A ceasefire between Pakistan and the Taliban collapses, and each side calls the other's strike the first one

World News 5 min 80 sources

Afghan and Pakistani forces traded strikes across the border after eight months of calm, with dozens of civilians reported dead — and both governments insist they were only answering an attack. Elsewhere: Ukraine's drones push Russia to import petrol, Gaza's occupation deepens, a deadly heat dome moves from Europe to North America, and central banks quietly start selling dollars.

Key takeaways

Pakistan and the Taliban traded cross-border strikes after eight months of calm, and each government insists it was only answering the other's attack.
Ukraine's drone strikes on Russian refineries have pushed oil-rich Russia to the strange step of talking about importing petrol.
For the first time on record, more of the world's central banks plan to hold fewer dollars than more — a slow shift with large long-term stakes.

The border that reopened

The ceasefire held for eight months. On Sunday it broke. [46]

Pakistan launched airstrikes into eastern Afghanistan, hitting what it said were militant hideouts in three border provinces. The Taliban government — the movement that has run Afghanistan since 2021 — said the strikes hit civilian homes instead, killing 36 people and wounding more than 160. [46] The UN put the civilian toll at 28. [46] Kabul called it “a cowardly act” and “an atrocity.” [46]

On Tuesday, Afghanistan hit back. The Taliban said they had struck targets across the border in Balochistan, Pakistan’s poor southwestern province, injuring several people. Pakistan’s military said it shot down four small drones and warned that any further move “would receive a befitting response.” [46] Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said 29 militants had been killed in an operation answering “recent terrorist attacks against innocent people.” [46]

Neither side’s figures could be independently confirmed. [46]

Here is the quarrel underneath the strikes. Pakistan says Afghanistan shelters fighters who cross the border to kill Pakistanis, and that its strikes only hit those fighters. The Taliban say Pakistan attacks unprovoked and kills civilians, and reject the claim that they harbour anyone. [46] The two neighbours agreed a ceasefire last October after weeks of deadly clashes; intermittent strikes have killed dozens since. [46] What’s new is that the pause both sides had been keeping is now openly over.

For anyone watching South Asia, the thing to track is whether this stays a border spat or pulls in the wider fight — Pakistan is already locked in a long standoff with India, and a two-front strain on Islamabad changes what it can afford elsewhere.

Ukraine’s drones reach Russia’s fuel tank

Russia — the world’s second-largest crude oil exporter — said on Tuesday it is in talks to import petrol. [28] For an oil giant, that is a strange sentence.

The reason is Ukrainian drones. For months they have hit Russian oil refineries, the plants that turn crude into the petrol cars actually burn. [28] Pumping crude out of the ground is one thing; refining it is another, and the refineries are where Ukraine has aimed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said imports would go ahead “if agreements could be reached at acceptable price points.” [28] Putin himself admitted over the weekend that national petrol reserves have fallen to 1.7 million tonnes, about 4% below a year ago. [28]

The move to buy fuel abroad is the clearest sign yet that Moscow is struggling to keep its own petrol market stable. [28] A country can be rich in oil and still run short at the pump if the middle step breaks.

Gaza: less ground, more people

Israel’s military kept expanding its hold on Gaza this week, moving concrete barriers and advancing tanks to deepen control of the Strip. [25] Thirty displaced families fled their tents in the northern town of Beit Lahia overnight as Israeli tanks advanced. [25] The UN says dozens of aid facilities and essential services now sit outside the zone the army controls. [25]

The strikes continued alongside the ground push. In one, Palestinian reports said a 23-year-old mother and her one-year-old baby were killed in a camp for displaced people in Khan Younis; a second-grader was killed in Deir al-Balah. [42] At least eight people were reported killed across Gaza on Monday. [42]

UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that UNRWA — the UN agency that feeds and schools Palestinian refugees — is nearing “breaking point.” [27] The pattern of the past weeks holds: the controlled area grows while the space left for civilians shrinks, and more people are pushed into less ground.

A heat dome crosses an ocean

The extreme heat that broke records across Europe last week is now moving over North America. [51]

Europe’s early-summer heatwave has been linked to 1,300 deaths, the World Health Organization says, with Germany hitting a record 41.7°C. [51] German hospitals were “insufficiently prepared,” transport and roads shut as the heat climbed. [37] In Paris, which suffered its worst heat on record — worse than the 2003 spell that killed nearly 15,000 people in France — one resident wrote that it felt like being “abandoned to our fate by those in power.” [39]

Now the same kind of heat dome sits over the United States and Canada. [51] About 120 million Americans are under an extreme heat warning heading into the Fourth of July weekend, with the heat index reaching 100–115°F (38–46°C) in places. [51] Grid operators warn that demand for air conditioning — on top of the surging power draw from AI data centres — could push electricity use near record levels. [52] Parts of Canada expect 37°C. [51]

The through-line: the same weather system, the same strain, arriving on two continents within days, and in both places it lands hardest on those with the least ability to cool down.

The story nobody’s covering: central banks start selling dollars

For the first time on record, more of the world’s central banks plan to shrink their dollar holdings than to grow them, according to a survey released Tuesday. [36]

Central banks hold reserves — mostly in foreign currency — as a national rainy-day fund, and for decades the dollar has been the default. It is what oil is priced in, what countries trade in, what they park their savings in. A steady majority always wanted more of it. That majority has now flipped. [36] A separate survey found the same shift in the other direction: more banks want to add gold. [36]

This is the kind of change that moves slowly and matters enormously. The dollar’s dominance is what lets the US borrow cheaply and lets Washington’s sanctions bite worldwide. If the world’s official money managers are starting, even at the margin, to hold less of it, that is a structural drift worth watching for years — not a headline that spikes and fades.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why two sides in a fight can never agree on who started it

Every retaliation feels like justice to the one giving it and aggression to the one getting it, because each side is counting from a different first move.

Two true stories

Read the Pakistan–Afghanistan strikes closely and you notice something odd. Both governments describe the same week, and both descriptions are internally honest. Pakistan says it answered terrorist attacks on its people; it struck militants, not civilians. Afghanistan says it answered an unprovoked atrocity that killed 36 people in their homes. Each side calls its own strike a response and the other’s a beginning.

They cannot both be answering. Somebody moved first. But ask each government where the story starts, and they hand you a different opening scene. Pakistan starts the clock at the last cross-border attack it suffered. Afghanistan starts it at the airstrike on its villages. Neither is lying about the moment they’ve chosen. They’ve just chosen different moments — and the whole quarrel lives in that gap.

The clock has no zero

Here is the trap, and it is older than either country. In a long feud, every act is a reply to the act before it. So there is no natural starting point — only the point each side decides to start counting from. And people always start counting at the moment they were hurt, not the moment they hurt someone else.

That’s not dishonesty. It’s how memory works. The blow you took is vivid; you felt it. The blow you gave was justified; you had reasons. So each side’s timeline is real, complete, and self-justifying — and it makes the other side’s restraint impossible to see. When Pakistan holds fire, Afghanistan doesn’t register it as restraint, because in Afghanistan’s story Pakistan is the one who just attacked. And the reverse. Each waits for the other to “stop first,” but there is no first — only a chain, being read from two different links.

Why the spiral tightens

Watch what this does to a defensive move. Pakistan strikes militants it believes are killing its citizens — to Pakistan, pure defence. To Afghanistan, that same strike lands on homes and reads as pure aggression, demanding an answer. Afghanistan’s answer, defensive in its own eyes, looks like fresh aggression to Pakistan. So each side’s shield becomes the other side’s sword. Both are trying to feel safe, and the trying is what makes them both less safe.

This is why “we’re only defending ourselves” can be true on both sides at once, and why it’s no comfort. Two nations, each genuinely reacting, can build a war neither one chose — not because anyone wanted it, but because no one could see the whole board. Each could see its own wound and the other’s blow. Neither could see its own blow as the other’s wound.

The arrangement you don’t notice

Step back and notice what makes this possible: the fact that there is no referee. Inside a country, when two people fight, a third thing — a court, a police force, a shared rule — decides who struck first and settles it. Between countries there is no such third thing standing over Pakistan and Afghanistan. Each is the judge of its own case.

That absence isn’t natural law; it’s the shape the world is built in. We have courts inside borders and almost nothing between them. When someone says “they started it” about a war, they’re appealing to a judge who doesn’t exist — and both sides get to appeal to that same missing judge and both get to win. The border that reopened this week is one place among many where the missing referee shows.

Where you’re standing

It is easy to read this from a distance and feel clear-headed — obviously both sides are trapped, obviously someone should just stop. But the same clock runs in every quarrel you’ve ever been inside. The argument with a partner, the grudge between colleagues, the family rift that’s lasted years: each of you started the count at the moment you were wronged. Each of you can recite a true, complete story in which you were only responding. You have almost certainly, at some point, been someone’s unprovoked first strike while feeling like the injured party.

That isn’t a flaw in them. It’s the standard equipment we all carry — vivid memory for our own pain, reasons ready for our own blows. Seeing that doesn’t tell you who’s right in Balochistan; it can’t, and it isn’t trying to. It leaves you holding your own certainty a little more loosely — because the person on the other side of your own feud is, right now, reading the very same chain from the link where they got hurt, and to them, it’s just as obvious.

03 · Lab · your turn

Who started it

Command one side of a border feud, see only your own timeline, and feel how your defence reads as the other side's first strike.

04 · Hope · carry this

The same border that reopened this week stayed quiet for eight months first — proof that even neighbours locked in a feud can choose the pause, and hold it, when they decide the fighting costs more than the grudge. They found that agreement once without a referee to force it. Nothing stops them finding it again.