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France has suspended high-speed rail services across much of the country after the network was hit by sabotage attacks hours before the Olympic Games opening ceremony.

The co-ordinated arson attacks on Thursday night will alarm organisers of the Paris summer games as they prepare to host hundreds of thousands of spectators in the capital for the opening ceremony.

“Fires were set intentionally to damage our infrastructure, and teams of engineers are already on the ground working to solve the issue,” high-speed rail operator SNCF said. “Many trains will have to be cancelled.”

No official statement has yet been given over who was behind the attacks. French officials have previously warned that Russia or political activists could seek to sabotage the Games, and have also been bracing for terror attacks.

Passengers have posted images on social media of crowded train stations in Paris after services were largely shut down.

Transport minister Patrice Vergriete warned that trains would be affected through the weekend. “I firmly condemn these criminal acts that will disrupt many people’s travel,” he said.

Jean-Pierre Farandou, the chief executive of SNCF, said three fires were set around the same time and fire-starting materials were found nearby. He vowed to re-establish services as quickly as possible and said the SNCF would not let “a bunch of crazy, irresponsible people” stop them from doing their jobs.

Estimating that some 800,000 travellers would be affected, he said pipes that carry electric cables had been affected, requiring painstaking work to repair.

Security and transport officials had been contingency planning for such incidents in the years-long organisation of the Games, but appear to have been unable to stop them.

Some 45,000 police are already patrolling Paris and Laurent Nunez, the city’s police chief, said additional police were being sent to train stations. 

Valérie Pécresse, who heads the Ile-de-France region that is responsible for transport, said it was a “massive and co-ordinated attack” that had affected equipment that supplies electricity to the trains. She added that SNCF staffers had managed to chase off the arsonists.

The disruptions hit several big lines out of Paris, including the connection to the northern city of Lille where football and basketball games will be held throughout the Games.

Eurostar warned of delays on its connections from London to Paris. “Due to a problem with the overhead power supply in France today, we advise you to postpone your trip,” the operator said. 

“Acting against the Games is acting against France, it’s acting against your own camp, your own country,” sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra told BFM TV, although she did not comment on the exact origin of the sabotage, which is under investigation. “These are not the Games of a government, they’re the Games of a nation.”

A burning car pushed into a gully sparked California’s largest wildfire of the year, authorities said Thursday as they announced the arrest of a suspect. Meanwhile other blazes scorched the Pacific Northwest.

Flames from the fire the man is accused of starting exploded into what is now the Park Fire, which has burned more than 195 square miles (505 square km) near the city of Chico. Evacuations were ordered in Butte and Tehama counties, with the blaze only 3% contained by Thursday evening.

California authorities did not immediately name the man they arrested.

Also in California near the Nevada line, about 1,000 people remained displaced from their homes Thursday after evacuations were ordered Monday night when lightning sparked the Gold Complex fires that have burned more than 4 square miles (10 square km) of brush and timber in the Plumas National Forest about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of Reno, Forest Service spokeswoman Adrienne Freeman said.

There have been no reports of structure damage, deaths or serious injuries at the Gold Complex of fires southwest of Portola near the Nevada line. But they still had zero containment Thursday.

“We’ve made some really good progress on the fires,” Forest Service operations section chief Tom Browning said Thursday afternoon. “But it’s hot, it’s dry and it’s very windy … With the wind and the heat, we don’t have great containment on all these lines.”

Tim Fike, Forest Service incident commander at the Gold Complex, said gusty winds were plaguing crews at the Park Fire as well, causing new spot fires up to a mile beyond the main fire lines.

“That’s been a big, big problem on the Park Fire right now,” Fike said.

As evacuations continued in California, some Oregon residents were cleared to return home after a thunderstorm dropped welcome rain but also potentially dangerous lightning on the biggest active blaze in the United States. More than two dozen new fires started in Montana on Wednesday and early Thursday, and another fast-moving blaze forced thousands to abandon a town in Canada.

In eastern Oregon, evacuation orders were lifted for the city of Huntington, population 500, after a severe thunderstorm late Wednesday brought some rain and cooler temperatures to the nearly 630 square miles (1,630 square kilometers) burned by the Durkee Fire — the nation’s biggest — and another nearby blaze.

President Joe Biden called Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek on Thursday night and offered his support to ensure the state has everything it needs to fight the fires, the White House said.

Baker County Sheriff Travis Ash called the rain a “godsend,” and the Oregon State Fire Marshal said firefighters were set to “seize the opportunity” of better conditions to push back the fire on the Oregon-Idaho border. It remained unpredictable and was just 20% contained, according to the government website InciWeb.

Lightning strikes started 15 new fires overnight in Idaho, the U.S. Forest Service told Boise’s KBOI-TV, but several had already been extinguished by Thursday afternoon. More than 2,800 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes were detected across southeast Oregon and Idaho on Wednesday alone, the National Weather Service in Boise said.

Overall, nearly 1,562 square miles (4,045 square kilometers) have burned so far this summer in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon alone has 34 large fires, almost all of them in the central or eastern part of the state.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of wildfires sparked by lightning across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada as the region endures recording-breaking heat, with many triple-digit days and bone-dry conditions. Idaho Power has for the first time instituted a pre-emptive power outage, shutting off electricity to thousands of customers to prevent new fire starts and other power grid issues from wires downed by the high winds, the utility said.

In northern California, fire personnel were focusing on evacuations and defending structures while using bulldozers to build containment lines ahead of the Park Fire. No deaths or damage to structures had been reported, CAL FIRE/ Butte County Fire Department said.

A fire in southern California was much smaller, but moving fast and threatening homes.

Evacuation orders were in effect Wednesday night in San Diego County after a wildfire began to spread fast near the border with Riverside County. Fire officials said the Grove Fire was heading southeast through steep and challenging terrain. The fire grew to 1.4 square miles (3.6 square kilometers) overnight and was 10% contained by Thursday afternoon.

In Montana, a fire warning was in effect in the central part of the state because of high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds. An extreme heat warning east of the storm front meant temperatures could soar up to 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 degrees Celsius). After hurricane-force winds toppled trees, downed power lines and damaged gas lines in the Missoula area, authorities urged people to stay out of rivers because they might be electrified.

In the Canadian Rockies’ Jasper National Park, a fast-moving wildfire this week hit the park’s namesake town, forcing thousands to flee and causing significant damage in the World Heritage Site. That blaze, like those in the Western United States, led to some air quality alerts or advisories as skies filled with smoke and haze.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met US President Joe Biden on Thursday, a day after his polarising joint address to the US Congress that drew boycotts and protesters.

The meeting is Netanyahu’s first visit to the White House since he returned to power in late 2022, and is seen by US officials as a chance to push the Israeli premier on a proposed Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal that he has yet to publicly endorse, including in his congressional speech.

Netanyahu remains under fire over the failures that led to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and faces growing calls to agree to the US-backed deal opposed by his far-right coalition partners that would bring an end to the fighting and free the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.

“It’s reaching a point that we believe a deal is closable and it’s time to move to close that agreement,” a senior US administration official said ahead of Netanyahu’s meetings, adding that both Israel and Hamas had to take steps that would allow for the deal to be implemented.

The prime minister also met vice-president Kamala Harris on Thursday afternoon. Harris, who did not attend Netanyahu’s address to Congress, on Thursday denounced the protests that have accompanied the visit, saying that “antisemitism, hate and violence” had no place in America.

In comments to reporters after her meeting the presumptive presidential candidate offered a glimpse of how she might pursue the US-Israel relationship should she win the election.

While she took similar positions to Biden on the Israel-Hamas war, she was more critical of Israel’s conduct, saying that while she had long had “an unwavering commitment to Israel”, which has the right to defend itself, “how it does so matters”.

In the meeting she also expressed serious concerns about the “scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians”. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” she said.

She called for an end to the war and said there had been “hopeful movement” towards a ceasefire agreement. “To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace: I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done,” she said.

About half of congressional Democrats skipped Netanyahu’s speech on Wednesday, in which he praised both Biden and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump but remained defiant about his war effort and the thousands of demonstrators who had gathered nearby to call for the US to stop arming Israel and an end to the war in Gaza.

In his speech the prime minister reiterated that Israel would not stop until it had achieved “total victory” over Hamas, the militant group that carried out the October 7 attack that sparked the war.

“America and Israel must stand together,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday. “Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight and our victory will be your victory.”

Despite the pressure, the prime minister on Wednesday laid out his postwar vision, telling US lawmakers that Israel wanted to see a “demilitarised and deradicalised Gaza” and that it did not intend to reoccupy the enclave but would seek to “retain overriding security control” for the “foreseeable future” to prevent a resurgence of Hamas.

The war in Gaza has strained Israel’s relations with the US, and Netanyahu made an effort to strike a conciliatory tone in the chamber.

This was a notable contrast with a speech he gave in 2015 urging Congress to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that had recently been agreed by the US and other governments, infuriating then-President Barack Obama and Democrats.

Additional reporting by Mehul Srivastava in London