Earthquakes in Afghanistan Kill Nearly 200, Officials Say

Two 6.3-magnitude quakes were followed by several large aftershocks, devastating entire villages in the western part of the country.

Two 6.3-magnitude earthquakes killed nearly 200 people in western Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said, the second major quake to hit the country in less than two years.

At least 180 people were killed and around 600 injured, according to the chief of the regional hospital in Herat Province, which was hardest hit. The number of casualties was expected to rise as search and rescue efforts continued, officials said.

The epicenter of the quake was about 25 miles northwest of Herat City, an ancient trading center and cultural hub that borders Iran, according to the United States Geological Survey. At least seven aftershocks followed.

The Taliban administration declared a state of emergency because of the possibility of more aftershocks, said Musa Ashari, the head of the Taliban’s disaster management department for Herat Province. A dozen villages in the Zinda Jan district there were “completely destroyed,” he said on Saturday, and 600 injured people were pulled out of the rubble.

The force of the tremors stoked panic in Herat City, residents said. Videos circulating on social media show hundreds of people rushing out their homes and office buildings, fearing they could collapse on top of them.

Abdullah Ansari, 27, was working at a sewing workshop in Herat City on an underground floor when the first quake hit, he said. He and his co-workers ran outside, some barefoot, and he quickly checked if everyone had made it out.

“I called my wife and asked about my sons,” he said, then asked her to leave their home. “There is a big building next to my house, and I was worried if it collapses, they might get killed.”

He and his family had dinner in his father-in-law’s yard, and he said that, like most people in the area, they planned to sleep outside. Some would be sleeping in parks or on the street, he said, “because people were not feeling safe at their houses.”

The World Health Organization sent 12 ambulances to hard-hit districts in Herat Province to help evacuate casualties, it said, cautioning that the areas were remote, making rescue operations difficult. Houses in the area are fragile, the organization noted, made of mud and brick.

Nazir Hussaini, 34, was filing paperwork at a tax office in Herat City when the building started shaking. He and others ran outside screaming, then felt another quake about 10 minutes later, he said. Cellphone networks were not working well, making it difficult to get in touch with family members, and after a third tremor hit he eventually made his way back home, as his office and shops had all closed. His neighbors were cooking outside and camping in the street, he said.

The Taliban administration directed military and service organizations to prioritize the areas hit by the quake, including rescue operations, transporting the injured, preparing homeless shelters and delivering food aid.

“We wish patience and solace for the families of the victims, along with a swift recovery for the injured,” Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the acting deputy prime minister of the Taliban administration, said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “Immediate relief efforts are underway to provide essential aid to those in need.”

The earthquakes on Saturday were the latest natural disaster to rattle Afghanistan, which has faced a series of devastating floods and earthquakes in recent years. Those crises have tested the Taliban’s ability to coordinate vast and sustained humanitarian efforts since seizing power in 2021.

The challenge of doing so was put on display in June last year, after a 5.9-magnitude earthquake hit southeastern Afghanistan, killing more than 1,000 people and injuring 1,600 more. The earthquake was the deadliest to hit the country in decades and added to an already dire humanitarian crisis that has engulfed Afghanistan since the Western-backed government collapsed.

An Attack From Gaza and an Israeli Declaration of War. Now What?

 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being pressured to launch a full-scale invasion that Israeli leaders have been scrupulously avoiding since 2005.

Nearly 50 years to the day after the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Israel has again been taken by surprise by a sudden attack, a startling reminder that stability in the Middle East remains a bloody mirage.

Unlike the series of clashes with Palestinian forces in Gaza over the last three years, this appears to be a full-scale conflict mounted by Hamas and its allies, with rocket barrages and incursions into Israel proper, and with Israelis killed and captured.

The psychological impact on Israelis has been compared to the shock of Sept. 11 in America. So after the Israeli military repels the initial Palestinian attack, the question of what to do next will loom large. There are few good options for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declared war and is being pressured into a major military response.

Given that 250 Israelis have died so far and an unknown number been taken hostage by Hamas, an Israeli invasion of Gaza — and even a temporary reoccupation of the territory, something that successive Israeli governments have tried hard to avoid — cannot be ruled out.

As Mr. Netanyahu told Israelis in declaring war: “We will bring the fight to them with a might and scale that the enemy has not yet known,” adding that the Palestinian groups would pay a heavy price.

But a major war could have unforeseen consequences. It would be likely to produce sizable Palestinian casualties — civilians as well as fighters — disrupting the diplomatic efforts of President Biden and Mr. Netanyahu to bring about a Saudi recognition of Israel in return for defense guarantees from the United States.

There would also be pressure on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that controls southern Lebanon, to open up a second front in northern Israel, as it did in 2006 after an Israeli soldier was captured and taken prisoner in Gaza.

Iran, a sworn enemy of Israel, is an important backer of Hamas as well as Hezbollah and has supplied both groups with weapons and intelligence.

The conflict will unite Israel behind its government, at least for a while, with the opposition canceling its planned demonstrations against Mr. Netanyahu’s proposed judicial changes and obeying calls for reservists to muster. It will give Mr. Netanyahu “full political cover to do what he wants,” said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution.

Nevertheless, he added, Mr. Netanyahu has in the past rejected calls to send thousands of troops into Gaza to try to destroy armed Palestinian groups like Hamas, given the cost and the inevitable question of what happens the day after.

“But the psychological impact of this for Israel is similar to 9/11,” he said. “So the calculus about cost could be quite different this time.”

The question will always be what happens afterward, said Mark Heller, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. Nearly every year there have been limited Israeli military operations in the occupied territories, but they have not provided any solutions.

“There is a lot of heavy pressure already for a large-scale incursion, to ‘finish with Hamas,’ but I don’t think it will solve anything in the longer run,” Mr. Heller said.

But Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, said a major Israeli assault on Gaza was almost inevitable, particularly if Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. “If Hamas has taken Israeli soldiers as prisoners and taken them to Gaza, a full-scale Israeli operation into Gaza looks highly likely,” he said on X. “Another war.” The same presumably would hold true for Israeli citizens.

Israel and Mr. Netanyahu have been wary of sending ground forces into Gaza. Even in 2002, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister and Israeli forces crushed a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, the government chose to avoid sending significant extra forces into Gaza, where it then had Israeli settlements.

Israeli unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and citizens from Gaza in 2005, while retaining effective control of large parts of the occupied West Bank. The failure of that withdrawal to secure any sort of lasting peace agreement has left Gaza a kind of orphan, largely cut off from other Palestinians in the West Bank and almost entirely isolated by both Israel and Egypt, which control Gaza’s borders and its seacoast. Palestinians often call Gaza “an open-air prison.”

After the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conflict of 2006, an internal struggle between the Fatah movement of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the more radical Islamist Hamas movement ended with Hamas taking control of the territory in 2007, prompting Israel to try to isolate Gaza even further.

Even in an extended conflict of 2008 and 2009, Israeli forces entered Gaza and its population centers but chose not to move too deeply into the territory or to reoccupy it, with a cease-fire brokered by Egypt after three weeks of warfare.

Successive Israeli governments insist that after the 2005 withdrawal, it no longer has responsibility for Gaza. But given Israel’s control over the borders and its overwhelming military advantage, many groups like B’Tselem, which monitors human rights in the occupied territories, argue that Israel retains significant legal responsibilities and obligations for Gaza under international humanitarian law.

While Hamas has not been clear about why it chose to attack now, it may be a response to growing Israeli ties to the Arab world, in particular to Saudi Arabia, which has been negotiating a putative defense treaty with the United States in return for normalizing relations with Israel, potentially to the neglect of the Palestinians.

That is the view of Amberin Zaman, an analyst for Al-Monitor, a Washington-based news website that covers the Middle East. “Israel’s response to today’s attacks will likely be of a scale that will set back U.S. efforts for Saudi- Israeli normalization, if not torpedo them altogether,” she said in a message on X, formerly Twitter.

Saudi Arabia has not recognized Israel since it was founded in 1948 and until now had signaled that it would not even consider normalizing relations until Israel agreed to allow the creation of a Palestinian state.

But recently even the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has gone public with affirmations that some sort of deal with Israel seemed plausible. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that talk of normalization was “for the first time, real.”

That will now be in question, depending on how long this conflict lasts and with what level of dead and wounded.

But Mr. Sachs of Brookings says that the goals of Hamas may be simpler: to take hostages in order to free Palestinian prisoners from both the West Bank and Gaza in Israeli jails.

Aaron David Miller, a former American diplomat dealing with the Mideast, said that Hamas had been frustrated with the amounts of money coming into Gaza from Arab countries and restrictions on workers getting permission to work in Israel. “In many ways this is a prestige strike, to remind the Israelis that we’re here and can hurt you in ways you can’t anticipate,” he said.

Israel, shocked, will now have to deal with the results of what Mr. Miller, now with the Carnegie Endowment, called its “overconfidence and complacency and unwillingness to imagine that Hamas could launch a cross-border attack like this.”

The ramifications of the war and its aftermath will be “far-reaching and take a long time to manifest,” Mr. Sachs said. There will be commissions of inquiry into the military and intelligence agencies “and the political echelon won’t escape blame, either.”

But first, as Mr. Heller noted, comes the war. “And these things tend to get out of control,” he said.

100 Israeli civilians and soldiers kidnapped, says embassy to US

 As we've been reporting, dozens of Israelis have been taken hostage by Palestinian militants.

We don't have an official number - but the Israeli Embassy to the United States has put the figure at 100 in a social media post.

That includes both civilians and soldiers, it says.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, it also says that more than 300 Israelis have been killed, and upwards of 1,800 injured.

These numbers have not been officially confirmed by Israel.