Bullets whipped via the water and the booming sound of mortar shells echoed as troopers fired out to sea with howitzers, machine weapons and rifles on Dongyin, an island 50km off the Chinese language coast the place Taiwan’s armed forces have been practising for a possible assault.
It was a routine drill on Wednesday however lots of Dongyin’s 800 residents took extra discover than traditional. An incursion by a Chinese language plane final month and the battle in Ukraine have highlighted the danger of an invasion by Beijing — and the weaknesses of Taiwan’s navy.
China claims Taiwan as its territory, threatening to annex it if Taipei refuses to undergo its management indefinitely. Watching the struggle in Ukraine, the Taiwanese have began to debate the menace they lengthy used to disregard and whether or not their navy is match for a struggle.
“Folks right here acquired scared by the Chinese language aircraft,” stated Chen Li-ying, the spouse of Dongyin’s mayor. “We by no means have plane flying overhead right here aside from helicopters, and it actually flew this shut and this low,” she added, pointing to a hill the place the aircraft flew previous on February 5 and was filmed by a safety digital camera on the roof of her mattress and breakfast.
Liu Hsiang-ying, a secretary on the township’s workplace, was at a temple that afternoon when she heard a sound she initially mistook for a navy truck. “Then I realised it got here from above. I regarded up, and there it was, very large and really shut,” she stated.
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Dongyin, a former pirate stronghold with a small settlement of fishermen from Fujian province, got here below Taiwanese authority solely when the Chinese language nationalist navy fled the mainland after dropping the Chinese language civil struggle in 1949. The island is Taiwan’s northernmost territory and serves as a strategic outpost, geared up with Skybow II surface-to-air missiles.
The native military command has tried to reassure residents by saying it noticed the plane early and it had “full grasp” of the scenario. However the defence ministry’s gradual response and its clarification of the incident, which appeared to contradict the details on the bottom, has kicked off a heated dialogue amongst Taiwanese politicians and navy specialists concerning the armed forces’ early warning capabilities.
In a press release issued 10 days after the incursion, Taiwan’s defence ministry recognized the plane as a Y-12, a turboprop aircraft usually utilized by the Chinese language coastguard to conduct reconnaissance or assert sovereignty claims in areas disputed with neighbouring international locations. The ministry stated China might need examined the Taiwanese navy’s responses with a “civilian” plane, including that the Y-12 had not entered its territory, outlined as air area as much as 6km from the shoreline.
Two former navy officers stated the operations centre that analyses all radar alerts had in all probability not recognized the thing as a doubtlessly harmful intruding plane. “The very long time the ministry took to provide you with their evaluation means that they recognized the aircraft solely afterwards via complete evaluation utilizing different digital alerts and satellite tv for pc images,” stated one official.
The talk over the incident has been amplified by a sequence of latest accidents involving Taiwan’s air pressure, and the struggle in Ukraine, which Beijing has refused to sentence. On Monday, the air pressure grounded its whole fleet of Mirage fight plane after one crashed into the ocean. 4 fighters have been misplaced in related crashes since late 2020.
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Admiral Lee Hsi-min, former chief of the final employees of Taiwan’s armed forces, stated the Y-12 incident was a very good case research of the navy’s potential to cope with issues. “If the plane was not detected via radar, that in itself shouldn’t be a disaster — this stuff can occur,” he stated, pointing to the 1987 case of German aviator Mathias Rust, who flew far into Soviet airspace and landed in Moscow’s Pink Sq..
“The secret’s the way you reply. On this case, they need to name all operators and analyse what went improper,” Lee added. “However we regularly simply attempt to get the incident behind us as rapidly as potential by reassuring the general public or narrating the heroic lives of the pilots who misplaced their lives. If we do this, we is not going to grow to be stronger as an organisation.”
In Dongyin, individuals have gone again to their regular lives however a way of unease stays. “Folks right here don’t usually have the identical sense of apprehension concerning the Chinese language as individuals in Taiwan have as a result of many residents right here marry Chinese language and we’ve frequent contact with them,” stated Tsai Hsin-ju, who moved to Dongyin after marrying a neighborhood six years in the past and runs a restaurant and a video weblog. She stated islanders would incessantly barter groceries with fishermen from Fujian who ventured near the island and generally got here ashore.
“However in actual fact, we’re susceptible,” she added. “We now generally say, ‘What if sooner or later all these mainland fishing boats haven’t fish of their holds however Folks’s Liberation Military troopers?’ There’s nothing we might do.”
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Vietnam’s ruling Communist party has appointed President To Lam as its general secretary, the country’s most powerful position, to succeed longtime chief Nguyen Phu Trong, who died two weeks ago.
Lam, a former public security minister, was elected unanimously by the party’s central committee on Saturday, a government newspaper reported. He ascended to the role of president just two months ago. It remains unclear whether he will hold both positions.
Lam’s appointment comes at a crucial time for Vietnam, which has become a regional manufacturing powerhouse as companies rush to diversify from China amid escalating geopolitical tensions.
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However, concerns about Vietnam’s ability to attract more investment have grown in recent months as a sweeping corruption crackdown — which Lam oversaw as minister — has triggered bureaucratic paralysis and rare political instability in the one-party state.
Following his appointment, Lam told party’s delegates that he would continue to pursue the fight against corruption “without any exceptions”, state media reported. The crackdown has achieved positive results, he said.
Lam, 67, also vowed to maintain Vietnam’s foreign policy, saying he would “inherit and promote” the legacy of Trong, who held Vietnam’s top position for 13 years until his death in July.
Trong was the architect of the anti-corruption crackdown, and shaped Vietnam’s independent foreign policy, which deftly balanced Hanoi’s ties with major powers.
The appointment caps a meteoric rise for Lam, a former police officer. He became president in late May following his predecessor’s resignation due to unspecified “violations and shortcomings” amid corruption investigations.
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The crackdown has seen a dramatic reshuffle of the country’s top ranks and the arrests of hundreds of government officials. Two presidents have resigned since January 2023, and a real estate tycoon was sentenced to death for her role in a $12bn fraud. Critics say the corruption crackdown has also ensnared government critics and political rivals.
Lam was seen as Trong’s right-hand man in implementing the graft crackdown, but he has also been criticised for lavish spending. In 2021, a video was posted of him eating a gold leaf-covered steak at an upscale London restaurant run by the celebrity chef Nusret Gökçe, popularly known as Salt Bae. The video prompted controversy in Vietnam and was eventually taken down by the chef.
Lam’s ministry has also been leading the charge on arrests of government critics and rights activists, and his elevation to the top job is likely to stir further concerns over civic freedoms in the communist state.
Holding two posts simultaneously as party chief and president would raise additional concerns about power consolidation, analysts have said. Vietnam has a four-person collective leadership, which includes the Communist party chief, president, prime minister and National Assembly chair.
Standing alongside Donald Trump in Florida a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was vague on the latest prospect of a ceasefire in the war in Gaza.
“I hope we are going to have a deal. Time will tell,” the Israeli prime minister said, two days after his controversial address to a joint session of the US Congress.
Throughout his three-day visit to the US, Netanyahu was careful to avoid making any commitment to the deal Biden unveiled on 31 May. While the US insisted publicly that the onus was on Hamas to accept the plan, the administration knew it also needed to pin down Netanyahu personally over his reluctance to commit to a permanent ceasefire.
Yet, according to US reports, it now appears that at the very time Netanyahu was publicly speculating about a deal, a remote-controlled bomb had already been smuggled into a guesthouse in Tehran, awaiting its intended target: Ismail Haniyeh, the senior Hamas leader who was assassinated on Wednesday night.
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Haniyeh, reported the New York Times and CNN, was killed by an explosive device placed in the guesthouse, where he was known to stay while visiting Iran and was under the protection of the powerful Revolutionary Guards. Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the attack, which Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. It fits a pattern of previous Israeli targeted killings on Iranian soil.
Israeli airstrike kills five in West Bank, including Hamas commander – Palestinian media
An Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in the occupied West Bank killed a commander in the Palestinian armed group Hamas on Saturday, Hamas media reported, while Palestinian news agency WAFA said four other men were also killed.
The identities of the others were not clear, according to the WAFA report, which cited health officials.
The Israeli military said it had carried out an airstrike against a militant cell around the West Bank city of Tulkarm.
Hamas media said a vehicle carrying fighters had been struck and that one of the commanders of its Tulkarm brigades was killed.
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Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the crisis in the Middle East. I’m Tom Ambrose.
The US military has announced that it will deploy additional fighter jets and navy warships to the Middle East, the Pentagon said on Friday, as Washington braces for Iran and its regional allies to make good on a promise to respond to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
After the back-to-back assassinations of Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday and top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut the evening before, international diplomats have scrambled to head off a fully-fledged regional war. Rising tensions have spurred a growing list of major airlines into cancelling flights to Tel Aviv and Beirut, including Lufthansa, Delta and Air India.
It comes as, on Friday, France urged its citizens to leave Iran and Cyprus and said it had expanded plans to support a large-scale evacuation from the region if the war expands. The island nation helped tens of thousands of people leave during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
More on that soon, first here’s a summary of the other main headlines:
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Mourners gathered in Doha on Friday to hold funeral prayers for slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as Iran and its regional allies vowed to retaliate against Israel. With the bodies of Haniyeh and his bodyguard in coffins draped with Palestinian flags, men knelt and prayed while senior leaders of Hamas’ Qatar-based political office paid their respects to Haniyeh’s family.
Israel’s foreign ministry summoned the deputy Turkish ambassador for a reprimand on Friday after Turkey’s embassy in Tel Aviv lowered its flag to half mast in response to the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. “The State of Israel will not tolerate expressions of mourning for a murderer like Ismail Haniyeh,” foreign minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
Amid fears of wider Middle East conflict, Poland has advised its citizens against travelling to Lebanon, Israel and Iran, according to updated guidance published on Friday. “In connection with a growing number of Polish tourists visiting Lebanon, Israel and Iran, we want to repeat that we have long advised against any kind of travel to this region,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on the social media platform X.
The leader of Hezbollah has said that the Lebanese group’s conflict with Israel has entered “a new phase” after the back-to-back assassinations of a senior commander and Hamas’s political chief that risk plunging the Middle East into a regional war. In a televised address broadcast to about 1,000 mourners at the Beirut funeral of Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Fuad Shukur, Hassan Nasrallah vowed that the powerful Shia militia would seek revenge.
US president Joe Biden said on Thursday the killing of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh was not helpful for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. Biden said he had a direct conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier on Thursday, Reuters reported. He made the comments at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, where a plane carrying detainees released by Russia landed late on Thursday.
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US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has withdrawn plea deals reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind behind the September 11 2001 terror attacks and two accomplices, an extraordinary about-face in politically charged cases that have dragged on for years.
The brief memorandum published on Friday came just two days after the Pentagon announced Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi had reached deals with the head of the military tribunal in Guntánamo Bay. The three men had been held at the US military base in Cuba for nearly two decades, where they faced the death penalty.
Austin also revoked the authority of retired Brigadier General Susan Escallier, who oversaw the Guantánamo war court, to enter into the agreements with the three prisoners, reserving such power for himself. Escallier was appointed to her post in 2023.
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“I have determined that in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin wrote in the memo addressed to Escallier.
“Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself. Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024” in the cases in question, the memo stated.
The agreements reached on Wednesday had prompted a fierce backlash from Republicans, who accused the Biden administration of negotiating with individuals accused of taking part in a terror attack that killed nearly 3,000 people and dramatically altered US domestic and foreign policy.
The party’s Senate leader Mitch McConnell called the decision “a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility”. It had also led to some criticism from the families of those who died on September 11, when attackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.
A lawyer for Mohammed did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The exact terms of the three men’s original pleas were not disclosed by the US government, but they were expected to plead guilty and avoid a full trial. The proceedings had been mired in legal and ethical controversy over the length of the defendants’ custody without trial and instances of torture.
Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, was captured in 2003 in Pakistan, and held at CIA prisons before being sent to Guantánamo Bay, where a military detention facility was opened during the administration of George W Bush to house prisoners captured during the US’s “war on terror” following the September 11 attacks. The agency has since been found to have subjected him to waterboarding, a form of torture, at least 183 times.
A report by a Senate select committee in 2014 found that “internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] as evolving into a ‘series of near drownings’”.
Harrowing accounts of such techniques sparked a fierce debate within the US over the legality of cases against Mohammed and other prisoners, and the ongoing litigation became a deeply divisive topic in Washington.
