Hello, everyone. Today at WPR, we’re we’re covering Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s populist approach to foreign policy, and the outlook for Australia and Papua New Guinea’s historic new mutual defense pact. | But first, for today’s top story, we’re featuring a piece from our sister publication, GlobalPost. To get GlobalPost in your inbox every weekday, sign up here. |  | Members of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, in Nuseirat, Gaza, Oct. 28, 2025 (AP photo by Abdel Kareem Hana). |
| In Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood in mid-October, masked gunmen forced seven men, blindfolded and bound, to their knees in a public square. As the crowds gathered, the shooting began. | The executions, captured on video, came just days after a ceasefire agreement was to bring peace to Gaza. But Hamas isn’t fighting Israel anymore. It is fighting Palestinians. | And with Israel, the U.S., and Gulf states all backing different factions, Gaza risks becoming a fragmented battlefield of competing militias. That has led to worries about Gaza collapsing into another war, but this time an internal one. | “What we are witnessing today signals the onset of an internal Palestinian confrontation—a slide toward civil war,” said Mansour Abo Kareem, a Gaza-based political researcher, in an interview with the Media Line. “All the conditions for such a conflict are now present.” | Since the truce was signed in early October, Hamas has killed dozens of people in clashes with rival armed groups. Family-based militias known as hamulas have seized control of neighborhoods, distributed aid on their terms, and openly challenged Hamas fighters weakened by two years of Israeli military operations. | The violence erupted almost immediately after the peace deal took effect in early October. Clashes between Hamas forces and the Abu Wardah clan near Gaza City’s port left at least five dead. But the worst fighting came in battles with the Doghmush clan, where at least 27 people died, including eight Hamas operatives. | “Children are screaming and dying—they are burning our houses,” a Doghmush family member told the Israeli news portal Ynet. “We are trapped.” | Videos showed masked Hamas gunmen shooting blindfolded prisoners in front of cheering crowds. The Arrow Unit, Hamas’s enforcement wing, posted the footage with a warning: “This is the fate of every traitor to the homeland and to [our] religion,” according to the Long War Journal. | The executions signal deep worry within the group, Palestinian analyst Akram Attallah told the Times of Israel. As rival groups operate beyond their usual territories, they pose a rising threat to Hamas. | The street violence reflects deeper fractures inside the group itself. It is divided between its political leadership abroad—including figures in Doha who negotiated the ceasefire—and hardliners inside Gaza who see disarmament as surrender. Some local commanders have reportedly rejected orders from the external leadership, Reuters noted, casting doubt on the group’s intention to disarm. | Meanwhile, Gaza’s clans have fractured into two opposing coalitions. One faction, organized under the pro-Hamas Higher Commission for Palestinian Tribes led by Husni al-Mughni, has defended the crackdown against what they call “Israeli-backed gangs,” looters and drug traffickers, the Palestine Chronicle reported. Clans like the al-Mujaida family quickly declared “full support” for Hamas and agreed to hand over weapons. | But a rival coalition of clans has resisted. The Doghmush clan issued a statement expressing shock at “a distressing internal campaign targeting our innocent sons, involving killing, intimidation, torture, and burning of homes with their residents inside, without any justification,” according to CNN. | The family said it lost some 600 members during the war and firmly rejected “all attempts by the occupation to win it over or recruit it.” | Israel has been cultivating anti-Hamas clans as proxies, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledging financing these clans. The most prominent is Yasser Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces, which now controls aid distribution at key crossings. | “We maintain close ties with several Western countries, with the United States and even with Israel,” said Hossam al-Astal, commander of a rival militia in Khan Younis, in an interview with Ynet. “We want them to support residents who refuse Hamas rule.” | President Trump’s peace framework imagines Gaza overseen by an international authority and a technocratic government, with Hamas temporarily maintaining order while it disarms and the enclave transitions. But that ambiguity is being exploited from all sides. Ordinary Gazans are caught between them. | The fragility of the arrangement became clear when Israel halted aid and launched airstrikes on Oct. 19 after Hamas fighters killed two Israeli soldiers. Trump had warned that if the violence continues, “we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.” | Even so, he has said Hamas actions against “very bad gangs” are acceptable and that the administration had authorized the group to act temporarily as Gaza’s police force. | For Palestinians who survived months of bombardment, the prospect of another war is devastating. Many now fear their own rulers, saying they don’t believe Hamas will disarm, even as they worry about its clan rivals and Gaza’s criminal gangs as much as renewed Israeli airstrikes. | “It’s been two years with a complete loss of law and order,” aid worker Hanya Aljamal told the BBC from her home in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. “We need someone to take over. As unqualified as Hamas is to rule the Strip, they are a better option than the gangs.” |
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| | Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has had a rough year. A series of scandals have beset his vulnerable minority government, including corruption allegations against top figures from his Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, and even his wife. Sanchez has not been able to pass a new budget since the start of his term in 2023, forcing him to rely on EU funds and extensions of the 2022 budget. But as WPR’s Frida Ghitis writes, Sanchez has found an unlikely strategy for countering his domestic troubles: turning the country’s attention to foreign policy. | | | Last month, Australia and Papua New Guinea—the largest of the Pacific Island nations both in size and population—inked an historic Defense Cooperation Agreement. Also known as the Pukpuk Treaty, after a local word for crocodile in Papua New Guinea, the deal is a remarkable achievement for both countries. However, given the two sides’ significantly different geostrategic objectives, implementation will be tricky, and China’s response may cause one or both signatories to get cold feet. These factors call into question the Pukpuk Treaty’s sustainability over the long run, Derek Grossman writes. | | | Russian Power Grid Attacks Terrorize Ukraine | A series of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid Thursday caused outages across the country. The strikes, which Kyiv said involved more than 650 drones and more than 50 missiles, were the latest in an ongoing Russian campaign targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as winter approaches—a tactic the Ukrainian prime minister described as “systematic energy terror.” | In the past, Russia has claimed that Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is a legitimate military target because, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed, it is “linked with Ukraine’s military industrial complex and weapons production.” However, as Charli Carpenter wrote in her WPR column in March, that is not a legitimate justification under international law, especially given the harm to civilians that results from loss of power as the bitter Ukrainian winter approaches. | “While the law is ambiguous in situations where a civilian object is being used in such a way as to make a direct military contribution to war, even then targeting of that object is subject to the principle of proportionality, by which harm to civilians must be weighed against military necessity,” Carpenter wrote. “Moreover, targeting civilian objects for the purpose of terrorizing civilians is a war crime.” |
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| | | China, U.S. Strike a Trade Truce | President Donald Trump said today that he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have agreed to a trade deal in which the U.S. will lower tariffs on Chinese exports from 57 to 47 percent in exchange for China cracking down on fentanyl, resuming purchases of U.S. soybeans and foregoing restrictions on exports of critical minerals. Trump spoke after he and Xi met in Busan, South Korea, their first face-to-face meeting since 2019. | While the deal will allow both Trump and Xi to go home claiming victory, it only returns the U.S.-China relationship back to where it was in March. “As long as the deal sticks, it would have the important effect of reducing global economic uncertainty,” Mary Gallagher wrote in WPR this week after the Trump administration publicized an outline of the emerging deal. “The steps being previewed by the Trump administration would change little about the underlying tensions between the two sides, nor would they solve the domestic problems that obsess both leaders.” |
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Welcome to my geopolitics blog site. This is a Hawaii Island news site focusing on geopolitical news, analysis, information, and commentary. I will cite a variety of sources, ranging from all sides of the political spectrum.