Supporters of Bolivia's former president Evo Morales took more than 200 soldiers hostage on Nov. 2. The Bolivian Foreign Ministry reported that the activists occupied three military facilities in the region of Chapare during protests. The statement accused them of possessing weapons and ammunition. At least 30 police officers are reportedly injured, and more than 50 protesters were arrested last week.

President Mahamat Déby has vowed vengeance for an attack by jihadists on an army base in Chad's Lake region that killed at least 40 soldiers Oct. 27. The insurgents who managed to overrun the base are likely to be from Boko Haram's "Bakura" faction, which is concentrated in the northern part of the region, on the Niger-Chad border. They've been involved in a long-running battle for supremacy in the region with the rival Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP). Their commander, Ibrahim Bakura Doro, has resisted both peace overtures and demands for assimilation by the larger ISWAP group. The night-time attack on the Barkaram base, in which weapons and equipment were captured, follows a military sweep through the region earlier in the year by a joint force of Nigerian, Cameroonian and Chadian troops—which at the time was proclaimed a success.

With UN aid agencies and humanitarian organizations warning of an "apocalyptic" scenario in North Gaza, the Biden administration faces a lawsuit charging complicity with genocide. The "pause" that the White House has imposed on some arms shipments to Israel by no means absolves the administration of moral (or legal) culpability. However, it may have had the effect of restraining Benjamin Netanyahu's maximalist plans to cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians altogether. President Trump meanwhile recognized Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and launched the "Abraham Accords"—predicated on betrayal of the Palestinians by the Arab leadership. His 2019 executive order officially embraced the propagandistic conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and he now calls for complete repression (including by the military) of Palestine solidarity protests. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law who was his Middle East pointman, is now openly backing the cleansing of Gaza of all Palestinians, while his ultra-Zionist former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an open advocate of Israeli annexation of the West Bank and destruction of al-Aqsa Mosque. As Trump accuses Biden of "holding back" Israel, it is clear that Netanyahu and his most hardline cabinet members like Itamar Ben-Gvir are openly rooting for him—as is the Israel Lobby in DC.

Brutal attacks by the Rapid Support Forces on villages and towns in Sudan's Gezira state, south of Khartoum, have displaced around 120,000 people over the past two weeks, resembling the kind of violence used by the paramilitary group in the Darfur region beginning last year. The attacks were triggered by the defection to the army of the RSF's top commander in Gezira, Abu Aqla Kayka; villages under his control were reportedly targeted. The UN said the attacks left at least 124 people dead and resulted in more than 27 women and girls being raped, though these numbers are likely a massive undercount given survivor testimonies, activist reports, and videos that show rows of bodies wrapped in shrouds. The attacks are among the worst to take place in Gezira since the RSF took over the state in December 2023. The state is considered the country's breadbasket, but farmers have been forced to flee and cropland has been deliberately burnt.

The Commission of Detainees & Ex-Detainee Affairs, a Palestinian prisoner rights organization, and the Palestinian Prisoners' Club reported in statements on Oct. 28 that Israeli prison staff have brutally assaulted Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian political leader and member of the Central Committee of Fatah.

The government of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe extended a territory-wide curfew on Oct. 25, applying from 7 PM through 6 AM, after a strike by workers at the EDF-PEI power plant shut down the island's electricity supply. The power plant at Pointe Jarry, is run by the Insular Electricity Production unit of national utility Electricity of France. The order marked an extension of the curfew imposed the previous day "to prevent the risk of public order disturbance in the context of the general power outage."

The collapse of the electrical grid plunged the entire island of Cuba into darkness on Oct. 18—a situation compounded by Hurricane Oscar two days later. The national blackout, which caused many families to lose most of the little food they had, sparked rare protests amid a broader economic crisis marked by soaring inflation and widespread shortages of medicine, food, and water. Power has now been restored in the capital, Havana, but many rural areas remain in the dark, while schools and workplaces across the country remain closed due to ongoing energy-saving measures.

The national police force of Bolivia announced that they had arrested 44 protesters on Oct. 25, after supporters of of former president Evo Morales set up more than 20 roadblocks on highways across the country to prevent his arrest. The police accused protestors of committing various crimes, including attacks on transportation security, usurpation of functions, criminal association, armed robbery and terrorism. In a press conference, Minister of Government Eduardo Del Castillo condemned the the protesters' use of dangerous weapons, including dynamite, assault rifles and shotguns. He noted that 14 officers have been injured and one is undergoing surgery.