Israel’s military has carried out waves of air attacks in southern Lebanon, causing damage to several homes, according to Lebanese state media, as anger mounts over repeated Israeli violations of a ceasefire with Hezbollah agreed upon last year.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported late on Monday that Israeli jets targeted Mount Safi, the town of Jbaa, the Zefta Valley, and the area between Azza and Rumin Arki in “several waves”.
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There was no immediate report of casualties.
The Israeli military, in a post on X, said it struck several sites linked to Hezbollah, including a special operations training compound used by its elite Radwan Force.
The military said several buildings and a rocket-launching site were also hit.
The attacks come days after Israel and Lebanon dispatched civilian envoys to a military committee tasked with overseeing their ceasefire, a step towards a months-old demand by the United States, which has been urging the two countries to broaden their talks.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said on Friday that his country “has adopted the option of negotiations with Israel”, and that the talks were aimed at stopping Israel’s continued attacks on his country.
The current ceasefire, brokered by Washington in 2024, ended more than a year of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah.
But Israel has continued to strike Lebanon on a near-daily basis.
A United Nations report released in November said that at least 127 civilians, including children, have been killed in Lebanon since the ceasefire went into effect. UN officials have warned that the strikes amount to “war crimes”.
Tensions spiked further last week when Israel bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing Hezbollah’s top military commander, Haytham Ali Tabtabai.
The group, still weakened after last year’s conflict, has yet to respond.
Israel has accused Lebanon of not doing enough to compel Hezbollah to relinquish its arsenal across the country, a claim the Lebanese government denies.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said last week that Lebanon wanted to see the ceasefire monitoring mechanism play a more robust role in verifying Israel’s claims that Hezbollah is rearming, as well as the work of the Lebanese army in dismantling the armed group’s infrastructure.
Asked whether that meant Lebanon would accept US and French troops on the ground as part of a verification mechanism, Salam said, “Of course”.
The continued Israeli strikes have raised fears in Lebanon that the Israeli military could expand its air campaign further.
US President Donald Trump has cleared the way for tech giant Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chip to China, in a significant easing of Washington’s export controls targeting Chinese tech.
Trump said on Monday that he had informed Chinese President Xi Jinping of the decision to allow the export of the chip under an arrangement that will see 25 percent of sales paid to the US government.
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Trump said exports would be allowed to “approved customers” under conditions that protect national security, and that his administration would take the “same approach” in relation to other chipmakers, such as AMD and Intel.
“This policy will support American Jobs, strengthen U.S. Manufacturing, and benefit American Taxpayers,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Nvidia, which is based in Santa Clara, California, said the move struck a “thoughtful balance” and would “support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America”.
Nvidia shares jumped more than 2 percent in after-hours trading on the news.
Trump’s announcement marks a major departure from the policy of former President Joe Biden’s administration, which confined Nvidia and other chipmakers to exporting downgraded versions of their products specifically designed for the Chinese market.
In his Truth Social post, Trump slammed the Biden administration’s approach, claiming it had led to US tech companies spending billions of dollars on downgraded products that “nobody wanted”.
The H200, launched in 2023, is Nvidia’s most powerful chip outside of the latest-generation Blackwell series, which Trump confirmed would continue to be restricted for the Chinese market.
While not Nvidia’s most advanced chip, the H200 is almost six times as powerful as the previous generation H20 chip, according to the Washington-based Institute for Progress, a non-partisan think tank.
Under an agreement with the Trump administration announced in August, Nvidia agreed to pay the US government 15 percent of revenues from its sales of the H20, which was designed to comply with restrictions imposed on the Chinese market.
Tilly Zhang, an expert on Chinese tech at Gavekal Dragonomics, said Trump’s decision reflected “market realities” as well as intense lobbying by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“The priority is moving away from purely blocking or slowing China’s tech progress, more towards competing for market share and securing the commercial benefits of selling their own tech solutions,” Zhang told Al Jazeera.
As blocking China’s tech advancement becomes increasingly unrealistic, “gaining more market share and revenue is turning into a higher priority”, Zhang said.
“That’s what this US move signals to me.”
Zhang said the race between China and the US to dominate artificial intelligence had shifted from export controls towards market competition.
“That might push chipmakers on both sides towards faster innovation, and bring more market dynamics,” she said.
Trump’s announcement drew a swift rebuke from Democratic lawmakers.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who represents Massachusetts, accused the Trump administration of “selling out US security”.
“Trump is letting NVIDIA export cutting-edge AI chips that his own DOJ revealed are being illegally smuggled into China,” Warren said on X, referring to multiple probes into illegal chip shipments carried out by the US Department of Justice.
“His own DOJ called these chips ‘building blocks of AI superiority’.”
Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Trump’s move was a blow to US efforts to stay ahead of China in the race to dominate AI.
“Loosening export controls on AI chips will allow Chinese AI firms to close the gap with frontier US AI models, and will allow Chinese cloud computing providers to build ‘good enough’ data centres around the world,” McGuire, who worked on tech policy in Biden’s White House, told Al Jazeera.
Ukraine’s European allies have agreed to increase their support for Ukraine and put more economic pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin as they say efforts to end Moscow’s “barbaric” war are at a “critical moment”, according to Downing Street.
The statement from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he would share Ukraine’s version of a 20-point plan on Tuesday, as both Ukraine and Russia continue to refine a 28-point plan put forward by US President Donald Trump last month to end the war.
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“The mood of the Americans, in principle, is for finding a compromise,” Zelenskyy told reporters in London after a meeting with the leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom on Monday. “Of course, there are complex issues related to the territory, and a compromise has not yet been found there.”
The London meeting kicked off a busy two days of diplomacy for Zelenskyy as European allies scramble to show their support for the Ukrainian leader as he continues to face public criticism from the US president.
Trump said on Sunday he was “disappointed” with Zelenskyy, accusing him of not having read the latest proposals backed by the US.
Following the meeting in London, Zelenskyy said that the leaders of Finland, Italy, Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Turkiye also joined a call to express their support.
He then travelled to Brussels, where he met with European Union and NATO leaders before travelling on to Italy to meet with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
A Russian guided bomb attack damaged a residential neighbourhood in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Monday [Handout: Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Adm/Anadolu]
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has said that the recent US national security strategy put forward by the White House largely aligns with Russia’s positions. The new US document is critical of European leaders, sceptical of NATO expansion, supports far-right parties on the continent, and seeks better and stable relations with Russia.
“The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television reporter Pavel Zarubin on Sunday.
Peskov also said it was encouraging that the new strategy pledged to end “the perception… of the NATO military alliance as a perpetually expanding alliance”.
Meanwhile, Russian forces continued to launch deadly attacks across Ukraine, killing at least four civilians in Ukraine’s Donetsk region and five civilians in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region since Sunday.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence also claimed on Monday that Moscow’s troops had seized the Ukrainian villages of Novodanylivka in the Zaporizhia region and Chervone in the Donetsk region, according to the state-owned TASS news agency.
The developer of a popular app used to monitor and share alerts about immigration enforcement activities has sued the administration of United States President Donald Trump for pressuring Apple to remove it.
ICEBlock, whose name refers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had one million users before it was dropped from Apple’s app store, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday.
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Developer Joshua Aaron alleged in the complaint that the Trump administration’s campaign against the tracking app amounted to a violation of free speech.
“When we see our government doing something wrong, it’s our duty as citizens of this nation to hold them accountable, and that is exactly what we’re doing with this lawsuit,” Aaron said in the lawsuit.
The suit calls on the district court system to protect the Texas-based software company from “unlawful threats” under the Trump administration.
It also names as defendants some of Trump’s highest-level officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons.
First released in April, ICEBlock quickly became a widely used tool across the US as communities sought ways to share information about immigration raids.
Since returning to office for a second term, Trump has pushed a campaign of mass deportation, targeting a wide range of immigrants, many of whom are in the country legally.
Those raids, many carried out by heavily armed immigration agents in military-style attire, have also faced repeated accusations of human rights abuses.
Critics have questioned the violence used in some arrests, as well as the ICE officers’ use of face masks and plainclothes to conceal their identities.
There have also been reports of inhumane conditions once immigrants are in custody, including overcrowding, a lack of sanitation and faeces-smeared walls.
Human rights advocates have also questioned the speed with which deportations are being carried out, claiming the immigrants arrested have no opportunity to exercise their due process rights and are often prevented from contacting lawyers.
Even US citizens have been accidentally detained in the immigration sweeps. Some immigrants have been deported despite court orders mandating that they remain in the US.
The Trump administration has faced fierce criticism and judicial rebukes for its tactics.
But it maintains that software like ICEBlock puts federal immigration agents in danger of retaliation.
“ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line,” Attorney General Bondi has said.
In October, ICEBlock was pulled from Apple’s app store, a popular platform for downloading mobile software. The Justice Department confirmed that it had contacted Apple to push for the removal.
The lawsuit states that the tech company told Aaron the app had been removed following “information provided to Apple by law enforcement”.
Aaron has countered that the app is an exercise of essential free speech rights and is meant to help protect people from overbearing government activity.
“We’re basically asking the court to set a precedent and affirm that ICEBlock is, in fact, First Amendment-protected speech and that I did nothing wrong by creating it,” Aaron told The Associated Press news agency in an interview.
Russian forces killed four people in attacks on Ukraine’s Donetsk, and wounded 12 others in the Sumy region, according to Ukrainian officials. The city of Sumy was without power late on Monday after Russian forces launched more than a dozen drones in the span of half an hour.
Earlier on Monday, Sumy regional authorities said Russia had launched 130 attacks on the region in one day.
The death toll from Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Kharkiv on Sunday rose to five, officials said, after a second person died in the Staryi Saltiv settlement.
Ukrainian forces launched drone attacks on Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia, knocking out power to nearly 12,000 people, according to Moscow-installed official Yevhen Balitsky. He said late on Monday that some 8,000 people remained without electricity.
Ukrainian monitoring site DeepState reported Russian gains near the embattled town of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, saying Russian troops have seized Lysivka, Sukhyi Yar, Hnativka, Rih and Novopavlivka, and advanced in the towns of Siversk and Myrnohrad.
In Russia, several regions in the southern and western parts of the country issued warnings about possible drone attacks early on Tuesday, while airports in Vladikavkaz, Grozny, Magas and Mozdok suspended operations over safety concerns.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence claimed that Moscow troops had seized the Ukrainian villages of Novodanylivka in the Zaporizhia region and Chervone in the Donetsk region, according to the TASS news agency.
The ministry also said Russian forces shot down 171 Ukrainian drones in a day, TASS reported.
Politics and diplomacy
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with the leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom in London to shore up support for Kyiv as negotiations continue working on a United States proposal to end the war.
Zelenskyy said the leaders made “small progress” and that Ukraine will share a revised peace plan with the US on Tuesday.
He told reporters the revised plan comprised 20 points and reiterated that Kyiv had no legal or moral right to give up land to Russia in any peace deal.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened a call with Zelenskyy and other European leaders after the meeting in London. “The leaders all agreed that now is a critical moment and that we must continue to ramp up support to Ukraine and economic pressure on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to bring an end to this barbaric war,” Starmer’s office said.
Zelenskyy later flew to Brussels, where he met European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa.
The Ukrainian leader said his meeting with the two European Union institution chiefs, as well as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, was “good and productive” and that “we are acting in a coordinated and constructive manner”.
The two EU leaders said Ukraine’s must be respected and Ukraine’s security must be guaranteed, in the long term, as a first line of defence” for the European bloc.
Zelenskyy is due to travel to Italy afterwards.
Earlier, he confirmed reports that unidentified drones had been spotted near his plane during his flight to Ireland last week. “There will be an investigation… There were drones, indeed,” he told reporters.
Leaders from Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden urged the EU to move quickly with a stalled proposal to use frozen Russian assets to provide funds for Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says a meeting between Putin and US President Donald Trump is not expected before the New Year, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
A court in Russian-controlled Donetsk in Ukraine sentenced three Russian soldiers to 12 years in prison for torturing and killing Russell Bentley, a 63-year-old US national who had volunteered to fight for Russia against Kyiv.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that Turkiye has agreed to guarantee the flow of Russian gas to his country. He made the comments in a joint news conference with Turkish leader Recep Erdogan in Istanbul.
German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Johann Wadephul, who is visiting Beijing, said he pressed Chinese officials to use their influence on Russia to help end the war in Ukraine. “If there is one country in the world that has a strong influence on Russia, it is China,” Wadephul told a news conference.
Military aid
Zelenskyy said that Kyiv is short of about $800m for the US weapons it had planned to buy this year with funding from its European allies.
The Netherlands said it will earmark another 700 million euros ($815m) to provide Ukraine with military support in the first quarter of 2026. The Dutch government had earlier pledged 3.5 billion euros ($4bn) in support for next year, but a large part of that money has already been spent this year.
The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced a 17 million British pound ($19.78m) investment in green energy innovation projects in Ukraine.
Legal proceedings
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that counterclaims submitted by Russia are admissible in Ukraine’s case against Russia’s invasion. The case was brought under the Genocide Convention.
United States President Donald Trump has raised tariffs by 5 percent on imports from Mexico, accusing the country of failing to uphold a cross-border water treaty.
The tariff hike was revealed in a social media message late on Monday, as tensions simmer between the two North American neighbours.
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“Mexico continues to violate our comprehensive Water Treaty, and this violation is seriously hurting our BEAUTIFUL TEXAS CROPS AND LIVESTOCK,” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social.
“Mexico still owes the U.S over 800,000 acre-feet [986.8 million cubic metres] of water for failing to comply with our Treaty over the past five years.”
The US president’s message set a demand and a deadline. He called on Mexico to release 200,000 acre-feet of water — equivalent to 246 million cubic metres — by December 31.
But the punitive tariffs, Trump added, are set to begin right away.
“As of now, Mexico is not responding, and it is very unfair to our U.S. Farmers who deserve this much needed water,” Trump said.
“That is why I have authorized documentation to impose a 5% Tariff on Mexico if this water isn’t released, IMMEDIATELY. The longer Mexico takes to release the water, the more our Farmers are hurt.”
A long-running drought left parts of the Rio Grande cracked and dry in August 2025 [File: Susan Montoya Bryan/AP Photo]
Drought-stricken Mexico struggles
Trump’s demands are part of a long-running dispute over the 1944 Water Treaty, which governs the output of the waterways that spider across the border region — namely the Rio Grande, the Colorado River and their tributaries.
Under the terms of the treaty, each year, the US must allow Mexico to receive 1.5 million acre-feet of water, or 1.85 billion cubic metres, from waterways streaming south.
In return, Mexico lets at least 350,000 acre-feet, or 431 million cubic metres, flow northward to the US.
But years of drought have left Mexico in crisis. According to a 2024 report from the North American Drought Monitor, an intergovernmental agency, more than 75 percent of Mexico is experiencing “moderate to exceptional” drought levels.
That is the highest recorded level since 2011. As a result, Mexico officials have warned they cannot meet the standards inked in the eight-decade-old treaty.
But agricultural interests in the border state of Texas are pressuring US lawmakers to act, saying the decreased water supply has withered their businesses.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, is among those who have pledged to champion the farmers’ cause.
“Mexico must be held accountable for their continued breaches of our long-standing water agreement,” Abbott said in a news release last month.
“Because of their pattern of neglect, Texas farmers are enduring preventable hardship and an erosion of the agricultural viability of the Rio Grande Valley.”
A family takes a walk in the Rio Grande’s dry riverbed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 21 [Susan Montoya Bryan/AP Photo]
A water ‘debt?’
The issue has been an ongoing source of cross-border strife. In 2020, desperate farmers in Mexico went so far as to take over a dam in the border state of Chihuahua to prevent the “water payments” from flowing to the US, while their crops shrivelled.
Mexico’s deficit under the 1944 Water Treaty has continued to grow since then, leading to what the US considers a water “debt”.
The US claims it is owed hundreds of millions of cubic metres of water from the treaty’s last five-year cycle.
Monday, however, was not the first time Trump has wielded economy-buckling tariffs as a means of enforcing compliance. In April, he made a similar threat.
“We will keep escalating consequences, including TARIFFS and, maybe even SANCTIONS, until Mexico honors the Treaty, and GIVES TEXAS THE WATER THEY ARE OWED,” he wrote on Truth Social.
One month earlier, in March, the Trump administration also denied Mexico’s request for a special delivery of Colorado River water to the drought-stricken border city of Tijuana.
It was the first time since the water treaty was signed that the US had taken such an action.
“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture — particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley,” the US State Department said in a statement.
“As a result, today for the first time, the U.S. will deny Mexico’s non-treaty request for a special delivery channel for Colorado River water to be delivered to Tijuana.”
In response, the Mexican government denied violating the 1944 treaty. Instead, it said it supplied what it could in the face of extreme water shortages.
“We have experienced three years of drought, and to the extent that water has been available, Mexico has been fulfilling its obligations,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said.
Farmers protest against a proposed water law outside the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City on December 3 [Claudia Rosel/AP Photo]
A new deal, a new dilemma
Ultimately, the two countries ended the impasse on April 28, with a new deal to regulate cross-border water flow.
According to the US, the agreement required Mexico to immediately release water from international reservoirs.
It also stipulated that Mexico would boost the amount of water flowing from the Rio Grande northwards through the end of the last five-year cycle, which expired in late October.
Mexico has claimed it fulfilled those requirements. But Texas lawmakers said the country fell far short, and some want the deficit to roll over into the next five-year cycle.
Because of a 43-day-long government shutdown in the US, it is unclear how much water passed across the border during the end of that five-year period. Only preliminary data is available.
Still, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), a state agency, has petitioned the Trump administration to take action.
“Economic losses from delayed water deliveries cannot be recovered,” TCEQ Commissioner Tonya Miller said in a November statement.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, the Sheinbaum administration faced domestic pressure to loosen water restrictions on local farmers.
Just this month, farmers poured in from the countryside to form a blockade with their tractors in front of Mexico’s Congress, as a protest against a new bill that would tighten the tap on their water.
River flows are not the only point of tension between the two countries: Trump has pushed for a crackdown on cross-border drug trafficking and migration, while Sheinbaum has warned against US threats to Mexico’s sovereignty.
But while Sheinbaum has largely managed to keep relations steady with Trump, there are signals that their bond may be fraying.
