The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Israel to stop its military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
The top United Nations court said the humanitarian situation in Rafah had “deteriorated further” since its previous court order for Israel to improve it, adding that what was happening in the besieged Palestinian territory was “disastrous”.
It comes after South Africa put in an emergency request to the ICJ for it to order Israel to stop its Rafah assault.
The ICJ president Nawaf Salam said in The Hague: “The state of Israel shall… immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The court also ordered Israel to open the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza to allow in humanitarian aid, and said Israel must provide access to the territory for investigators and report back on its progress within a month.
The order was handed down a week after it was requested by South Africa, which in January formally accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in a hearing at the UN court.
Israel, which claims that its military operations in Gaza are in self-defence and targeted at Hamas fighters, has vehemently denied the accusations.
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Israel launched its assault on Rafah this month, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee a city that had become a refuge to around half of the population’s 2.3 million people.
The ICJ is the highest UN body for hearing disputes between states, and its rulings are final and binding but have been ignored in the past.
Image: Smoke rises during an Israeli airstrike on Rafah. Pic: Reuters
No enforcement powers
The court has no enforcement powers and Israel is unlikely to comply with the latest ICJ order, which was adopted by a panel of 15 judges from around the world in a 13-2 vote, opposed only by judges from Uganda and Israel.
In response to the judgment, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “Those who demand that the State of Israel stop the war, demand that it decree itself to cease to exist. We will not agree to that. If we lay down our weapons, the enemy will reach the beds of our children and women throughout the country.”
South Africa has welcomed the latest ruling, with Zane Dangor, director general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, saying the order was “ground-breaking as it is the first time that explicit mention is made for Israel to halt its military action in any area of Gaza”.
Hamas also welcomed the ruling but said it was insufficient, with senior official Basem Naim saying “we believe it is not enough since the occupation aggression across the Gaza Strip and especially in northern Gaza is just as brutal and dangerous”.
“We call upon the UN Security Council to immediately implement this demand by the World Court into practical measures to compel the Zionist enemy to implement the decision.”
Israel says it has no choice but to attack Rafah to root out the last battalions of Hamas fighters it thinks are hiding there.
Image: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant. Pic: Reuters
The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to both eliminate Hamas and get all the hostages back who were taken in the October 7th attacks.
“Hamas is in Rafah, Hamas has been holding our hostages in Rafah, which is why our forces are manoeuvering in Rafah. We’re doing this in a targeted and precise way,” Israeli chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said on Thursday.
But the US – Israel’s most powerful ally – has threatened to scale back its support over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Prosecutor Karim Khan accused Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant of crimes including extermination, using hunger as a weapon and deliberately attacking civilians. Israel strongly denied the charges.
The Israelis said Hamas killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages in the October 7 raid on southern Israel.
Since then, Israel’s incursion has killed more than 35,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.
Lithuania has declared a state of emergency over smuggler balloons from Belarus that have disrupted aviation.
Vilnius airport has been closed because of the balloons, which Lithuania says have been sent by smugglers transporting cigarettes in recent weeks.
It also says they constitutes a “hybrid attack” by Belarus, which is a close ally of Russia.
Lithuania is a NATO member and ally to Ukraine during its fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
On Tuesday Lithuania’s interior minister Vladislav Kondratovic told a government meeting: “The state of emergency is announced not only due to civil aviation disruptions but also due to interests of national security.”
Mr Kondratovic added that the Lithuanian government had asked parliament to grant the military powers to act with police, border guards and security forces during the state of emergency.
Should parliament agree, the army will be given permission to limit access to territory, stop and search vehicles, perform checks on people, their documents and belongings, and to detain those resisting or suspected of crimes.
Image: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the balloon incursions as “completely unacceptable”. Pic: AP
Lithuania’s defence minister Robert Kaunas said the military would be permitted to use force for these functions.
Belarus has denied responsibility and accused Lithuania of provocations.
This includes sending a drone to drop “extremist material”, which Lithuania denies.
With more than a thousand troops being killed or wounded every day, there’s no sign that Donald Trump’s push to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is reducing the battles on the ground.
Quite the opposite.
Ukraine‘s military chief says Vladimir Putin is instead using the US president‘s focus on peace negotiations as “cover” while Russian soldiers attempt to seize more land.
That means much greater pressure on the Ukrainian frontline, even as Russian and American, or American and Ukrainian, or Ukrainian and European, leaders shake hands and smile for cameras before retreating behind closed doors in Moscow, Alaska, and London.
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Putin’s not counting on peace
The lack of any indicators that the Kremlin is looking to slow its military machine down also makes the risk of war spreading beyond Ukraine’s borders increasingly likely.
It takes a huge amount of effort, time, and money to put a country on a war footing as Putin has done, partially mobilising his population, allocating huge portions of government spending to the military and realigning Russia’s vast industrial base to produce weapons and ammunition.
Image: Putin has been in India to shore up support from Narendra Modi. Pic: Reuters
But when the fighting stops, it requires almost as much focus and energy to switch a society back to a peace time rhythm.
Deliberately choosing not to dial defence down once the battles cease means a nation will continue to grow its armed forces and weapons stockpiles – a sure sign that it has no intention of being peaceful and is merely having a pause before going on the attack again.
The absence of any preparations by Moscow to slow the tempo of its military operations in Ukraine – where it has more than 710,000 troops deployed along a 780-mile frontline – is perhaps an indicator that Putin is anticipating more not less war.
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What is Putin trying to achieve in India?
How could the war end?
What happens next in Europe will depend on the content of any peace deal on Ukraine.
An all-out Russian defeat is all but impossible to conceive without a significant change of heart by the Trump White House and a massive increase in weapons and support.
The next best result for Ukraine would be a settlement that seeks to strike a fair balance between the warring sides and their conflicting objectives.
This could be done by pausing the fighting along the current line of contact before substantive peace talks then take place, with Ukraine’s sovereignty supported by solid security guarantees from Europe and the US.
But such a move would require Europe’s NATO allies, led by the UK, France and Germany, genuinely to switch their respective militaries and populations back to a wartime footing, with a credible readiness to go to war should Moscow attempt to test their support of Ukraine.
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Will Starmer level with the public?
That does not just mean increased spending on defence at a much faster rate – in the UK at least – than is currently planned. It is also about the mindset of a country and its willingness to take some pain.
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Worst case scenario?
The other alternative when it comes to Ukraine is a scenario that sees a sidelined Europe unable to influence the outcome of the negotiations and Kyiv forced to agree to terms that favour Moscow.
This would include the surrender of land in the Donbas that is still under Ukrainian control.
Such a deal – even if tolerated by Ukraine, which is unimaginable without serious unrest – would likely only mean a temporary halt in hostilities until Putin or whoever succeeds him decides to try again to take the rest of Ukraine, or maybe even test NATO’s borders by moving against the Baltic States.
With Trump’s new national security strategy making clear the US would only intervene to defend Europe if such a move is in America’s interests, it is no longer certain that the guarantees contained in NATO’s founding Article 5 principle – that an attack on one member state is an attack on all – can be relied upon.
In the scenario, Washington does not come to Britain’s defences, which leaves the British side with very few options to respond short of a nuclear strike.
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A powerful earthquake struck off northern Japan, injuring 33 people and unleashing a tsunami.
The 7.5-magnitude quake struck at about 11.15pm local time, around 80 kilometers off the coast of Aomori prefecture.
Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said 33 people were injured, including one seriously, with most hurt by falling objects.
Image: A road is congested with cars heading for higher ground in Tomakomai City December 8, 2025 after a magnitude 7.6 earthquake. Pics: AP
A tsunami of 70cm was measured just south of Aomori, in Kuji port, Iwate prefecture, while levels of up to 50cm struck elsewhere in the region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
“I’ve never experienced such a big shaking,” said Nobuo Yamada, who owns a convenience store in Hachinohe, Aomori, in an interview with public broadcaster NHK.
Earlier on, the meteorological agency issued an alert for potential tsunami surges of up to 3m/10ft, with 90,000 residents ordered to evacuate.
Residents were urged by chief cabinet secretary Minoru Kihara to go to higher ground or seek shelter until advisories were lifted.
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Image: People sheltering today in Kamaishi Elementary School in Kamaishi City, Miyagi Prefecture. Pic: AP
He said about 800 homes were without electricity, and that the Shinkansen bullet trains and some local lines were suspended in parts of the region.
Some 480 residents took shelter at the Hachinohe Air Base, defence minister Shinjiro Koizumi said, with 18 defence helicopters mobilised for damage assessments.
While Satoshi Kato, vice principal of a public high school in the same town, encountered traffic jams and car accidents en-route to the school as panicked people tried to flee.
Japan has recent experience of the perils of earthquakes – one in 2011 unleashed a tsunami that killed some 20,000 people and triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Image: The earthquake warning off the coast of Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Pic: AP
Today’s quake caused about 450 litres of water to spill from a spent fuel cooling area at the Rokkasho fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori, the Nuclear Regulation Authority said.
But water levels remained within the normal range and there was no safety concern, the authority added.