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Karaganda (Kazakhstan) (AFP) – Residents of Kazakhstan’s mining town of Karaganda pay tribute to a miner who died following an accident on 28 October at an ArcelorMittal mine where 45 were killed. It is the worst mining disaster in the Central Asian country’s post-Soviet history. The tragedy, which struck at the Kostenko coal mine comes after a series of deadly incidents at ArcelorMittal mines which have prompted the nationalisation of the company’s local affiliate. A 2006 accident killed 41 miners.

Taybeh (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – Within an hour, the Bedouin village of Wadi al-Seeq in the occupied West Bank had been completely emptied, its 200 residents fleeing on foot with their sheep and goats. On October 12, five days after the start of the war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, residents say dozens of Israelis turned up at the village and gave them an hour to leave their land, among them settlers, soldiers and police. The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident, despite several AFP requests. Since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October, more than 120 Palestinians have been killed across the occupied West Bank where violence had already been spiralling. Even before the Gaza war, the death toll in the Palestinian territory had reached its highest levels since at least 2005.

Washington (AFP) – The United States does not support current calls for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, the White House says, adding that “pauses” to get aid into Gaza should be considered instead. “We do not believe that a ceasefire is the right answer right now,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby tells reporters during a briefing. Israel declared war on Palestinian militant group Hamas after it launched an unprecedented wave of attacks inside Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 230 people hostage. The United Nations has repeatedly called for a humanitarian truce in the violence, which the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza claims has killed more than 8,000 people, many of them children.

Islamabad (AFP) – Attending their last lessons for the foreseeable future, Afghan girls in Pakistan face being forced to return to a country where they are barred from a secondary education under the Taliban government, as Islamabad launches an unprecedented crackdown on the 1.7 million Afghans it says live illegally in Pakistan.

United Nations (United States) (AFP) – The chief of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) decries the situation for UN workers on the ground in Gaza, saying that 64 of his UNRWA colleagues had been killed in just over three weeks, “the highest number of UN aid workers killed in a conflict in such a short time.” Intensifying Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip have heightened fears of for its 2.4 million inhabitants, where the Hamas-controlled health ministry says more than 8,300 have been killed. Despite UN warnings that not enough aid was arriving in Gaza to meet “unprecedented humanitarian needs,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a ceasefire would amount to surrendering to Hamas, whose gunmen killed 1,400 people and took more than 230 hostages in an unprecedented attack on 7 October, according to the latest Israeli figures.

Washington (AFP) – US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says the anti-Israel riot at Dagestan’s Makhachkala airport Sunday evening was reminiscent of “pogroms.” “Some people have compared it to the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century and I think that’s probably an apt description,” Kirby tells journalists.

Beirut (AFP) – Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati warns of “security chaos” that could engulf the region should war spread beyond Israel and the Gaza Strip. The war has raised concerns that Lebanon’s powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, a Hamas ally, could open a new front with Israel. “I cannot reassure the Lebanese about anything because things are subject to their timing,” Mikati adds.

Gaza Strip (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – An Israeli tank fires on a car near Salahedin Road, in the Zaytun district on the southern fringes of Gaza City. Israeli tanks advanced into the district on 30 October, cutting a key road from the north to the south of the war-torn Palestinian territory. Since 27 October, Israeli forces have stepped up their ground offensive in response to the 7 October Hamas attacks that officials say killed 1,400 people in Israel, mostly civilians, with more than 220 people taken hostage. The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says more than 8,000 people, mostly civilians and almost half of them children, have been killed in retaliatory Israeli air and ground strikes.

Unknown (AFP) – Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells an elite police unit “we will win” as fighting in Gaza stretches into its 24th day, following an attack by Hamas militants on October 7 which left at least 1,400 Israelis dead. In Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry has reported more than 8,000 deaths as a result of Israel’s response to the attack. Speaking to the Police Elite Unit (the Gidonim) in central Israel, Netanyahu praises those “imbued with the fighting spirit.”

Svea (Norway) (AFP) – Rusty rails and crumbling brick buildings are all that remain to the Svea coal mine on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, which is turning away from the environmentally harmful industry. “We need to try to restore back to nature the area as it originally was” says former Norwegian environment minister Espen Barth Eide. Svea opened in 1917 and brought wealth to the Arctic islands, before its closure a century later in 2017.