europe remains powerful enough that Moroccan authorities have already intervened to block new calls circulating on social media for another mass crossing this Saturday, a public holiday in Spain.

Experts point to stark, persistent structural inequalities between Morocco’s urban centers and rural regions as a core driving force. Official data puts youth unemployment at 9.5% across the entire country, but that figure jumps to 27% for young people in rural communities. Even more striking are the gaps in overall wealth: World Bank data shows that Spain’s GDP per capita is roughly eight times higher than Morocco’s, despite both countries facing similarly high youth unemployment rates.

What has surprised analysts most about the recent crossing is the diversity of people who participated, according to Mohamed Benaissa, a researcher with the Northern Observatory for Human Rights (ONDH), which is based in Morocco’s border region adjacent to Ceuta. Benaissa notes that a significant share of those who risked their lives to reach Ceuta actually come from relatively stable socio-economic backgrounds, with many quitting steady jobs as waiters, day laborers, and fishermen abruptly to join the migration attempt.

One of those migrants, 38-year-old Tangiers-based craftsman Said Tribak, spoke to AFP shortly after leaving Ceuta during the peak of the crisis. Tribak explained he dropped all of his work and traveled to the border town of Fnideq with his children after seeing social media posts claiming the frontier was open. After witnessing the chaotic crowding at the crossing, he took his children back home before returning alone to swim across the border. “My life here was not bad,” Tribak told reporters, “but I thought I would earn more if I put the same amount of work in there as I do here.”

For Benaissa, the participation of people like Tribak in the mass crossing is far more than an economic protest: it is a clear signal of a deeper crisis of confidence in Morocco’s future, and in the ability of national institutions to deliver reliable social protection and equal opportunity for young people.

Sociologist Soumaya Naamane Guessos explains that the idea of Europe as a “European El Dorado” — a place of unlimited opportunity — remains deeply entrenched in Moroccan popular culture, especially among younger generations. “In the minds of young Moroccans, Europe is directly tied to success and upward social mobility that feels out of reach at home,” she said, adding that social media has played a powerful amplifying role in spreading this narrative. A recent ONDH survey of 500 young people living near the Morocco-Spain border underscores this: 74% of respondents said they actively follow social media accounts and content focused on preparing to emigrate to Europe.

Morocco has already seen the rise of youth-led social movements in recent years, including the GenZ 212 collective, which organized large-scale nationwide protests last year demanding improved public health and education services. But Guessos argues that young Moroccans still lack accessible, legitimate spaces to voice their frustrations, advocate for their rights, and participate in shaping national policy. “Young people don’t see themselves as actors in Moroccan society,” she said. “They feel like spectators watching a country being built without them.”

Tensions have surged once again along the Israel-Lebanon border after a series of Israeli airstrikes on Saturday left 11 people dead — three of them children — in what marks the deadliest escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah since a June truce calmed violence in the region.

The attack comes less than a month before the two sides are scheduled to convene in Rome for an eighth round of US-sponsored direct negotiations aimed at securing a long-term ceasefire and political settlement, turning a tentative period of calm into a major test of the fragile peace process.

According to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health, seven people, including three children and two women from a single family, were killed in an airstrike that leveled a residential building in the southern village of Ansar. Four additional fatalities and 17 injured people, including one child and 11 women, were recorded in a separate strike on the southern town of Deir Zahrani. Local witnesses described scenes of chaos and devastation, with rescue workers digging through concrete rubble for survivors and displaced residents fleeing north to Sidon with their most essential belongings packed into cars.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed the strikes, stating the Ansar attack targeted Ali Samir Al-Haj Hassan, a senior commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. The IDF acknowledged that Hassan’s family was present at the property but defended the operation, claiming Hassan had deliberately used his relatives as human shields and that civilians were not the intended target. The military added that the strikes were launched in retaliation for a prior Hezbollah attack that left three Israeli soldiers seriously wounded in the Israeli-declared 10-kilometer-deep “security zone” inside southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces have been deployed since the conflict escalated.

Lebanese political leaders across the spectrum have roundly condemned the attacks. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun framed the deadly raids as a deliberate violation of the June framework agreement reached in Washington, calling the strikes a clear challenge to ongoing US-led negotiation efforts. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam emphasized that the civilian casualties, including women and children, can never be justified as military targets, and urged Israel to immediately halt its “extremely dangerous” escalation of hostilities. Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s parliament speaker and a known Hezbollah ally, called on US negotiators and truce sponsors to take urgent responsibility to de-escalate before the situation spirals into full-scale war.

Israeli officials have pushed back against this criticism, framing the strikes as a necessary step to move negotiations forward. A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that the raids should “jumpstart the talks and make them much more serious, not do the opposite,” adding that Israel remains committed to the terms of the June framework, which calls for the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, the deployment of the Lebanese army to the border region, and the full disarmament of Hezbollah. Netanyahu’s spokesman also expressed hope that the Lebanese military would step up to secure the border and help remove Hezbollah’s armed presence from the region.

Hezbollah has rejected the framework deal from its inception and has long opposed the ongoing direct negotiations. In a statement following the strikes, the militant group pledged that the attack will be met with a proportional, appropriate response, and called on Lebanese authorities to abandon what it described as the “humiliating path of direct negotiations.” Hezbollah also claimed the escalation was driven by domestic political calculations, arguing Netanyahu is seeking to ramp up conflict to bolster his re-election prospects in Israel’s upcoming national election later this year.

The current flare-up comes amid a years-long escalation that saw Hezbollah draw Lebanon into the broader regional Middle East war in March, when the group launched large-scale rocket attacks on Israel in support of its Iranian backer. Israel responded with a sustained air campaign and limited ground incursion that Lebanese authorities confirm has killed more than 4,300 people to date, the vast majority of them civilians.

A June memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, followed by a framework ceasefire deal between Israel and Lebanon later that month, brought a sharp reduction in daily violence. But intermittent Israeli strikes and widespread demolition of civilian infrastructure in southern Lebanese villages have continued through the lull. In recent days, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reaffirmed Israel’s intention to maintain a permanent military presence in the southern Lebanon security zone, a position that directly contradicts the terms of the June framework. A senior US State Department official noted last week that “a permanent military presence in south Lebanon is not consistent with the commitments made in the framework,” setting up a point of contention even before the Rome talks get underway.

LONDON — As the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s 2021 return to power in Afghanistan approaches, exiled Afghan award-winning journalist and women’s rights advocate Zahra Joya has issued a urgent plea to the international community, warning that Afghan women are “fighting alone” against systemic gender discrimination and feel entirely abandoned by the global community.

In an exclusive interview with Agence France-Presse conducted in London on August 14, 2026, the 34-year-old Hazara ethnic minority founder of Rukhshana Media reflected on the upheaval that has defined her life and the lives of millions of Afghan women since the hardline Islamist movement retook control of Kabul. “I lost everything in my country five years ago,” Joya said, her voice heavy with grief over the irreversible changes that have reshaped her homeland.

Joya first launched Rukhshana Media in 2020, a groundbreaking independent news outlet dedicated to centering unheard voices and untold stories of Afghan women at a time when mainstream media largely sidelined their experiences. Just one year after founding the outlet, as Taliban forces swept across Afghanistan and seized the capital, Joya was forced to flee her home for the United Kingdom. She still recalls the jarring whiplash of those chaotic August days in 2021: a week before the fall of Kabul, she was working freely as a journalist across the capital, sharing lunch with a friend at a local Kabul restaurant. By the next week, she was trapped inside her own home, effectively a prisoner, as the new Taliban administration issued its first edict for women: all women must remain confined to their households.

“I really can’t see or can’t bear how the Taliban are celebrating our sorrow in Afghanistan. It is a heavy day and I wish strength and power to women and girls in Afghanistan,” she said, ahead of the August 15 anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover.

For Joya, life under Taliban rule is not a new experience. She spent part of her childhood during the group’s first period in power between 1996 and 2001, when the regime officially banned all girls from accessing formal education. Even as a child, however, Joya refused to accept that ban: with the help of her mother, she disguised herself as a boy named Muhammad, wearing hand-altered boys’ clothing and cutting her hair short to sneak into classes every day. “The idea came to my mum,” she recalled of that risky gambit. “She made me a boy. She made boy clothes for me. She cut my hair and I went to school.”

Today, the situation for Afghan women and girls is far more restrictive than it was two decades ago, and unmatched anywhere else in the world. Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban administration has implemented a sweeping series of laws that bar all girls over the age of 12 from attending high school and university, effectively eliminating access to secondary and higher education for half the population. The regime has also banned women from most forms of employment, restricted their ability to travel independently, and pushed them entirely out of public life.

From her base in the United Kingdom, where she currently serves as a by-fellow at the University of Cambridge, Joya has refused to stop amplifying Afghan women’s voices. She continues to collaborate secretly with journalists who have remained inside Afghanistan, working under extreme security constraints to document conditions on the ground. In a recent project with British national newspaper The Guardian, Joya asked dozens of Afghan women a simple question: what does an ordinary day look like for you now? The overwhelming, unanimous response echoed the isolation the entire community faces: “We’re surrounded by four walls.”

This July, Joya released her long-awaited memoir, *The Vanishing Girl of Kabul*, which traces her own journey from a disguised schoolgirl in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to an exiled advocate fighting for her community, while chronicling the broader erasure of Afghan women’s rights under the current regime.

For Joya, the crisis of Afghan women is not a regional issue — it is a global “gender war” that demands urgent international solidarity. “Afghan women are fighting alone,” she emphasized to AFP. “They are in a gender war. We need your solidarity. If there is any possibility to help us, share our stories, listen to us, and make your government accountable in terms of engagement with the Taliban.”

As a member of the Hazara community, a historically marginalized and persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan, Joya says that every part of her identity is considered “wrong” under the Taliban’s ideology: “My dignity, my identity as a woman, my gender, my career as a journalist, and also my ethnicity as a Hazara woman.” It is that overlapping marginalization, she says, that makes her work all the more critical to ensure the world does not turn away from the crisis unfolding in Afghanistan today.

A powerful 7.7-magnitude shallow earthquake has hit off the northern coast of Indonesia’s tourist-popular Flores island, leaving at least 20 people dead, six injured, and two more trapped alive under collapsed structures, with rescue teams racing against time to locate survivors amid challenging terrain conditions.

Saturday’s early morning quake shook residents awake across the island, even in areas more than 100 kilometers from the epicenter. Yulian Juita Ekalia, a 37-year-old university lecturer based in Ruteng, described the intense shaking as feeling like the entire area was bouncing on a trampoline. “I jolted awake at around 5:30 am, and by the time I rushed outside, every shelf and surface in my home had collapsed — the TV, my son’s sports trophies, everything was on the floor,” she told reporters in a phone interview. “When I got outside, my son and neighbors were already there, screaming in fear.”

Witnesses in Nagekeo, the district closest to the quake’s epicenter, reported residents scrambling for higher ground almost immediately after the tremor hit, after the sea suddenly pulled back from the shore — a classic warning sign of an incoming tsunami. Long queues of evacuees fled the coastal area on foot, motorbikes, cars, and packed pickup trucks after Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency issued an urgent tsunami warning. While the warning was later lifted, authorities have warned local residents against returning to damaged structures, as dozens of aftershocks have continued to rattle the island through the day, with the strongest recorded at magnitude 6.1.

Rescue operations focused on clearing rubble and reaching trapped victims by Saturday, but access to hard-hit areas has been severely limited by landslides that have blocked key rural roads, a complication that has slowed search efforts. By midday Saturday, thousands of residents remained outdoors, too afraid of new tremors to go back inside. Ekalia told reporters she had moved her cooking stove outside to prepare meals, and that patients at a local hospital were being treated in emergency tents rather than inside the damaged building. She added that she felt an unexpected sense of relief that the quake struck on a weekend morning: “My university was heavily damaged, but there were no classes or staff on campus Saturday. I can’t imagine how much worse it could have been if it hit during a regular school day.”

Nagekeo resident Yohanes Babo, 56, who was at a local market when the quake hit, said widespread panic spread across the area immediately after the shaking started. “The shaking was really strong, but we were lucky to already be outside,” he said. “Everyone was panicking, running every which way. We’re evacuating now, heading up to the higher hills to be safe.”

Hospital staff in the Flores city of Maumere also reported cracked walls and frightened patients fleeing the building. Officials are still conducting a full assessment of the total damage across the largely rural region, which has very few high-rise structures.

Indonesia sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, a geologically active zone that wraps from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin, making the country one of the most seismically active places on Earth. This 7.7-magnitude quake matches the strength of a deadly tremor that hit Flores in 1992, which triggered a tsunami that killed around 2,500 people. The country has faced multiple major seismic disasters in recent decades: the 2004 9.1-magnitude Sumatra quake and tsunami killed more than 170,000 people in Indonesia alone and 220,000 across the region, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. In 2018, a quake on the holiday island of Lombok killed more than 550 people, and a 7.5-magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami on Sulawesi killed or left missing more than 4,300 people that same year.

In the early hours of Saturday, a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake rattled the waters off Indonesia’s Flores Island, forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes in panic after national disaster authorities issued an urgent tsunami warning.

Witnesses with Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that residents in Nagekeo Regency, the region closest to the quake’s epicenter, rushed toward higher elevation immediately after the sea pulled back from the shore — a well-documented natural precursor that often signals an incoming tsunami. Roughly an hour after the initial warning, authorities announced it had been lifted, though they maintained ongoing monitoring of sea conditions.

According to geological data from both United States and Indonesian seismic agencies, the shallow quake originated off Flores’ north coast, approximately 68 kilometers northwest of the coastal town of Ende. In the hours after the main tremor, the region was hit by a series of strong aftershocks, including one that registered a magnitude of 6.1.

Lukas Lotar, a 31-year-old hospital administrative employee based in the coastal town of Maumere, described the sudden chaos of the quake. “Suddenly it started to shake and I panicked,” he told AFP. “Patients also fled the hospital, the jolt was big. I saw some walls were cracked.”

Yohanes Babo, a 56-year-old Nagekeo resident, was at a local open-air market when the ground began to move. “The shaking was strong. Thankfully, we were already outside the house,” he said. “People were panicking, running here and there. We’re evacuating for the time being… and trying to get to the hills. My family is safe. No one was harmed.”

Indonesia’s national disaster management agency (BNPB) and the country’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) quickly issued evacuation orders for at-risk coastal regions immediately after the quake. “We strongly urge our communities along the northern coast of Flores and in the southern parts, on the southern islands and across the southern region, to carry out self-evacuation immediately,” BNPB official Abdul Muhari told local broadcaster Kompas TV. He added that residents should move at least two kilometers inland or to elevated terrain that sits more than 10 meters above sea level to avoid potential flood risk.

BMKG earthquake and tsunami director Wijayanto — who, like many Indonesians, uses a single name — noted that early tsunami modeling showed potential for wave activity across East Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi, and West Nusa Tenggara provinces. The initial alert warned of waves ranging from 0.5 meters to 3 meters, but no large dangerous waves materialized. Authorities ultimately detected minor swells between 19 and 30 centimeters, and the warning was canceled. “We have ended (the tsunami warning) but we will keep monitoring the sea level,” Wijayanto confirmed.

On-the-ground reporting from AFP saw Maumere residents streaming toward higher ground, while local television footage showed hundreds of people in Nagekeo Regency gathering outside amid the rubble of damaged structures. As of the latest update, officials have not reported any fatalities or serious injuries from the event.

Indonesia sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a geologically active zone that circles the Pacific basin and produces frequent seismic activity, making the country no stranger to devastating quakes and tsunamis. In 2004, a 9.1-magnitude quake off the coast of Sumatra triggered a massive Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people across the region, 170,000 of whom were in Indonesia. The Boxing Day disaster remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded modern history. In 2018, a series of powerful quakes on the holiday island of Lombok and neighboring Sumbawa killed more than 550 people over the course of several weeks. Later that same year, a 7.5-magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami hit the Sulawesi city of Palu, leaving more than 4,300 people dead or unaccounted for.