World, in brief

Israel said on Saturday it has operational control of the Ali al-Taher ridge, a crest 600 metres above sea level that overlooks much of southern Lebanon and northern Israel. [1]

Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, said the army will not leave the zone it holds inside Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed across the whole country. [1] He also set a second condition: that threats to northern Israel are removed. [1]

Israeli strikes across southern Lebanon on Saturday killed three people and wounded 15, six of them paramedics, according to Lebanon's health ministry and its state news agency. [2][3]

Israeli forces also blew up homes in Bint Jbeil, a few hundred metres from the border, and shelled the Wadi al-Salouqi and Wadi al-Hujeir areas. [2]

Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed movement that holds much of southern Lebanon, has not commented on losing the ridge. [1]

Nicholas Blanford of the Atlantic Council, a US research institute, said the silence could mean a deal was done, or that Israel is overstating what operational control means. [1]

Israel declared the buffer zone in March, after it and the United States began their war on Iran. [1] The National reports the line covers about 7% of Lebanon, and that Israeli forces have already deployed past it. [2]

Karim Emile Bitar, a Middle East expert at the Sciences Po university in France, said the intensity of the fight comes less from the hill than from Israel's elections. He said Benjamin Netanyahu wants pictures of a captured tunnel. [2]

Iran warned the United States last month that it would respond forcefully if Israeli attacks on the ridge continued, Reuters reported. [1]

A ceasefire agreed in June has stopped neither the strikes nor the ground advance. [1]

Mounir Shehadeh, a retired Lebanese brigadier general, said the danger is that holding the hill becomes the first step in widening the occupied zone. [2]

Why it matters. Watch whether Israeli troops stop at the ridge or push north from it. The retired Lebanese general Mounir Shehadeh says one is a hill taken, and the other is the occupied zone getting bigger. [2]

US Central Command said its forces destroyed three oil tankers linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard on Saturday, after the Guard fired ballistic missiles at two US Navy ships. [4] It named them as the M/T Downy off Kharg Island, the M/T Stark 1 near Jask and the empty M/T Kylo in the Gulf of Oman, whose crew was told to abandon ship first. [5] Kharg Island handled about 90% of Iran's oil exports before the war, and Iranian news agencies reported explosions near the island itself. [7][8] Iran's military said its strikes on US ships would now be more severe than before. [4][6]

Why it matters. The United States answered a military attack by destroying economic targets, and Admiral Brad Cooper said the exchange rate out loud: shoot at two American ships, lose three of your own tankers. [4] Brent crude closed on Friday at $96.28 a barrel, its highest since 24 July. [4]

Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that the United States knows everybody that is moving at Pickaxe, renewing a threat he first made in July. [8] Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, is a complex dug under granite about 220km south of Tehran and 2km from the Natanz enrichment plant. [8] Its main chambers are thought to lie at least 100 metres underground. [8] Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya military headquarters has warned that bombing it would restart the war across the region. [8]

Why it matters. Nuclear talks have been frozen since a 60-day negotiating window ran out in mid-August, and Trump called the Iran war small potatoes on the same day four US missiles hit a tanker off Kharg. [8]

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the two envoys Donald Trump sent to Russia, spent about three hours with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow on Saturday. [9] Putin opened by calling the situation in Ukraine difficult and praised Trump's efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year war. [9] Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy aide to Putin, said the Americans had put forward a number of ideas and called the conversation extremely frank. [10] Neither side said what was proposed. [10]

Why it matters. It is the pair's first visit to Russia since January, and they were due in Kyiv on Sunday, somewhere neither of them had ever been. [11][13][14] The US push to end this war has been idle for six months while its own war with Iran took the attention. [11]

Putin ordered the Russian military not to strike Kyiv for three days from midnight on Saturday, Russia's presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, tying it to the envoys' visit. [11] Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had said Ukraine would stop air strikes during the trip and asked Russia to match it. [11] Ukrainian forces were told the halt applied on the ground, in the air and at sea until 8 September. [12] A Russian strike on a civilian business in Kamianske, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, killed five people and injured five on Saturday morning. [12]

Why it matters. The pause covers the city the envoys are visiting and nowhere else, and people were still being killed elsewhere in Ukraine on the morning it began. [11][12]

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, said on Saturday it had brokered a separate local ceasefire in Ukraine so engineers can restore outside power to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. [12] The plant sits in Ukraine and has been under Russian control for most of the war. [12] It has had no external power since 20 August and has been cooling its reactors on emergency diesel generators. [12]

Why it matters. Cooling has to keep running whether or not a reactor is producing electricity, and the plant has been on emergency diesel for more than two weeks. [12]

A dossier of nearly 150 documents, images, videos and voice notes, plus several thousand text messages, points to Sudan's army building chlorine bombs. [15] The Washington Post and The New York Times obtained it, and the material appears to come from the phones of senior Sudanese officers. [15] One video seems to show a makeshift rig filling munitions with liquefied chlorine, and other images show a bomb rack fitted inside an Antonov An-32 transport plane. [15] Some of the chlorine appears to have come from a civilian water treatment centre supplied by international aid groups. [15] Messages involving the army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, suggest he knew about it. [15]

Why it matters. The Post says more than two dozen Western intelligence officials, weapons inspectors and rights researchers called the material credible. [15] Every one of them said a firm answer needs access to the sites and the witnesses, which nobody has. [15]

Yemen's internationally recognised government flew at least 15 air strikes on Friday against Houthi positions, gatherings and vehicles in the western provinces of Taiz and Hodeidah. [16] The Houthis are the Iran-backed movement that holds the capital, Sanaa, and much of the north. [16] The strikes backed government troops trying to stop a Houthi push towards the Red Sea coast and the Bab al-Mandeb strait, the shipping gate at the southern end of the Red Sea. [16] A truce agreed in 2022 fell apart in July. [16] More than 60 people were killed on Saturday and 129 on Friday. [18]

Why it matters. With Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Bab al-Mandeb has become the more important route for Gulf oil, so a Yemeni ground offensive is now a shipping problem for everyone. [18]

A Houthi missile struck a crowded stretch of the Heijah al-Abd road south of Taiz city on Saturday, killing at least four civilians and wounding nine, Yemen's state news agency Saba said. [17] Government forces had said a day earlier that they retook several heights on the Haifan front nearby. [17] Heavy shelling in the Maqbanah and Jabal Habashi districts has emptied several camps for displaced people, and aid groups say some families are trapped on the front lines. [17] Phone and internet networks are cut across the combat zones. [17]

Why it matters. The families reaching safer districts are mostly people who had already been driven out once, and they are arriving with almost no food or shelter. [17]

Voters in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in eastern Germany, went to the polls on Sunday with the far-right Alternative for Germany the clear frontrunner. [19] A win would be the party's first control of a German state government. [19] The result had not been published when this edition was written.

Why it matters. Coming first and being able to form a government are two different outcomes, and only the second would put the AfD in charge of a German state for the first time. [19]

Greece's prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, used his annual speech on the economy in Thessaloniki on Saturday to announce more than 2bn euros ($2.3bn) of tax breaks and pay rises over the next year. [20] They cover self-employed workers, farmers, village residents, pensioners and public employees. [20] Outside, police estimated more than 25,000 people joined union-led protests, with farmers driving tractors into the city centre and more than 3,000 officers on duty. [20] Greece grew 2.1% last year and ran a budget surplus, but its workers have the lowest purchasing power in the European Union. [20]

Why it matters. Mitsotakis is seeking a third term at an election expected next April, and polls suggest his party would not win a majority. [20] Yiannis Panagopoulos, head of the largest union, said the problem is simply that wages are low and prices are rising. [20]

Tens of thousands of people marched through Zagreb on Saturday demanding Croatia's government clear more than 30,000 tonnes of hazardous waste, including medical and industrial material, buried near the town of Gospic in Croatia's mountainous Lika region. [21] Police and Europol, the European Union's police agency, arrested 13 people in February over importing and dumping it; investigators say the scheme earned more than $4m. [21] Croatian officials say soil and water tests found no contamination, while the country's own anti-corruption agency reported raised metal levels in the soil and PFAS forever chemicals in groundwater. [21]

Why it matters. It was one of Croatia's biggest protests in years and has grown into a challenge to prime minister Andrej Plenkovic's government, which opponents accuse of hiding the scale of it. [21]

Serbia's governing party formally proposed on Saturday that President Aleksandar Vucic become prime minister if it wins an election expected on 25 October. [22] Vucic said he will call the vote within days and then resign the presidency so he can campaign, with a presidential election held later. [22] Serbia has had more than a year of street protests, set off by the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad on 1 November 2024 that killed 16 people. [22] Protesters marched in Nis on Saturday while the party met there, and police ringed the National Theatre to keep them away. [22]

Why it matters. Vucic has held power for 14 years, and moving from one office to the other keeps him at the top through an election billed as the biggest test of it. [22]

A commemoration for Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army commander convicted of genocide, opened on Saturday at the House of the Serbian Army in Belgrade. [23] Mladic died last week while serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. [23] His body was flown from The Hague on a Serbian government plane on Thursday, carried off it by soldiers and wrapped in the national flag. [23] Serbia's justice minister had first announced full military and state honours; Monday's burial will now have no serving officials, artillery salutes or ceremonial troops. [23]

Why it matters. The European Union said any glorification would be incompatible with the values Serbia's membership path is built on, and the full honours were dropped between that announcement and Monday's burial. [23]

Dozens of men dressed in black and wearing balaclavas blocked the roads into the Port of Dover in southern England on Saturday morning, chanting stop the boats. [24] The port said all traffic in and out had stopped; the National Highways agency reported a 6.4km tailback and delays of up to 45 minutes. [24][25] Traffic was moving again by about noon. [24] Dover carries the ferries linking southern England to northern France. [24] The UK government said the action went beyond peaceful protest. [24]

Why it matters. Small boats crossing the Channel have been the loudest argument in British politics for years, and on Saturday the argument stopped the ferries for half a morning. [24][26]

West Midlands Police asked a woman whose hair and head were grabbed at Reform UK's annual conference in Birmingham to come forward, after video of the incident spread online. [27] She was one of several protesters thrown out after interrupting a keynote speech by the party leader, Nigel Farage. [27] Farage laughed during the disruption, said we have got a screamer, and called it boring. [27] Reform's home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, condemned the members who pulled her hair. [27] No complaint has been made. [27]

Why it matters. The party's own home affairs spokesman condemned the members who did it while its leader laughed from the stage, and the police have now asked the woman to come forward. [27]

Soekarno-Hatta International airport near Jakarta suspended flights on Sunday morning after ash from the erupting Anak Krakatau volcano was found over Indonesia's capital, more than 150km away. [28] The volcano began erupting late on Friday, throwing up a fountain of lava and booms heard as far as 700km off. [28] Ash reached 6,000 metres on the Java side and 15,000 metres on the Sumatra side. [28] An earlier suspension had already hit 33 flights, 16 of them international, and two more eruptions were recorded on Sunday. [28][29]

Why it matters. Anak Krakatau grew out of the crater left by the 1883 Krakatoa eruption. It sits between Java and Sumatra, and Indonesia's main international gateway is more than 150km downwind of it. [28]

Nepal's army and foreign rescue experts pulled a Chinese worker, named only as Luhaitao, alive from 225 metres inside a debris-filled tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower site in Rasuwa district on Saturday. [30] He was found ten days after a wall of water and mud swept down the valley on the China-Nepal border. [30] A photograph released by the army shows him upright between two rescuers with his hands caked in mud. [30] Hundreds of hydropower workers went missing in that flood. [30]

Why it matters. Teams had been digging for ten days on the assumption they were recovering bodies, and the army says the search is continuing with more urgency. [30]

The UN General Assembly passed a resolution on Friday urging countries to adopt the Equal Earth projection instead of the Mercator map, drawn in 1569 for sea navigation. [31] Mercator keeps coastline shapes and angles right but stretches the far north and squeezes the tropics, making Europe and North America look far larger than they are while shrinking Africa and South America. [31] Africa is about 30.3 million square kilometres and roughly 14 times the size of Greenland, which Mercator draws at about the same size. [31] The vote was 164 in favour, with the United States against and six countries abstaining. [31]

Why it matters. Togo drove the resolution, and its foreign minister Robert Dussey said maps guide education and shape how people picture the world. [31]

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, visited Turmus Ayya, a Palestinian town near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank where many residents hold US passports, and called violent Israeli settlers terrorists. [32] It is a word US officials normally reserve for Palestinian fighters. [32] He listed burning a car, torching a mosque and vandalising a home as acts of terror rather than only crimes. [32] Settler attacks have surged since the Gaza war began, according to the UN's humanitarian office. [32] He said Israel has a responsibility to keep West Bank Palestinians safe. [34]

Why it matters. Huckabee used the same word last month about unrest in the West Bank town of Qusra, so this is now a pattern rather than a slip, and it comes seven weeks before Israel votes. [32][33]

Mike Huckabee said on Saturday there is no plan to force Palestinians out of Gaza, after two Israeli ministers floated the idea this week. [33] Nobody is suggesting there would be forced displacement, he said, while adding that people who wish to leave should have the right to. [33] Forcing a civilian population out of occupied territory is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. [33] Almost the entire population of Gaza has already been displaced inside it since October 2023. [33]

Why it matters. The remarks land before Israel's election on 27 October, in which polls show a tight race for Benjamin Netanyahu, who brought once-shunned far-right figures into his cabinet. [33]

Israeli bulldozers uprooted olive groves for kilometres along the Arraba-Ya'bad road in the northern occupied West Bank this week. [35] Israeli flags were planted as far as the Arraba junction and past the red pylons that mark Area A, which is nominally under Palestinian Authority control. [35] Two women of the al-Fari family were held back by soldiers while the machines finished off their trees; the family said their phones were confiscated so they could not film it and their ID cards photographed. [35] Rubble from demolished homes has been left along the road for months. [35]

Why it matters. This is farmland rather than a checkpoint or a settlement outpost: the area is the region's food basket, and olive groves are not replaceable in a season. [35]

Gaza's civil defence recovered the remains of 55 Palestinians from the rubble of a building in Gaza City on Saturday, nearly three years after an Israeli air strike destroyed it in November 2023. [36] All were members of the Malka family, who had been sheltering in the family home when it was hit. [36] Colonel Muhammad Abu Dan, who supervised the teams, said they had been searching for more than 60 bodies from that one family. [36] The work is done largely by hand because Gaza has almost no heavy machinery left to lift broken concrete. [36]

Why it matters. Recovery in Gaza is running years behind the killing, which is why the counted dead keep rising long after the strikes that caused them. [36]

In an interview with Israel's i24NEWS that he shared himself, Benjamin Netanyahu said: I attacked Qatar, I also bombed it and attacked them during the war, and they attacked me. [37] He called Qatar a hostile state that did not dictate Israeli policy during the Gaza war. [37] The interview comes days before the first anniversary of Israel's strike on Doha, which killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer during a meeting about a US-backed ceasefire plan. [37] Qatar has hosted Hamas's political office since 2012 and has mediated in the region for years. [37]

Why it matters. Netanyahu was also answering accusations at home about money he let Qatar send into Gaza, saying Israel's own security agencies had recommended it as humanitarian aid. [37]

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said on Friday it will try again to reach Gaza by sea in October, sailing between European ports first. [38] Two of its ships have already made port-to-port trips: Handala II visited Norway, Sweden and Denmark in June and July, and the vessel Kate left Bristol in England earlier this month. [38] The group says volunteers on earlier attempts were severely beaten, repeatedly tasered and sexually assaulted. [38] It accuses Israel of blocking food, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza. [38]

Why it matters. Zohar Chamberlain Regev of the coalition said they sail because governments have not met obligations they signed up to, which is the argument each of these voyages exists to make. [38]

The Trump administration has begun work on a plan for the Middle East after the Iran war, the news outlet Axios reported, citing two US officials and two other people. [39] Three pillars have been discussed: lining up US allies to contain Iran, winding down the regional consequences of the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, and widening the Abraham Accords towards normal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. [39] The work is early and could set US policy for the rest of Donald Trump's term. [39]

Why it matters. Axios reported the discussions are being shaped by two voting dates - the US midterm elections in November and Israel's legislative elections in October. [39]

Israel's Channel 12 reported that Ofer Winter, a former brigadier general, met Benjamin Netanyahu at a secret location in the days after 7 October 2023 and argued against a ground invasion of Gaza. [40] Winter is said to have told him as many as 15,000 Israeli soldiers could die and thousands be taken captive, and to have proposed a total military blockade instead. [40] The meeting was arranged without the knowledge of senior military commanders. [40] The report cited no sources. [40] Winter launched his own party, People of Israel, in August. [40]

Why it matters. A retired general now running for office is telling voters he was right and the prime minister was wrong, seven weeks before Israel goes to the polls. [40]

President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iranian officials and citizens will stand together against US economic pressure, and that national cohesion alone is enough to neutralise attempts to divide the country. [41] The United States declared an Economic D-Day last month, which it calls its toughest sanctions programme ever, aimed at cutting every economic lifeline to Iran's government and its Revolutionary Guard. [41] Iran's police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, named jobs, wages, the economy and petrol as possible triggers for local or national protests, and ordered continuous monitoring. [41]

Why it matters. A government listing in public the shortages that might set off unrest is telling you which ones it expects, and petrol is on that list in one of the world's larger oil producers. [41]

At least 10 people were killed and six injured when a fuel tanker exploded after a road crash on the Hamedan-Sanandaj highway in western Iran on Saturday, the state broadcaster IRIB reported. [42] The governor of Sanandaj, capital of Iran's Kurdistan province, said a fault in the vehicle's braking system caused the crash. [42] The fire was brought under control quickly. [42] Officials gave no identities and said the figures were initial. [42]

Why it matters. The crash was caused by a brake fault and has nothing to do with the war, and the governor said the casualty figures were based on initial reports. [42]