Apparently, Israeli forces reportedly set off incendiary bombs by using quadcopter drones to incinerate ambulances outside of a Gaza City clinic. International humanitarian law forbids the use of incendiary weapons in densely populated areas.
President Donald Trump has released a video showing a United States military strike on a boat in the Caribbean that he says was smuggling drugs out of Venezuela for the Tren de Aragua gang, stoking fears of a possible clash between the Venezuelan and US militaries.
In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump said 11 people were killed on Tuesday. He wrote: “No US Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
The strike, apparently carried out in international waters, marks an escalation in tensions between the Trump administration and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom Trump has repeatedly accused of assisting international drug gangs.
The incident is the first known attack the US has made against alleged smugglers since the Trump administration began increasing its military presence in the Caribbean last month to counter drug cartels designated as “narcoterrorist organisations”.
The Trump administration dispatched warships to the southern Caribbean in August in a bid, it said, to counter threats to US national security posed by criminal organisations operating in the region.
The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that the US considers “terrorist organisations”.
On Thursday, the Reuters news agency reported that seven US warships and one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine were headed for the Caribbean. More than 4,500 sailors and Marines are on board the vessels.
Then on Tuesday, Trump announced the strike on the Venezuelan boat he said was transporting drugs.
Trump identified the people on board the Venezuelan boat as “narcoterrorists” who were “at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States”.
The Tren de Aragua is one of Venezuela’s most notorious criminal organisations with operations spreading across Latin America.
Originating in the early 2000s among prison inmates in the state of Aragua, the gang initially controlled contraband and extortion networks inside jails before expanding outwards.
Today, it runs a diversified criminal empire spanning drug trafficking, human smuggling, extortion, illegal mining and contract killings.
The group is especially active along migration routes, exploiting vulnerable refugees and migrants through kidnapping, forced labour and sex trafficking.
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed there is a direct link between groups like Tren de Aragua and Venezuela’s government. According to Trump, Maduro controls the gang as part of a “narcoterrorism” ploy to destabilise the US.
On August 7, the US Departments of State and Justice doubled their reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro to $50m, accusing him of being “one of the largest narcotraffickers in the world”.
For his part, Maduro denies any connection to the group. At least two reports from the US intelligence community also contradict the Trump administration’s claim.
In May, a declassified National Intelligence Council report found that Maduro’s government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with” Tren de Aragua.
The report also said Maduro is “not directing” the gang’s operations in the US although it did concede that Venezuela offers a “permissive environment” that allows Tren de Aragua to operate.
The US deployment piqued concerns over spiralling tensions with Venezuela after Maduro urged millions of Venezuelans in August to join nationalist “militias” to defend Venezuela in response to Washington’s aggressive new antidrug operations in the Caribbean.
In the run-up to the US strike on the Venezuelan boat this week, Maduro said on August 25: “No empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela.”
The Venezuelan president has long accused the US government of interfering in his country’s politics on behalf of the political opposition. In last week’s remarks, he also accused Trump of “seeking a regime change through military threat”.
Trump, meanwhile, has adopted the same “maximum pressure” campaign that defined his foreign policy towards Venezuela during his first term. It included heightened sanctions on the Latin American country.
In spite of this, the US energy group Chevron returned to Venezuela in July after a three-month hiatus after Trump’s decision in February to rescind a US Treasury licence that allowed the oil giant to export crude from Venezuela despite US sanctions.
Trump revoked the existing licence, which was issued during President Joe Biden’s administration in 2022, over what he saw as a “failure” by Maduro to implement electoral reforms and accept Venezuelans deported from the US, forcing Chevron to pause operations and wind down its activities.
But after intense lobbying, Chevron was granted a new restricted licence by the Department of the Treasury to export Venezuelan crude. That decision was considered to amount to an easing of sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector.
While the precise licence conditions remain unknown, experts said the agreement will bring benefits to Venezuela’s debt-strapped economy as Chevron is expected to send 200,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela to international markets.
Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, said the Trump administration is facing “competing objectives” in Venezuela.
Sabatini told Al Jazeera that the Treasury’s recent move to reinstate Chevron’s (albeit restricted) licence “is a recognition, in part, of the failure of past sanctions” insofar as they ceded control of Venezuelan oil assets from Chevron to “governments opposed to US interests, … China, Russia and Iran”.
He added that “by mobilising this fleet [in the Caribbean], the administration is also trying to scare Maduro into potential regime change.” The upshot, Sabatini said, is that Trump’s two-pronged policy approach “risks causing an unintended conflict with Venezuela”.
In talks with leaders from Mexico and Ecuador, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will make the case this week for broad cooperation on migration and drug trafficking, which the Trump administration views as crucial for security across the Americas.
Rubio’s trip on Wednesday and Thursday is likely to be complicated by the fact that Trump has rattled many leaders across the region with sweeping tariffs for not complying with his geopolitical aims, experts said.
The main problem, Sabatini said, is that US “demands are a moving target and prone to the whims of Donald Trump”.
In the case of Brazil, for instance, Trump slapped 50 percent tariffs on the country’s goods in August partly in retaliation for the government’s pursuit of criminal charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally.
Who: Spain vs. Bulgaria
What: UEFA qualifiers for 2026 FIFA World Cup
Where: Vasil Levski National Stadium in Sofia, Bulgaria
When: Thursday, August 4, at 9:45pm (18:45 GMT)
Following is how we’ll prepare for our live text commentary stream on Al Jazeera Sport starting at 6:45 p.m. (15:45 GMT).
The run-in between the nations intensifies significantly ahead of the world event, with European football’s focus shifting to qualifying for the 2026 FIFA World Cup the following week.
A six-game, 11-week sprint will now begin on Thursday to advance to the tournament being played in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Bulgaria hosts Bulgaria and Spain are hosting this stage, but Al Jazeera Sport examines why.
Top-tier teams from the region who played a thrilling series of Nations League games in March and June are among those launching their qualifying programs.
Teams that have advanced to those latter stages of the competition have only recently joined the World Cup qualifiers.
Portugal won the 2025 final tiebreaker 5-3 on penalties against Spain in June.
Portugal defeated Germany in the semifinal match, while Spain triumphed over France. The rest of the qualifiers for the later stages of that competition are currently only qualifying for the World Cup.
Georgia and Turkiye win Group E of the UEFA World Cup qualifiers.
Six groups of four are just starting their World Cup qualifying campaigns.
Six additional groups of five teams have already won four qualifying games so far.
The top teams in each of the groups advance to the World Cup in the summer, while the second-placed teams must also make playoffs to advance.
Three teams are eliminated from the five-team groups that are currently being developed, while two teams are eliminated from the reduced four-team groups.
Four top-placed Nations League teams that don’t automatically qualify at this stage will join the 12 runners-up from the current groups in the scheduled playoffs in March.
In the event that those sides encounter issues in the current groups, the goal is to give them a better chance of qualifying.
Surprisingly, San Marino, the 210th and final of the men’s national teams ranked by FIFA, might be among those extra teams. They currently have four defeats from their four games in Group H’s qualifiers, but they won the last Nations League title in Group D.
Four knockout brackets, each four teams, will be assigned to each of the 16 European playoff teams.
The four remaining World Cup spots are decided by March 26 and March 31 in single-game semifinal and finals.
The qualifying formula has been altered by the additions of FIFA’s World Cup entries and UEFA’s expansion of UEFA’s Nations League knockout stage.
Since the continent’s first World Cup qualifying group of just four teams since November 1989, which came just days after the fall and rebirth of the continent, was completed, only four teams remain.
Countries with high ranking teams that used to play in groups of five or six for 15 months now have a condensed program that plays two games in each of three straight months.
A key player for the entire qualifying program could be removed due to an injury. Jamal Musiala, who played for Bayern Munich at the Club World Cup in July with a serious leg injury, will not be available in Germany.
Next year, the format will change. The FIFA schedule for men’s national teams games will combine the two separate September and October breaks into a four-game block over back-to-back weekends following the 2026 World Cup.
dominant in the #FIFAWorldCup qualifying process
After defeating the Netherlands in the Nations League quarterfinal in March, European champion Spain won two consecutive victories at Euro 2024, joining Turkiye and Georgia in a four-team group.
In the draw last December, Georgia’s star winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia was the most dangerous team among the third-seeded options. Georgia plays in Spain on October 11 and hosts Turkiye on Thursday.
The four-team Swiss, Sweden, Slovenia, and Kosovo team is probably the hardest to predict.
Switzerland must now face some of Europe’s most expensive forwards, including Alexander Isak, Viktor Gyokeres, and Anthony Elanga, who were all signed for more than $300m this season by Liverpool, Arsenal, and Newcastle, despite their impressive quarterfinal place in Euro 2024.
Despite the fact that the event dates back to 1933, this is only their sixth meeting.
In the group stage of Euro 96 in England, Spain has won four of the matches, with one draw being the outcome.
Hristo Stoichkov, a renowned Bulgarian forward, opened the scoring from the penalty spot, but Alfonso Perez equalized for Spain.
In a friendly in May 1933, Spain won 13-0 at home.
The countries have met for the first time in more than 20 years, with Spain winning the previous friendly match with a score of 1-0 in 2002.
Their most recent competitive encounter was the France World Cup 1998, which Spain won 6-1.
With Levski Sofia’s Svetoslav Vutsov and Aberdeen’s Dimitar Mitov competing for the gloves, the biggest question for Bulgaria is who should start in goal.
To counteract Spain’s attacking threat, the home side will use a five-man defense.
Due to late injuries, Yeremy Pino, Fabian Ruiz of Paris Saint-Germain, and Gavi of Barcelona do not all miss out.
Aleix Garcia and Jorge de Frutos, both from Rayo Vallecano, have been named in place of them.
Mitov, Dimitrov, Petkov, Nedyalkov, Nurnberger, Despodov, Shopov, Gruev, Milanov, and others.
Loua, 18, misses her small garden in El-Geneina, where luscious mangoes once grew.
In June of this year, the RSF destroyed her home.
She claims that “they burned our entire village.” In the attack, an uncle, three neighbors, and two of her brothers were killed.
Roua and eight of her school friends were abducted by RSF fighters despite making an attempt to escape on foot. They were all raped, total.
They held us for two days, they said. She claims that two of them, who had been raped there, had actually perished from that location as a result. Her memories of her lost friends make her tears run.
“It seemed helpless to me. At that point, I wished I had died.
The horror persists even after two years.
She claims, “I can’t sit still for a long time.”
Roua’s hand rests on the breastfeeding baby, and her face is unmoving as she speaks. After fleeing across the border with the majority of her family, the child’s father is a Chadian police officer.
She initially assumed he was interested in her after they had dated a few times.
He said, “I like you, I like you. She says, “I want you,” and she runs away as the footsteps come near. Such remarkables are shared with apprehension even within a small tent’s confines.
She recalls her second encounter with him at home, “but I refused,” she says.
She claims that after being raped, “He grabbed me and slammed me down on the floor.”
Roua and her rapist are no longer in communication.
Sexual abuse is not uncommon in refugee camps and during humanitarian crises.
According to Loiseau, “sex is a sex for survival” for some young girls. She and her team provide covert psychological assistance at the Maison d’étoile, the Red Cross’s House of Stars in Adre.
They say they are invited to do laundry or other tasks, but ultimately they are raped instead of being paid. They are violated. She mentions refugees who frequently work for locals in Adre and claim that there is nothing they can do about it.
Given the absence of many women’s husbands, the camp’s pregnancies have raised questions for aid workers and community leaders.
According to Loiseau, “when you dig, you discover that it wasn’t consensual.”
Roua consistently rocks Awa, a nine-month-old baby, while staring into the distance. She describes how her family was harmed by the rape, which inflamed her father. She claims that a friend who was also pregnant after being raped by a Chadian police officer, went back to Sudan out of shame.
Inside, I’m broken, inside. I’m not able to eat at times. I’m sleepy-eyed. I’m not interested in talking to people. … I feel as though I’ve changed.
Refugees claim that violence is becoming more frequent in the camp despite Borgo’s claims that things are under control. Women claim they make sure their homes are out of the market by 6pm because one gang called The Colombians has gained notoriety for causing trouble.
In and around the camp, according to Doctors Without Borders, which also has the French acronym MSF.
Women who leave the camp to collect firewood or water may be targeted, according to Dr. Assoumana Halarou, the medical director of MSF in Chad.
One of those victims earlier in the day was Hanan, a woman who was listening to UNICEF while gathering firewood.
Hanan desperately needs medical care, despite the fact that there is psychological support.
My children are six. Both my wife and I are married. How should I feed my second child if I have him? ” she berates herself for her “bad luck” by asking.
Nearly 300,000 people have been evacuated in the past 48 hours from flood-hit areas of Pakistan’s Punjab province following the latest flood alerts by India, officials have said, bringing the total number of people displaced since last month to 1.3 million.
A new flood alert was shared with Pakistan by neighbouring India through diplomatic channels early on Wednesday, said Arfan Ali Kathia, director-general of Punjab’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority.
Floodwaters have submerged dozens of villages in Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district, after earlier inundating Narowal and Sialkot, both near the border with India.
Authorities are also struggling to divert overflowing rivers onto farmlands to protect major cities, as part of one of the largest rescue and relief operations in the history of Punjab, which straddles eastern Pakistan and northwestern India.
The flood alert on Wednesday was the second in 24 hours following heavy rains and water releases from dams in India.
Thousands of rescuers using boats are taking part in the relief and rescue operations, while the military has also been deployed to transport people and animals from inundated villages, said Kathia.
Rescuers are also using drones to find people stranded on rooftops in the flood-hit areas. Kathia said more than 3.3 million people across 33,000 villages in the province have been affected. The damage is still being assessed and all those who lost homes and crops would be compensated by the Punjab government, he said.
Landslides and flooding have killed at least 30 people in India’s Punjab state, home to more than 30 million people, and nearly 20,000 have been evacuated since August 1.
In Pakistan, tent villages are being set up and food and other essential items are being supplied to flood-affected people, said Kathia, though many survivors complained about a lack of government aid.
Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif visited flood-hit areas in Muzaffargarh on Wednesday, meeting with displaced families at the camps.
About 40,000 people are in the relief camps, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. It remains unclear where the rest are sheltering.
Malik Ramzan, a displaced resident, said he chose to stay near his inundated home rather than enter a relief camp. “There are no liveable facilities in the camps,” he said. “Food isn’t delivered on time, and we are treated like beggars.”
Facilities at the camps “are very poor,” said Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Multan in Punjab. “There’s no clean drinking water, no proper toilet facilities, plus the fact that it’s very hot and humid, so it leads to dehydration.”
While these families have fans to keep cool in the heat, “there are frequent power breakdowns, so these people now are very vulnerable when it comes to their health and, of course, the outbreak of diseases.”
Last week’s flooding mainly hit districts in Kasur, Bahawalpur and Narowal.
Pakistan began mass evacuations last month after India released water from overflowing dams into low-lying border regions.
London, United Kingdom – Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader, is set to host a two-day event examining the United Kingdom’s role in Israel’s war on Gaza, casting the “tribunal” as an attempt to bring about justice for the Palestinian people.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, is among those expected to contribute, as well as medics who have volunteered in Gaza, such as British surgeon Victoria Rose, aid workers, experts and survivors.
Organisers said Labour MP Richard Burgon and journalists who have reported on the ground and from afar will also participate, including investigative reporter Matt Kennard, who has been tracking the UK’s surveillance flights over Gaza.
On Thursday and Friday, at London’s Church House, Westminster, they will join various panels, with subjects including the UK’s legal responsibilities.
“The public deserves to know the full scale of their government’s complicity in genocide. That is why we are holding The Gaza Tribunal. We will uncover the truth,” the website of the initiative says.
The push follows Corbyn’s failed attempt for an official measure akin to the Iraq Inquiry, by John Chilcot, which investigated the UK’s role in the Iraq war.
On June 4, Corbyn, one of the UK’s most renowned pro-Palestine voices who is launching a new left-wing political party, tabled a bill in the House of Commons calling for an independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in Israeli military operations in Gaza, including the supply of weapons, surveillance aircraft, and the use of Royal Air Force bases.
That bill, backed by dozens of MPs and supported by more than 20 aid groups, was ultimately blocked by the governing Labour Party.
“Just like Iraq, the government is doing everything it can to protect itself from scrutiny. Just like Iraq, it will not succeed in its attempts to suffocate the truth. We will uncover the full scale of British complicity in genocide – and we will bring about justice for the people of Palestine,” said Corbyn.
The summit comes as many Britons feel their government is at odds with public opinion.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets for almost two years to urge Prime Minister Keir Starmer to cut ties with Israel and exert more pressure on his Israeli counterpart to stop the onslaught, described by leading rights groups and scholars as a genocide against Palestinians.
Recent YouGov polls (PDF) show the majority of Britons sympathise with Palestinians and a significant number view Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide
Last week, Corbyn told Al Jazeera that there has been a “slight but slow-moving shift in opinion in Parliament because of the numbers of people in Britain that have shown their solidarity with the Palestinian people”.
The UK has sanctioned far-right Israeli ministers and suspended some arms export licences to Israel following a review that found there was a risk certain military exports might be used in violations of international humanitarian law, but UK-made F-35 parts can still end up in Israel via the global spares pool.
Questions have also been raised over the UK’s surveillance flights over Gaza, hundreds of which have reportedly taken off from Cyprus.
The UK says the planes are flown in a bid to locate captives held by Hamas, the group that governs the Gaza Strip.
But “with no parliamentary oversight or public scrutiny, it remains unclear how much British intelligence gathered from these flights has been shared with Israel”, the Action on Armed Violence group, which researched the flights, reported in March.
“Whether these flights have also conducted Target Acquisition over the [occupied Palestinian territory] … in addition to intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance, remains unknown.”
It said, “Grave concerns remain as to the nature of these flights within the broader context of Israel’s violations of international law and the UK’s continued military collaboration with Israel, including the continued supply of arms such as components for F-35 jets, which have been used in Israel’s widespread bombardment of civilian zones.”
Since October 2023, at least 63,746 people have been killed and 161,245 wounded across Gaza, which is now home to the highest number of child amputees per capita.