World roundup: October 29 2026

World roundup: October 29 2026

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Barring any massive news there will be no roundup tomorrow. I am going to take a day to rest and see if I can finally kick this cold.

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 29, 1923: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declares the founding of a Turkish Republic, replacing the by-than obviously defunct Ottoman Empire. Although Atatürk’s Grand National Assembly had been functioning as a republican government since 1920, this day is annually commemorated as “Republic Day” in Turkey.

October 29, 1929: The “Crash of ‘29,” which began with “Black Thursday” on October 24 and continued with “Black Monday” on October 28, ends with “Black Tuesday.” Over those final two days the US stock market lost roughly a quarter of its value. By July 1932 the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at just over 40 points, down from roughly 380 points in September 1929. The crash signaled the onset of the Great Depression, a global economic collapse that especially hit industrialized Western nations and those countries dependent on the West for trade and investment, and that wouldn’t really end in many places until after the onset of World War II.

October 29, 1956: Israeli military forces, backed by France and the UK, invade Egypt’s Sinai region, kicking off what became known as the Suez Crisis. British and French leaders were upset over Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision in July to nationalize the Suez Canal and use its revenues to pay for his Aswan High Dam project. Their aim was to a) seize the canal and b) remove Nasser from power. Militarily their plan met with some initial success, but diplomatically it was such a dismal failure that the United States stepped in and threatened both Britain and France to cease and desist, which they did. Nasser’s ultimate victory cemented his stature as an anti-colonial force in the Arab and non-aligned worlds and the episode highlights the post-World War II shift in the Western world that had the US moving to the top of the hierarchy and Britain and France reduced to subordinate status.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli Central Election Committee released a preliminary tabulation of votes cast in Tuesday’s Knesset election on Thursday and there do not appear to be any major surprises based on earlier projections: Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition won 53 seats collectively, the Gadi Eisenkot-led opposition coalition won 48, and the two Palestinian-Israeli parties (the Joint List and the United Arab List) won 19.

In a different situation this could be interpreted as 53 seats for the government and 67 seats for the opposition, so the opposition won and Israel will get a new government. But with the caveat that anything could happen as the parties try to negotiate a post-election settlement, that’s not how things work in Israel. A large portion of Eisenkot’s coalition will not join an alliance with the Palestinian parties, whose remarkable success is one reason why the situation appears to be so deadlocked now. That includes bringing the UAL into the government and accepting support from the JL (whose constituent parties reject Zionism and would themselves refuse to be part of a governing coalition, but might be willing to support one to get rid of Netanyahu). Even if Eisenkot himself might entertain something like this he might cause enough of his coalition’s MKs to defect to Netanyahu to hand the latter a majority. So this outcome seems highly unlikely.

Netanyahu, it should be noted, is arguing that the Palestinian-Israeli vote was fraudulent, which he does every election cycle but this time it has particular salience. Netanyahu wants to make it as politically toxic as possible for Eisenkot to work with those Palestinian parties. He may also be trying to make a case for voiding the election altogether but that’s a less realistic goal. Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency is reportedly investigating claims that a foreign country sent financial support to one of the two Palestinian lists, but the agency has stressed that it’s not seeking to invalidate the Palestinian-Israeli vote altogether. That’s not stopping Netanyahu from making a big deal about the investigation.

The new Knesset is due to begin its session early next month. At that time the collective “opposition” will hold a majority of votes but it probably will not have formed a government. Netanyahu and his cabinet will continue in office, albeit with the practically meaningless “caretaker” label applied to their positions. If the opposition can work together in even the most basic way it can elect a new Knesset speaker and start passing legislation, but unless it can agree on a government it can’t unseat Netanyahu. I already outlined some of the possibilities on that front yesterday but ultimately I suspect Netanyahu will do what he can to force a snap election on the assumption that the result probably can’t get any worse for him and might be better. Even the prospect of a pardon seems unlikely to sway him, though again anything can happen at this point as the parties start talking.

Elsewhere, the Israeli military (IDF) killed at least two people and wounded several others in central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp on Thursday. Multiple IDF attacks were reported across the territory so there may be additional casualties. And in the West Bank a mob of Israeli settlers attacked journalists Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, Jasper Nathaniel, and Adele Shoko in the Masafer Yatta area on Wednesday. After the attackers beat them, Khrzhanovskiy and Nathaniel were arrested by Israeli security personnel. I believe that Nathaniel at least has been freed but I haven’t seen any confirmation of that or of Khrzhanovskiy’s whereabouts.

YEMEN

Intense fighting continues to rage around the besieged Yemeni city of Taiz, with the country’s nominal government declaring to Al Jazeera on Thursday that its forces had killed or wounded “239 militants” over the previous 24 hours. There’s no confirmation of that. Ansarullah claimed on Thursday that Saudi airstrikes in the vicinity of Taiz had killed at least 12 civilians and wounded three others, one day after the group said that Saudi attacks had killed at least 14 people in Jawf province in northern Yemen. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is now reporting that at least 281,000 people have been displaced since this war resumed in earnest lat month and that some 800,000 people are still trapped in Taiz with minimal supplies and inadequate access to humanitarian aid.

IRAN

In Iran-related items:

• According to The Wall Street Journal, Central Command boss Brad Cooper “briefed President Trump on Thursday on military options for Iran” in what it called “a rare in-person visit to the White House.” The in-person aspect may suggest that the Trump administration has reached a fairly advanced stage of war planning.

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed on Thursday that four vessels had caught fire after hitting sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz over the course of the day. The CENTCOM keeps insisting that it has cleared the strait of mines but the IRGC has in the past couple of weeks repeatedly made claims about tankers being disabled by mines along the waterway’s southern channel along the Omani coast. There’s no confirmation of Thursday’s alleged mine incidents and no indication as to damage or casualties.

• The US Defense Department is telling Congress that the Iran war has cost $47.1 billion. This is almost certainly a drastic underestimate from a department that isn’t exactly known for its scrupulous adherence to truth and accuracy, and it obviously doesn’t account for the money that the Trump administration is about to waste on a resumption of the war.

ASIA

AZERBAIJAN

It would appear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has backed down from his hijab spat with the Azerbaijani government. On Sunday the newspaper Cumhuriyet reported that Erdoğan had requested and received the resignation of one of his advisers, Oktay Saral. It was Saral who initially criticized the Azerbaijani government’s ban on religious attire in schools, including the hijab, beginning the dispute. Forcing him to resign is a clear gesture that Erdoğan wants this argument to end and he’s not worried about ending it on Turkish terms. The underlying issues in the Turkish-Azerbaijani relationship — chiefly that Turkey views itself as the dominant partner while Azerbaijan views itself as a peer or near-peer — remain, but those can be papered over at least for a little while longer.

AFGHANISTAN

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime is reporting a significant increase in opium production in Afghanistan this year, despite the Taliban-led government’s ban on its cultivation. According to its estimates some 43,000 hectares of Afghan farmland were devoted to the crop this year, compared with just 10,000 hectares in 2025. That’s still well below the 200,000-plus hectares that were used in opium cultivation prior to the Taliban’s re-takeover in 2021, but it seems pretty clear that economic pressures are increasingly driving farmers to defy the ban. The UN does have programs to help farmers transition to other crops but those are as poorly funded as most other UN programs these days so their reach is questionable. And there are other factors at play as well — one farmer interviewed by AFP cited climate-driven water shortages as a reason for going back to growing opium poppies, which are better able to withstand drier conditions than many of the alternatives.

PAKISTAN

A “Pakistani regional official” claimed on Wednesday that “unprovoked” cross-border fire from Afghanistan killed at least one person and wounded five in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province the previous day. Afghan officials are claiming that they retaliated for Pakistani drone strikes on Afghanistan’s Paktika province and that their forces killed or wounded “several Pakistani soldiers.”

CAMBODIA

A new Amnesty International report examines the links between scam operators and Cambodian security forces:

Cambodian private security companies connected to the country’s military, police and powerful business networks have helped sustain a scamming industry built on trafficking, forced labour, torture and slavery, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.

Official Business: Security companies and authorities at scamming compounds in Cambodiaidentifies five private security companies that provided services at scamming compounds – and details their links to members of Cambodia’s military, police and business elites. Amnesty also identified multiple members of the military and police who worked as security guards, trained or supervised guards at more than 20 compounds.

“For years, survivors of these nightmarish compounds described encountering members of the Cambodian military or police inside. These accounts could not be independently verified – until now,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“This report demonstrates Cambodian corporate actors’ direct involvement in scamming compounds. Our findings also begin to expose the long-suspected links between Cambodia’s billion-dollar criminal scamming networks and politically connected figures who have remained largely beyond scrutiny.

“At the heart of these connections are security companies whose guards controlled compound exits, hunted down people who escaped and enforced compliance through fear and violence. Without them, this system of mass exploitation could not have functioned.”

AFRICA

SUDAN

Rapid Support Forces drone strikes killed at least five people in Sudan’s North Darfur state on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the Emergency Rooms Coordination Council in the state’s Karnoi locality. The group also says that the RSF has been carrying out “ground operations and cattle rustling” in that area since Tuesday morning and there are likely additional casualties that haven’t been reported as yet. Karnoi is one of a handful of places in North Darfur that is not fully under RSF control and the group has been moving to secure those areas of late.

TUNISIA

The Arab Center’s Patricia Karam writes that the heat-driven breakdown of Tunisia’s public infrastructure this summer has sparked new public hostility toward the country’s dictatorial president:

During the summer of 2026—the hottest that Tunisia has recorded since 1950—the state could not keep the lights on. Rolling power outages, some lasting over ten hours, also knocked out the pumping stations that provided drinking water. In response, protests broke out across all 24 governorates. The Tunisian Social Observatory recorded 1,101 protest actions in July and 1,093 in August. Five years after President Kais Saied began dismantling Tunisia’s post-revolutionary political order, this latest crisis strikes at the implicit trade-off on which his rule has rested: fewer freedoms in exchange for a state that provides better for its people than in the past.

Today, Tunisia is no longer a young democracy experiencing backsliding. Its parliament has been replaced by a chamber elected with only 11 percent voter turnout. The judiciary has been purged by decree, and opposition politicians, lawyers, journalists, and activists have been imprisoned—with some receiving sentences of up to 66 years in the 2025 “conspiracy” trial. The 2022 constitution that Saied supported makes the president the head of the executive and leaves the government answerable to him alone.

CAMEROON

The Wall Street Journal reports that among the Trump administration’s various “third country” agreements to traffic migrants to various destinations other than their homes, it agreed to provide “around $35 million in military aid” to the Cameroonian military’s Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR). This is noteworthy inasmuch as the BIR has been credibly accused of myriad human rights violations, like torturing people to death — so credibly, in fact, that the US cut off military aid to the unit during Donald Trump’s first term in office. The administration won’t, for obvious reasons, admit to a quid pro quo here but this certainly seems like a window into the depths to which it will go in order to advance its xenophobic agenda.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

A Russian drone strike killed at least 14 people in a train station in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday. Other Russian attacks killed at least six people across the country. On another front, The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that the Ukrainian military stopped attacking Russian oil refineries earlier this month because of “weeks of pressure” from US officials. What’s most notable about this report is the suggestion that this halt is not indefinite, and that the Ukrainians may resume refinery attacks at some point after the US midterm election.

The localized ceasefire around the city of Oleshky in southern Ukraine’s Kherson oblast is still holding and an aid shipment appeared to be on the way on Thursday but I haven’t seen any indication as to when it’s supposed to arrive. The planned six day ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday morning and The New York Times reports on what it has wrought in Oleshky and elsewhere:

The temporary cease-fire, set to last several days, began early Tuesday morning in Ukraine’s Kherson region to facilitate an evacuation of the nearby city of Oleshky. The some 2,000 people living in that city, which Russia seized in February 2022, are facing a starvation crisis. Their worsening plight garnered attention from Mrs. Trump, who helped arrange a rare agreement between Russia and Ukraine to hold fire in the area long enough to demine the road out and allow locals to evacuate. The Ukrainian civilians will then be able to choose if they stay in territory controlled by Russia or return to areas under Ukrainian control.

The Ukrainian-controlled city of Kherson, which sits several miles across the river from Oleshky and is typically under near constant Russian attack, also went quiet this week. Russia seized Kherson in early 2022. Later that year Ukrainian forces pushed them across the river. Russia has never given up on retaking the city and launches many of its attacks on Kherson from Oleshky. But it has withheld fire on Kherson since the Oleshky truce began.

The sudden quiet has allowed for a remarkable respite in one of Ukraine’s most dangerous cities, where drones often hunt civilians in what Ukrainian officials call a “human safari.”

Civilians wandered Kherson’s streets with a sense of bewilderment and caution on Wednesday, still trying to wrap their heads around how [US First Lady Melania] Trump, who has rarely commented on the war in Ukraine, managed to secure them a brief moment of peace.

The ceasefire is supposed to include the opening of evacuation corridors for residents who want to leave Oleshky, but it sounds like those logistics haven’t yet been finalized.

SERBIA

Organizers of the protest movement whose electoral list defeated the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in Sunday’s parliamentary election are demanding public sector audits and the resignation of senior officials with ties to the outgoing government. They’ve already secured the resignation of Manja Grčić, who ran the SNS-aligned state TV outlet RTS. The student-led protests were oriented around corruption and it stands to reason that their main initial focus will be on that subject. The protesters have yet to say who will serve as prime minister in the new government, nor have they identified a candidate for president later this year.

AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who returned to the country after over a year abroad on Sunday, claimed at a press conference in Caracas on Thursday that the Trump administration supports new elections in Venezuela next year. There’s no word from the administration on that front, nor is it clear whether Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are comfortable with Machado’s arrival. They’ve been quite happy with the performance of loyal vassal Delcy Rodríguez and her administration, and Machado’s arrival/talk of elections threatens to complicate the situation.

Trump and company may also be displeased with comments that Machado made regarding Venezuela’s need for “transparent contracts, open bidding for public deals and international arbitration.” Suffice to say that the administration’s recent oil deal with Rodríguez’s government would fall short on those standards.

HAITI

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council announced on Wednesday evening that it has scheduled the country’s next election for July 18, 2027, with a second round on October 4. Earlier this year it had pushed that election, which was supposed to take place in August, back to December, but even that timetable proved to be too ambitious given the country’s ongoing instability.

Meanwhile, El Salvador has now deployed some 2000 military personnel to Haiti as part of the operation to recover four Salvadoran military aviation technicians who disappeared after they were attacked by gangs near Port-au-Prince earlier this month. As the AP notes there are a number of unanswered questions about this deployment, mostly around the nature of their mission and their command structure. This force is presumably outside the control of the UN-backed “Gang Suppression Force” but the concern is that it may not be accountable to anybody (or at least not anybody in Haiti).

UNITED STATES

Finally, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired a senior Army strategist on Thursday:

The ouster of US Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who headed the Joint Staff’s policy, plans and strategy office, known as the J5, comes as the Trump administration is weighing whether to resume intensive attacks on Iran after the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Sylvia, an Army officer with more than three decades of experience who previously led the 101st Airborne Division, has become the latest in a string of more than a dozen generals and admirals dismissed by Hegseth since 2024. His dismissal was first reported by the Atlantic.

While Sylvia’s former role did not include drafting the US military’s plans for war with Iran, he was responsible for approving those plans and weighing them against the potential costs and benefits to other potential future US military campaigns and operations across the globe.

Sylvia, who assumed his post last October, had reportedly admitted to leaking classified information to the media regarding the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran after failing multiple polygraphs on the subject.

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