“The tents are gone, the clothes are gone, our food is gone.” Displaced Palestinians in Gaza fled Israeli bombardment with what little they could carry. Those items are now waterlogged and destroyed by flooding, as one man in Deir el-Balah told Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili.
In her second public appearance after more than a year in hiding, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has promised that, one way or another, the presidency of Nicolas Maduro will end.
Speaking to reporters in Oslo, Norway, on Friday, Machado added that she was still hopeful that a change in leadership in Venezuela would be peaceful.
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“Maduro will leave power, whether it is negotiated or not negotiated,” Machado said in Spanish. “I am focused on an orderly and peaceful transition.”
Her latest statement comes as the administration of US President Donald Trump maintains its buildup of military forces in the Caribbean.
The Trump administration has repeatedly struck alleged drug smuggling boats in the region, in what experts say amounts to extrajudicial killings. The president has also, in recent days, repeatedly threatened to begin operations on Venezuelan territories, in what he has characterised as actions to stem illegal drug flows from the country.
Maduro has accused the Trump administration of seeking to topple his government. Some critics have accused the US of aiming to open up Venezuela’s vast oil reserves to US and Western companies.
Machado, who remains popular in the Latin American country but was barred from running in last year’s presidential election, has been seen by many as Washington’s favourite to replace Maduro.
The opposition has maintained that Machado’s replacement, Edmond Gonzalez, won the July polls by a landslide, with a group of independent election experts later legitimising their evidence. Maduro has continued to claim victory.
On Thursday, Machado emerged in Oslo, Norway, where she received the Nobel Peace Prize after evading a travel ban in her home country.
The 58-year-old opposition leader has aligned herself closely with Trump and Venezuela hawks in the Republican Party.
She has praised several actions taken by the Trump administration to pressure Maduro, including the US seizure of a sanctioned oil tanker in the Caribbean earlier this week.
Machado called Trump’s actions “decisive” in weakening Maduro’s government.
She has been more circumspect on the prospect of military action on Venezuelan territory, saying only on Thursday that Venezuela “has already been invaded”.
“We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents, we have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime. We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels,” she said.
On Friday, she predicted that Venezuela’s armed forces would comply with a transition of power.
“I have confidence that the immense majority of the Venezuelan armed forces and the police are going, in the instant that the transition begins, to obey orders, guidelines, instructions from the superiors who will be designated by the civil authority duly elected by Venezuelans,” she said.
Experts have warned that any transition would need to be carefully negotiated with political and military officials to avoid an internal conflict.
Speaking at a briefing earlier this week, Francesca Emanuele, senior policy associate for Latin America at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), noted that Maduro’s Chavismo ideology, named after former leader Hugo Chavez, remains a strong political force in Venezuela, while segments of the opposition are also staunchly opposed to US military interventions.
A deeply entrenched system of corruption and patronage will also make many military officials hesitant to change allegiances, she explained.
“The military won’t want to leave the government of Maduro if they don’t have amnesties, if there is no negotiation, so we [could] see a very horrible, devastating conflict in Venezuela that would spread in the region,” she said in reference to a possible US military intervention.
For its part, the Trump administration has shown little indication that it planned to alleviate pressure.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt would not rule out future seizures of sanctioned vessels off Venezuela’s coast.
On Friday, Reuters news agency reported that Admiral Alvin Holsey, who leads US military forces in Latin America, would retire early.
Three US officials and two people familiar with the matter told the news agency that Holsey was forced out by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over frustrations with his response to the Pentagon’s increasingly aggressive strategy in the region.
Holsey has not publicly explained the reason for his retirement.
The European Union is expected to indefinitely freeze hundreds of billions of Russian funds held in Europe in line with a plan to use the cash to support Ukraine.
The bloc’s members were expected to approve the plan on Friday to immobilise 210 billion euros ($246bn) worth of Russian sovereign assets for as long as necessary, through a qualified majority vote, instead of voting every six months on extending the asset freeze.
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That would equate to the support of at least 15 of the bloc’s 27 member states, representing 65 percent of the EU population.
The move is an important step that would allow EU leaders to hash out the specifics of a plan at a summit to use billions in frozen Russian Central Bank assets to underwrite a massive loan that would assist Ukraine in meeting its financial and military needs.
The 210 billion euros in Russian assets are frozen in Europe as a result of EU sanctions on Moscow over its war on Ukraine, with the vast majority held in Euroclear, a Belgian financial clearing house.
The expected decision, which would stay in place until the immediate threat posed by the EU’s economic interests subsided, would replace the current arrangement where the freeze on the funds needs to be re-approved every six months unanimously.
That situation has raised concerns that Hungary and Slovakia, which have closer relations to Moscow than other states and oppose further support to Ukraine, could vote to block a rollover of the sanctions and force the EU to return the funds to Russia.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Kremlin’s closest ally in Europe, railed against the expected decision on Friday, accusing the European Commission, which prepared the measure, “of systematically raping European law”.
He said the anticipated move means that “the rule of law in the European Union comes to an end, and Europe’s leaders are placing themselves above the rules.”
“It is doing this in order to continue the war in Ukraine, a war that clearly isn’t winnable,” he wrote.
Belgium, where Euroclear is based, is also opposed to the bloc’s “reparations loan” plan, saying it “entails consequential economic, financial and legal risks”.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Central Bank said on Friday that it had filed a lawsuit in Moscow against Euroclear for damages it claims were caused due to the stripping of Russian control of the frozen billions.
In a separate statement, the Central Bank said the wider EU plans to use Russian assets to aid Ukraine were “illegal, contrary to international law”, and in breach of “the principles of sovereign immunity of assets”.
As the legal battle over frozen funds heats up in Europe, fighting continues to rage on the battlefield. Ukrainian forces said they had retaken parts of the front-line town of Kupiansk in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, and had encircled Russian troops there.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy released a video visiting the area, where he praised the troops’ efforts and said their results were strengthening Kyiv’s hand diplomatically, as Washington pushes Kyiv to make major territorial concessions to end the nearly four-year war.
“Today, it is extremely important to achieve results on the front lines so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy,” Zelenskyy said in the clip, which showed him wearing a bulletproof vest at the entrance to Kupiansk.
Ukraine’s Khartiia Corps of the National Guard said it had liberated several northern districts of Kupiansk, while Russian supply routes had been cut off and several hundred Russian troops were surrounded.
In other movements on the battlefield, Ukraine said it had retaken the settlements of Kindrashivka and Radkivka in the northern Kharkiv region.
As the warring neighbours intensified their attacks far beyond the front line, Ukraine’s special forces have claimed to have hit two Russian ships transporting weapons and military equipment in the Caspian Sea, in an operation they said was carried out in coordination with a “local resistance movement”.
The statement on Friday, posted on Telegram, said two vessels – the Composer Rakhmaninoff and the Askar-Sarydzha – had been struck off the coast of the Russian republic of Kalmykia. Both vessels had been sanctioned by the US for transferring military loads between Iran and Russia, it said.
The statement said the operation had been carried out with the assistance of a resistance movement it named as “Black Spark”, which it said had provided detailed information on the ships’ movements and cargoes.
It did not provide details on the location and nature of the strike, or the extent of any damage.
India Twenty20 captain Suryakumar Yadav and his deputy Shubman Gill continued their run drought, but the team management has backed the duo to regain their form before the home World Cup early next year.
Returning from a neck injury, opener Gill managed four and zero in the first two T20 matches of the ongoing home series against South Africa. The right-hander has now gone 17 innings in this format since his last half-century.
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“I thought he got (dismissed by) a good ball today, which can happen when you are short on form,” assistant coach Ryan ten Doeschate said after Gill, who has an impressive record in the Indian Premier League (IPL), fell for a first-ball duck against South Africa on Thursday.
“But we also know the class. If you look at his IPL record, where he stacks up 700 runs, 600 runs, 800 runs, 600 runs.
“We believe in his class and we believe he will come good.”
T20 specialist Suryakumar has endured worse. Across his last 20 innings in this format, he has compiled 227 runs at 13.35 with no fifties.
“It’s exactly the same with Surya,” ten Doeschate said. “Personally, I think you back quality players and quality leaders like that and they will come good.
“I can understand from the outside it looks like a concern, but I have got absolute faith in both of them coming good at the right time for us.”
Former India all-rounder Irfan Pathan said the duo’s recent run of poor form was “a real cause of concern for India”.
“Surya will be under pressure because he’s the captain, and as a captain, your slot in the playing 11 is secured automatically,” Pathan told JioHotstar.
“As a player, if you haven’t scored runs in a year, you are under pressure. His form has to come back before the World Cup. He needs the right batting position and better shot selection.”
Ukraine says it has retaken parts of Kupiansk, a town in the northern region of Kharkiv, which Russia’s Ministry of Defence claimed to have seized on November 21.
On Friday, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Kupiansk and hailed the defending troops, a Ukrainian commander said Russian forces in the city had been completely surrounded.
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“Today, we can say that the Russians in the city are completely cut off. For a long time, they couldn’t understand what was happening. But now they know they are surrounded,” said Ihor Obolienskyi, head of the Khartiia Corps of the National Guard, as quoted by the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet.
The battlefield unit said it had liberated northern districts of the town.
Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Kupiansk had been “practically in the hands of Russian forces” on November 4.
“Our guys, so to speak, were finishing mopping up isolated neighbourhoods and streets. The city’s future had already been determined at that point,” Putin told his National Security Council.
“The volume of Russian lies far exceeds the actual pace of Russian troop advances,” Oleksandr Syrskii, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, wrote on the Telegram messaging service. “The enemy uses disinformation and fake maps in a hybrid war against Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine has continued to fight in its contested eastern city of Pokrovsk this week, despite Russian claims to have seized it entirely.
“The defence of Pokrovsk continues, our troops control almost 13 square kilometres [five square miles] in the northern part of the city,” Syrskii said on Tuesday, calling it an “extremely difficult phase” of the fight.
Geolocated footage showing Russian drones striking there on Wednesday confirmed the presence of Ukrainian troops.
Russia had claimed complete control over Pokrovsk on December 2.
Syrskii later explained that Ukrainian forces had tactically retreated from Pokrovsk, but fought their way back in.
“At a certain stage in the autumn, there were no more of our troops in Pokrovsk due to limited capabilities,” he told Ukrainian media executives on Wednesday.
He also said Ukrainian forces held 54sq km (21 square miles) west of the city.
Ukrainian forces were also resisting Russian advances in Myrnohrad, east of Pokrovsk, Syrskii said.
The two cities are almost surrounded by Russian forces, with supply lines and evacuation routes running only through a narrow neck to the west.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said their troops were still repelling attacks in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad on Thursday, as well as in outlying villages near the two towns.
Russian narratives were part of a campaign to force Ukraine to sign a peace agreement that United States President Donald Trump presented last month, said the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
That plan demands that Ukraine hand over Pokrovsk and the rest of a “fortress belt” of cities in the eastern Donetsk region. Ukraine invested an estimated billion dollars last year to defend the region.
“ISW continues to assess that the Russian campaign to militarily seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast, including Ukraine’s heavily fortified Fortress Belt, would likely take at least two-to-three years, pose a significant challenge, and result in difficult and costly battles that the Russian Federation may not be able to sustain,” the ISW wrote.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had not agreed to any territorial concessions demanded in the original plan, and was continuing to negotiate the proposal, though many observers believed it was a dead end.
“I don’t think the current US-managed Ukraine peace process is serious,” wrote Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash on his Substack newsletter. “Trump wants the quick win, in effect. He is not really bothered to understand the core drivers of the conflict.”
Putin repeated on December 9 that Russia’s wartime goals had not changed, including the seizure of Donetsk, casting doubt on whether Moscow was serious about negotiating.
Despite highly publicised seizures of villages and rural terrain, Russia’s progress has been slow for the past two years of the war, figures show.
Last year it seized 4,168sq km (1,609sq miles), equivalent to 0.69 percent of Ukraine. So far this year, the ISW estimated it has seized 4,669sq km (1,802sq miles), or 0.77 percent of Ukraine. During that time, Russia has suffered an estimated 820,000 casualties.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov this week said Russian manufacturing, construction, agriculture and services faced a shortage of 2.3 million workers.
After weathering the first three years of war well, the Russian economy slowed down in 2025 and its treasury, central bank and energy corporations are running out of cash, leading to cuts in defence spending.
The European Union aimed to deal Russia another economic blow on Friday, freezing 210bn euros ($246bn) in immobilised Russian assets indefinitely rather than in rolling six-month periods, in a step towards using the cash to finance Ukraine’s war effort.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops, though outgunned, have not lost their will to fight, according to the testimony of a Russian assault company commander, identified as Vladimir, in a Telegram post published by Russia’s Defence Ministry.
The ministry said he led the seizure of the village of Rovnoye in Donetsk.
Congolese refugees have recounted harrowing scenes of death and family separation as they fled intensified fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where Rwanda-backed M23 rebels captured a strategic city despite a recent United States-brokered peace agreement.
M23 has cemented control over Uvira, a key lakeside city in DRC’s South Kivu province that it seized on Wednesday, despite a peace accord that President Donald Trump had called “historic” when signed in Washington just one week earlier.
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Al Jazeera, which is the first international broadcaster to gain access to the city since M23’s takeover, saw residents tentatively returning home after days of violence, amid a heavy presence of rebel fighters on Friday.
The day before, M23 fighters combed the streets to flush out remaining Congolese forces and allied militias – known as “Wazalendo” – after taking over key parts of the city.
Meanwhile, at Nyarushishi refugee camp in Rwanda’s Rusizi district, Akilimali Mirindi told the AFP news agency she fled South Kivu with just three of her 10 children after bombs destroyed her home near the border.
“I don’t know what happened to the other seven, or their father,” the 40-year-old said, describing corpses scattered along escape routes as about 1,000 people reached the camp following renewed clashes this month.
Regional officials said more than 413 civilians have been killed since fighting escalated in early December, with women and children among the dead.
The offensive has displaced about 200,000 people, and threatens to drag neighbouring Burundi deeper into a conflict that has already uprooted more than seven million across eastern DRC, according to United Nations figures.
Uvira sits on Lake Tanganyika’s northern shore, directly across from Burundi’s largest city, and serves as South Kivu’s interim government headquarters after M23 seized the provincial capital, Bukavu, in February.
Al Jazeera correspondent Alain Uaykani, who gained access to the city on Friday, reported a tenuous calm and the heavy presence of M23 soldiers but described harrowing scenes on the journey there.
“Here in Uvira, we have seen different groups of the Red Cross with their equipment, collecting bodies, and conducting burials across the road,” Uaykani said.
He added that the Al Jazeera crew saw abandoned military trucks destroyed along the road to Uvira, and the remains of people who were killed.
Residents who fled Uvira told AFP of bombardment from multiple directions as M23 fighters battled Congolese forces and their Burundian allies around the port city.
“Bombs were raining down on us from different directions,” Thomas Mutabazi, 67, told AFP at the refugee camp. “We had to leave our families and our fields.”
Refugee Jeanette Bendereza had already escaped to Burundi once this year during an earlier M23 push in February, only to return to DRC when authorities said peace had been restored. “We found M23 in charge,” she said.
When violence erupted again, she ran with four children as “bombs started falling from Burundian fighters”, losing her phone and contact with her husband in the chaos.
Another refugee, Olinabangi Kayibanda, witnessed a pregnant neighbour killed alongside her two children when their house was bombed. “Even children were dying, so we decided to flee,” the 56-year-old told an AFP reporter.
M23 spokesperson Lawrence Kanyuka announced on Wednesday that Uvira had been “fully liberated” and urged residents to return home.
Fighting had already resumed even as Trump last week hosted Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame at a widely attended signing ceremony.
The December 4 Washington agreement obliged Rwanda to cease supporting armed groups, though the M23 was not party to those negotiations and is instead involved in separate Qatar-mediated talks with Kinshasa.
DRC’s government accused Rwanda of deploying special forces and foreign mercenaries to Uvira “in clear violation” of both the Washington and earlier Doha agreements.
The US embassy in Kinshasa urged Rwandan forces to withdraw, while Congolese Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner called for Washington to impose sanctions, saying condemnation alone was insufficient.
Rwanda denies backing M23 and blames Congolese and Burundian forces for ceasefire violations.
In a statement on Thursday, President Kagame claimed that more than 20,000 Burundian soldiers were operating across multiple Congolese locations and accused them of shelling civilians in Minembwe.