Gaza, Israel, and Hezbollah

• Israel's military said it's close to achieving all of its objectives in Rafah - which included destroying a majority of the Hamas combat units hiding out in the city - and hopes to wind down its operation there within a few weeks.
• Meanwhile in the north, Hezbollah released a nine-minute drone video - perhaps captured by an Iranian-made Qasaf 2k drone - of Israeli military and "highly populated" civilian sites in and around Haifa, which spooked Israel.
• Israeli Foreign Minister Katz warned that Israel is "getting very close to the moment of deciding to change the rules of the game against Hezbollah and Lebanon," and threatened that an attack on any of the sensitive areas shown in the video could lead to "all-out war."
• Hezbollah ominously responded that this video was just the "first episode" and suggested more such videos will follow.
• Israel's army additionally confirmed that senior officers have approved "operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon" - though more cautious voices say neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants this to escalate further.

Yemen

• The Greek-owned coal carrier Tutor has reportedly sunk in the Red Sea about a week after it was struck by a Houthi drone boat. U.S. Navy teams safely evacuated all of the doomed ship's personnel after it began taking on water.
• If its sinking is confirmed, the Tutor would be the second ship the Houthis have sunk since they started targeting vessels with alleged (but often tenuous) Israeli ties in Nov. 2023.

Russia

• The Russian flotilla that briefly docked in Havana last week has split up and left Cuba. Its nuclear-powered submarine - which some spotters observed to have damage to its hull - is heading back north with a wary U.S. and Canadian naval escort, and the rest of the Russian ships are expected to make a port call in Venezuela.

North Korea

• North Korean media gushed about Kim Jong Un's bromance with Pres. Putin, who's visiting for two days. State media said the two ostracized leaders "exchanged their pent-up innermost thoughts."

China

• Human Rights Watch and a pro-Uighur Norwegian NGO accused China of "efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs" by Han-washing the names of around 630 Uighur villages between 2009 and 2023.
• The names of around 14% of Xinjiang's 25,000 villages were changed in this period, and of those, about 80% of name changes were innocuous. But in the ~630 cases making up the remaining 20% of changed names, villages whose old names had religious, historical, or cultural significance to Uighurs - including names with Islamic or Sufi connotations or references to pre-Republic local leaders - were renamed after bland-but-Beijing-approved concepts like “Happiness,” “Unity,” and “Harmony.”
• Most of the contentious name changes occurred between 2017 and 2019 - when Chinese persecution in Xinjiang was at a peak - and most of the renamed villages were concentrated in majority-Uighur southern parts of Xinjiang.

Other News

• Arab diplomats reported that at least 550 pilgrims died during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca this week. The vast majority succumbed to heat-related illnesses after temperatures at the Grand Mosque reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit (51.8 degrees Celsius).