Tuesday, 28 July 2026

Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington for a White House meeting on Tuesday, his first since the war with Iran began on 28 February, and Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 reported he told his cabinet he intends to refuse American demands for troop withdrawals from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

The wider region is still absorbing the war. Saudi Arabia says it shot down drones launched from Iraqi territory at oil facilities in its Eastern Province and at Riyadh, blaming Iran-backed militias, while Yemen's Houthis claimed strikes on the pipeline carrying crude to the Red Sea port of Yanbu; shipping data show traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb strait has fallen 56 percent since the Houthi embargo on Saudi-linked vessels was declared on 20 July. Israeli forces raided at least 20 towns and villages in the occupied West Bank and a United Nations facility, according to Tehran Times, and Israel has separately approved the deployment of an international stabilisation force in Gaza.

The Pentagon, which began publishing casualty figures on a dedicated webpage on 7 July, has listed four service members killed during the ceasefire period separately from 14 further Epic Fury casualties since February; the New York Times, cited by TASS, puts injuries since February at more than 600.

In Ukraine the war is widening rather than winding down. Russian missiles and drones killed at least six people on Sunday including a nine-year-old girl in a Chernihiv supermarket, while a Ukrainian drone attack on Rostov-on-Don left five dead including a child according to the regional governor, with each capital calling the other's strikes terror. Ukrainian drones struck an oil site in Udmurtia in what the region's governor called the most massive attack there to date, and a strike on shipping in the Caspian Sea killed an Iranian sailor, prompting Tehran to summon Kyiv's chargé d'affaires and warn that the attack "cannot go unanswered".

Volodymyr Zelensky was the first foreign leader received by Britain's new prime minister Andy Burnham before travelling to the White House, where a US official quoted by CNN said it is time to end the war, even as the Trump administration told Congress that $400m in approved assistance will not be fully delivered before fiscal 2029. Vladimir Putin raised Russia's authorised army strength to 2,426,130 personnel, the sixth such expansion according to Meduza, and the South China Morning Post reports unconfirmed claims that North Korea is preparing to send 30,000 more troops.

Southern Europe is burning. Wildfires in Spain, France and now Portugal have displaced roughly 375,000 people according to The Guardian and Koha, with the largest fire in Spanish records covering 77,000 hectares and the Gironde blaze uncontained after five nights within a few dozen kilometres of Bordeaux. Forecasters expect a fourth heat wave since May to reach France from Tuesday with temperatures up to 40 degrees, while Reuters and The Telegraph report Europe entering winter with shrinking gas and fuel buffers. In Berlin, a man drove a van into the Christopher Street Day parade in the Tiergarten on Saturday evening and attacked people with knives, killing a woman and injuring 29 before being shot dead; the federal prosecutor's office has taken over the case.

Central banks and technology dominate the economic picture. The Federal Open Market Committee meets this week for its first decision under new chairman Kevin Warsh, who has said the Fed has "no tolerance" for elevated inflation, with derivatives markets split between a hold and a hike; the Bank of England is expected to hold, and Singapore tightened for the second time in three months. In Shanghai, memory chipmaker CXMT closed its trading debut up 466 percent, becoming by market value the most valuable company listed on a mainland exchange, while Apple overtook Nvidia as the world's most valuable public company amid concern over AI costs.

Nvidia is reported by the Wall Street Journal to be negotiating roughly $250bn in funding guarantees for an OpenAI data centre in Piketon, Ohio, and has formed an Open Secure AI Alliance as the dispute over open-weight models widens. Elsewhere the news was quieter but grim: Uganda began emergency food distribution in Karamoja after 19 hunger deaths, Ebola responders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo struck over unpaid bonuses as recorded cases passed 3,000, and Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $5.5bn to settle nearly 70,000 talc cancer claims it continues to deny.