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Briefing · Thursday, 28 May 2026

Iran ceasefire frays as hunger, heat, and Ebola compound a world at war

World News 9 min 96 sources

A fragile US-Iran ceasefire is cracking — new US strikes hit Bandar Abbas even as a draft deal circulates — while Ukraine's president begs Washington for Patriot missiles it can't spare, a record European heatwave kills people across France, an Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo outpaces all efforts to contain it, and the Iran war's oil shock is pushing 45 million more people toward famine.

Iran ceasefire frays as hunger, heat, and Ebola compound a world at war

The ceasefire that keeps getting shot at

The US-Iran war, which began on 28 February when the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, has been under a notional ceasefire since early April. That ceasefire is visibly unraveling. On Wednesday, US Central Command hit a ground-control station in Bandar Abbas — a strategic port city on the Strait of Hormuz — and shot down four Iranian drones that it said were about to be launched. Earlier in the week, the US struck Iranian missile sites and mine-laying boats in the same area, killing four Iranian soldiers [77].

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow waterway through which about 20% of the world’s seaborne oil passes. Iran closed it when the war began. The resulting oil price spike — Brent crude is still about 30% above its prewar average — is the single biggest driver of today’s global food and energy crisis [1].

Iran condemned the Bandar Abbas strike as a “grave violation” and said it had the “legitimate right to retaliate” [77]. At the same time, Iranian state TV reported that Tehran had received a draft framework deal under which Iran would reopen commercial shipping through Hormuz within a month in exchange for a US military withdrawal and end to the naval blockade [32,44]. A Tehran official said separately that no agreement had yet been reached [32].

Trump, at a cabinet meeting Wednesday, said Iran was “negotiating on fumes” and that the US was “not satisfied” with the deal yet — while also threatening to resume full-scale bombing if talks fail [77,78]. This is the central tension: talks are ongoing and a text appears to exist, but the US keeps firing, and Iran keeps warning.

There is a second strand to the Iran situation that matters for everyone else. Pakistan, which has been acting as a mediator and paused US attacks on Iran in April, is now under pressure from Trump to join the Abraham Accords — the US-brokered agreements under which several Arab states have normalized ties with Israel. Trump said on Monday that any Iran deal should require Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt to “simultaneously sign onto the Abraham Accords” [13]. Pakistan has no diplomatic relations with Israel and has not given a clear answer. Analysts say the benefits are real but the domestic and regional costs — inflaming relations with Iran, damaging standing on Palestine — are substantial [13].

A new analysis published Wednesday finds that the US will need years to replenish the advanced missile stockpiles depleted during the Iran war [40]. That is the backdrop against which Ukraine is asking for more of the same missiles.

Ukraine: a six-month window, and no missiles to open it

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote directly to Donald Trump and the US Congress this week pleading for more Patriot interceptor missiles — the only weapons Ukraine has that can shoot down Russian ballistic missiles [4,9,14].

The letter was prompted by a massive Russian strike over the weekend: 30 ballistic missiles plus two nuclear-capable Oreshnik missiles were launched at Ukraine. Only 11 of the ballistic missiles were intercepted. Over 90 people were injured [4,9].

“For us — for a nation fighting for its survival — there is hardly anything more painful to see than Patriot batteries with no missiles loaded,” Zelenskyy wrote [9].

The supply problem is structural. The US has been slow to deliver Patriot interceptors to Ukraine even before the Iran war. Since February, American and Israeli forces have been burning through hundreds of the same PAC-3 interceptors across the Middle East, leaving even less for Kyiv [9,40].

The military picture on the ground is more encouraging for Ukraine. Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, who commands one of Ukraine’s most respected fighting units from a bunker in the Kharkiv region, told Reuters that Russia’s army is exhausted. “I believe the next six to nine months are a turning point,” he said. “More precisely, I think the next six are the most critical” [3]. GCHQ — Britain’s electronic intelligence agency — published a new estimate Wednesday: almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began, with Russian forces “going backwards on the battlefield” for the first time since late 2022 [33].

Russia disputes Ukrainian military claims. Russian official sources asserted the capture of several villages; Ukraine’s military denied most of them, and the independent Ukrainian war-tracking blog DeepState described Russian incursions as fleeting [4].

What changes: Ukraine has a window it can’t fully exploit without air-defence munitions. The question is whether the Patriot shortage — now a byproduct of a separate war — closes that window before Russia’s exhaustion becomes decisive.

The hunger arithmetic of a war nobody planned for

Before the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, 300 million people were already facing acute hunger globally. The war added 45 million more, according to the UN World Food Programme — the direct result of the oil price spike driving up food transport costs [1].

Carl Skau, the WFP’s acting head, put the agency’s situation plainly: “We take from the hungry to give to the starving. That’s the reality” [1]. The WFP’s funding fell nearly 40% last year. The US, historically its largest donor, cut its contribution by more than half. In Afghanistan alone, the WFP cut support from 10 million people to 2 million and shed 5,000 staff [1].

Two famines were formally declared in 2025 — in Gaza and Sudan — the first double declaration in decades. Gaza has stabilized slightly since October’s ceasefire, but Sudan’s situation remains the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with active famine in parts of Darfur and South Kordofan [1].

The mechanism is direct: in the poorest countries, a 30% rise in energy prices produces roughly a 30% rise in food prices, because transport and refrigeration costs run through everything. People already spending every available cent on food have nowhere to go [1]. The Iran war’s oil shock is the economic link between a conflict in the Gulf and a child going hungry in the Sahel.

A May that felt like August

Western Europe has been shattering temperature records for three consecutive days. London’s Kew Gardens hit 35.1°C on Tuesday — more than 2°C above the previous UK May record. France registered its hottest May day since records began. Ireland, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland all reported similarly extreme conditions for spring [5,7,10].

Seven deaths in France have been linked to the heat. Seventeen French administrative departments were on orange alert Wednesday [5,10]. Scientists note that a record shattered by 2°C is not normal variation — historically, records tend to fall by fractions of a degree, not by margins this large [7].

The cause is a “heat dome” — an area of high pressure that gets stuck in place, trapping warm air. Climate scientists say human-caused warming means the same weather pattern now produces dramatically higher temperatures than it would have in, say, the 1970s [7]. Europe has been warming at 0.56°C per decade over the past 30 years — more than twice the global average [7].

In 2024, summer heat in the EU killed roughly three times more people than car crashes, 16 times more than murderers [10]. The same pattern, arriving six weeks earlier than usual, is now underway. India is simultaneously seeing temperatures above 45°C in Delhi [7].

The thread connecting Europe’s heatwave to the Iran war: the UN’s climate chief said on Wednesday that the “soaring costs” of fossil fuel dependence — made viscerally clear by the Hormuz closure — underline why the world needs to pivot faster to clean energy [5].

Congo’s Ebola is outrunning the response

An Ebola outbreak in Ituri province, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo — a vast, conflict-scarred country in central Africa — is moving faster than health workers can contain it. More than 900 suspected cases and at least 223 deaths have been reported; the WHO believes the real numbers are much higher because testing has been severely limited [36,41,54].

This strain, called Bundibugyo, is rare. There are no vaccines and no approved treatments for it, unlike the more common Zaire strain [36,54]. One doctor treating patients in a displacement camp died this week, deepening fears among frontline workers [23].

The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, flew to Congo Wednesday to personally lead the scale-up. He said the region faced a “catastrophic collision of disease and conflict” and called on armed groups to agree an immediate ceasefire. “We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling,” he said [36].

The conditions are close to worst-case for outbreak control: Ituri has been under military rule since 2021, health facilities have been attacked, roads are poor, and funding has been cut by the same US foreign-aid reductions that gutted the WFP. Aid workers describe treatment centers where staff fight Ebola with sand, oatmeal, and one thermometer — but no running water [27].

Uganda closed its border with Congo this week; Canada banned entry from DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan for 90 days; the US banned non-citizens who had recently travelled to those three countries from entering [25,36]. The Trump administration said it was building a quarantine facility in Kenya for Americans exposed to Ebola — declining to bring them home — a decision that epidemiologists said could deter American health workers from volunteering for the response [46].

If anyone is tracking emerging disease risk, the number to watch is 3,600: the people currently identified as contacts of the infected who need tracing, in a conflict zone, with no vaccine [36].

The story nobody’s covering

Pakistan is quietly mediating the most consequential ceasefire negotiation on earth — and nobody outside the region is scrutinising the terms. Pakistan’s army chief and prime minister have been personally lauded by Trump for their mediation role, and Islamabad claims credit for pausing US attacks on Iran in April. But the terms Pakistan is helping broker — opening Hormuz, lifting the blockade, halting enrichment talks — will reshape oil markets, global food prices, and the security architecture of South Asia for decades. Pakistan itself has no diplomatic relations with Israel, shares a long border with Iran, and is now being asked to join the Abraham Accords as the price of a deal [13]. The domestic political costs of that ask — in a country with a large Shia population, a powerful religious establishment, and unresolved tensions with India — have received almost no coverage in English-language media. The analyst Raza Rumi, quoted in DW, describes the tradeoffs clearly: real but politically overstated benefits, and substantial risks including domestic instability and worsened Iran relations [13]. This is a country of 240 million people being asked to make a civilisational-level choice while the world watches Hormuz.

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