‘Where are they?’: Flood-hit Spanish towns desperate for leadership

Published

10 months ago

November 2, 2024

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For days, the people of Paiporta have been dealing with the devastation of their town. But what hurts them now is the sense that they have been forgotten by their country.

As we walk through this town, what we see is relentless hard work – clearing mud, pumping out water, recovering cars.

But none of it is being done by people in uniform. Paiporta is being saved by its own residents, by friends, and by volunteers.

“The town feels like chaos,” says Cristina Hernandez, who moved here a year ago from Madrid

“Nobody has organised anything so we are doing our best. We feel we are abandoned by the government and there are also a lot of thieves in the night, so we are scared.

“It is a nightmare not only because of the floods but also because of the anarchy that we are living through now. After the catastrophe, the worst thing is that we are still scared.

Spain floods latest: King Charles ‘utterly heartbroken’

“We don’t have food or clothes. Some of our friends are still missing and some have lost their houses with all their things in them.

“So it is pretty sad that we see trucks going past but nobody is helping with the mud and clearing the houses, so we are alone.”

As if on cue, we can see a helicopter flying above us, but it passes by. She shakes her head.

“We see them, but we don’t know what they are doing,” she says. It is, at the moment, a cruel sight – a tantalising vision of help that comes and goes.

Around us is a tapestry of devastation – dozens and dozens of wrecked cars, many of them lying in a lake of stagnant water. Cloying mud covers piles of debris. On the road, there is a child’s booster seat, a shoe and a small purse. Tangled wires lie like a web.

Along the road, every house is affected, splattered with mud. You can see the dark waterline where the water reached its highest point.

Ruth is sweeping water along the street, time after time, pushing it towards an open manhole cover. She rests for a second, then starts again.

She takes a break and tells me that she has not seen a policeman, a soldier, a doctor or any other official. “It’s only us who clean up,” she says. “Where are they?”

I start to ask her if she is angry with the government, and she interrupts. Her fury is palpable. “Angry? I am so, so angry with the government.

“I don’t care which political party you support, because my flag is Spain. And this is so bad.”

She wanders off, then returns and gently grabs my arm. “Come this way,” she says. “The world should see this.”

We round a corner and come to a street that is entirely packed with a wall of cars, mixed with huge piles of debris.

A fridge freezer, a microwave. Ruth clambers on top of a shattered bonnet and pulls me alongside her. “Nobody can reach these houses; nobody has looked in these cars,” she says. “They have forgotten.”

It’s not true to say that no officials have come to Paiporta. We see local police, civil guard, ambulances and firefighters. As we’re leaving, we even see a military truck pull up.

But nobody seems to be coordinating any of this. At one point, I saw a policeman try to take control of a vehicle recovery, but nobody listened to him. He had a short row with his colleague, and then they both drove off.

As for the military, I had a chat with one of the officers as they stood by the road, waiting for a lorry to move so they could drive in.

The soldier was evidently frustrated. “We want to help, we know we can help, but so far we don’t have the orders about what we have to do,” he said.

“So you need a chief – someone to take control?” I asked. A question answered with a deep, long nod.

Paiporta has suffered grievously in these floods. At least 60 people are dead, a figure that shocked Cristina when I told her. They have no access to the internet, of course, and cannot leave their town. “There will be more,” was her response.

But what makes that pain so much worse is the time it is taking to be helped. Last year, I went with my colleagues to an appalling earthquake in Morocco, and within two days there were well-equipped Spanish response teams helping out, saving lives and leading the response.

And yet now, in their own country, the response is sluggish and indecisive.

A French offer to send in help was turned down. We are told that huge numbers of troops are being mobilised but we have seen hardly any and the ones we’ve met don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

These towns are desperate for leadership, reassurance, help and certainty. Instead, right now, they are fending for themselves.

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At least 43 Palestinians killed as Israeli offensive in Gaza City intensifies

Published

2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

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At least 43 Palestinians killed as Israeli offensive in Gaza City intensifies

At least 43 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Saturday, according to local hospitals, as the Israeli offensive on Gaza City intensifies.

Most of the casualties were reported in Gaza City. Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, said 29 bodies had been brought to its morgue, including 10 people killed while seeking aid and others struck across the city.

Al-Awda Hospital said on Sunday morning that 11 more people were killed in strikes and gunfire, seven of whom were civilians trying to get aid. Witnesses said Israeli troops shot at crowds in the Netzarim Corridor, which is an Israeli military zone cutting Gaza in half.

Ragheb Abu Lebda, from Nuseirat, said the area is a “death trap” after he saw at least three people bleeding from gunshot wounds.

The Netzarim Corridor has become increasingly dangerous, with civilians seeking aid being killed while approaching United Nations (UN) convoys, which have been overwhelmed by desperate crowds and looters.

Others have been shot en route to aid sites run by the controversial Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Neither the foundation nor the Israeli military responded to questions about the seven reported casualties among people seeking aid on Sunday.

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz announced on Sunday that the spokesman for Hamas’ armed wing, Abu Obeida, was killed in Gaza over the weekend after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier said his forces had attacked the spokesman without confirming whether he had died.

Hamas has not commented on the claim that Mr Obeida has been killed.

It comes after Israel announced the initial stages of its Gaza City offensive on Friday, following weeks of operations on the outskirts of the city and the Jabaliya refugee camp.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have since intensified its air attacks in the coastal areas of the city.

The military has urged hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still in Gaza City to flee, but only tens of thousands have followed through, as many say they are not convinced it is safer elsewhere, or they are too exhausted after repeated displacements.

About 65,000 Palestinians have fled their home this month alone, including 23,199 in the past week, according to the UN.

Many are living in temporary shelters after they were displaced multiple times.

The UN says more than 90% of the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced at least once since the start of the war on 7 October 2023.

Palestinians have accused Israel of forcing displacements after it signalled that aid to Gaza City would be cut.

Malnutrition in Gaza is rife, with part of the Strip suffering from famine, according to a global hunger monitor.

Seven adults died of causes related to malnutrition and starvation over the last 24 hours, bringing the death toll from malnutrition-related causes in adults to 215 since late June, the Gaza health ministry said.

The ministry said 63,371 Palestinians have died since the start of the war in October 2023, including 124 children who have died of malnutrition-related causes.

This comes as Greta Thunberg and other activists have embarked on a second aid flotilla to Gaza on Sunday, despite having been detained by Israeli forces and deported when they approached on a British-flagged yacht in June.

Thunberg, who is among hundreds of people from 44 countries on the flotilla, hopes their mission will bring symbolic aid and help open up a humanitarian corridor to deliver more aid.

She said the activists’ goal is to send “hope and solidarity to the people of Gaza, showing a clear signal that the world has not forgotten about you”.

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Yemen’s Houthi rebels raid UN premises and detain several people

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2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

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Yemen's Houthi rebels raid UN premises and detain several people

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have raided United Nations offices and detained several people, officials have said.

The group has tightened security across the capital, Sanaa, after their prime minister was killed in an Israeli strike on Thursday.

Sunday’s raids were the latest in a long-running Houthi crackdown against the UN and other international organisations working in rebel-held areas of Yemen.

The offices of the UN’s food, health and children’s agencies were raided on Sunday, according to officials.

Ammar Ammar, a spokesperson for UNICEF, said a number of the agency’s staffers were detained, and the agency was seeking more information from the Houthis.

Media reports have suggested that 11 UN workers were detained.

The Houthis have controlled much of northwestern Yemen since 2014 after forcing out the internationally recognised government and starting a civil war.

They are backed by Iran and have conducted repeated strikes on shipping in the Red Sea and Israel.

Sunday’s events come after rebel prime minister Ahmed al Rahawi and a number of other ministers were killed on Thursday, according to the Houthis.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said on Friday it had “carried out a significant strike against strategic targets of the Houthi terror regime in Yemen”.

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The Russia-Ukraine war has reshaped global trade and forged new alliances

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2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

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The Russia-Ukraine war has reshaped global trade and forged new alliances

The vast majority of policymakers in Westminster, let alone elsewhere around the UK, have never heard of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the geopolitical grouping currently holding its summit at Tianjin, but hear me out on why we should all be paying considerable attention to it.

Because the more attention you pay to this grouping of 10 Eurasian states – most notably China, Russia and India – the more you start to realise that the long-term consequences of the war in Ukraine might well reach far beyond Europe’s borders, changing the contours of the world as we know it.

The best place to begin with this is in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Back then, there were a few important hallmarks in the global economy. The amount of goods exported to Russia by the G7 – the equivalent grouping of rich, industrialised nations – was about the same as China’s exports. Europe was busily sucking in most Russian oil.

But roll on to today and G7 exports to Russia have gone to nearly zero (a consequence of sanctions). Russian assets, including government bonds previously owned by the Russian central bank, have been confiscated and their fate wrangled over. But Chinese exports to Russia, far from falling or even flatlining, have risen sharply. Exports of Chinese transportation equipment are up nearly 500%. Meanwhile, India has gone from importing next to no Russian oil to relying on the country for the majority of its crude imports.

Indeed, so much oil is India now importing from Russia that the US has said it will impose “secondary tariffs” on India, doubling the level of tariffs paid on Indian goods imported into America to 50% – one of the highest levels in the world.

The upshot of Ukraine, in other words, isn’t just misery and war in Europe. It’s a sharp divergence in economic strategies around the world. Some countries – notably the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – have doubled down on their economic relationship with Russia. Others have forsworn Russian business.

And in so doing, many of those Asian nations have begun to envisage something they had never quite imagined before: an economic future that doesn’t depend on the American financial infrastructure. Once upon a time, Asian nations were the biggest buyers of American government debt, in part to provide them with the dollars they needed to buy crude oil, which is generally denominated in the US currency. But since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has begun to sell its oil without denominating it in dollars.

At the same time, many Asian nations have reduced their purchases of US debt. Indeed, part of the explanation for the recent rise in US and UK government bond yields is that there is simply less demand for them from foreign investors than there used to be. The world is changing – and the foundations of what we used to call globalisation are shifting.

The penultimate reason to pay attention to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is that while once upon a time its members accounted for a small fraction of global economic output, today that fraction is on the rise. Indeed, if you adjust economic output to account for purchasing power, the share of global GDP accounted for by the nations meeting in Tianjin is close to overtaking the share of GDP accounted for by the world’s advanced nations.

And the final thing to note – something that would have seemed completely implausible only a few years ago – is that China and India, once sworn rivals, are edging closer to an economic rapprochement. With India now facing swingeing tariffs from the US, New Delhi sees little downside in a rare trip to China, to cement relations with Beijing. This is a seismic moment in geopolitics. For a long time, the world’s two most populous nations were at loggerheads. Now they are increasingly moving in lockstep with each other.

That is a consequence few would have guessed at when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet it could be of enormous importance for geopolitics in future decades.