An escalation in armed conflict between Hamas and Israel led to thousands of casualties and ongoing regional instability. More than 70 people have been killed after Israeli forces fired at Palestinians collecting food aid in the Gaza Strip, taking the total death toll to more than 30,000 since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza nearly five months ago, according to the Ministry of Health in the besieged enclave. The ministry’s update on Thursday comes amid a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, on the brink of famine, as the Israeli military threatens a ground invasion of Rafah, where about 1.5 million people, most of them were displaced by the war, are sheltering. On Thursday, it was reported that soldiers opened fire on civilians waiting for flour for their families in Gaza City, killing at least 70 Palestinians in an attack described as a cold-blooded “massacre” by the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates. The ministry said of the 30,035 people killed so far in the conflict, more than 13,000 were children and 8,800 women. At least 70,457 people have been injured, of which more than 11,000 are in critical condition and need to be evacuated.

The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing over 140,000 people and marking a pivotal moment in World War II. Throughout July 1945 the Japanese mainlands, from the latitude of Tokyo on Honshu northward to the coast of Hokkaido, were bombed just as if an invasion was about to be launched. In fact, something far more sinister was in hand, as the Americans were telling Stalin at Potsdam. In 1939 physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the possibility of nuclear fission and had understood that the potential energy might be released in an explosive weapon of unprecedented power. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein had warned Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany’s forestalling other states in the development of an atomic bomb. Eventually, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created in June 1941 and given joint responsibility with the war department in the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. After four years of intensive and ever-mounting research and development efforts, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area near Alamogordo, New Mexico, generating an explosive power equivalent to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the atomic bomb was born. Truman, the new U.S. president, calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland. Japan’s unsatisfactory response to the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration decided the matter. (See Sidebar: The decision to use the atomic bomb.) On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried from Tinian Island in the Marianas in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on Hiroshima, at the southern end of Honshu: the combined heat and blast pulverized everything in the explosion’s immediate vicinity, generated fires that burned almost 4.4 square miles completely out, and immediately killed some 70,000 people (the death toll passed 100,000 by the end of the year). A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, killed between 35,000 and 40,000 people, injured a like number, and devastated 1.8 square miles.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, leading to a major European war with global implications for security, economy, and refugees. The Russia-Ukraine war, which began with Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing conflict in the Donbas, escalated dramatically with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This intensification marked the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, fundamentally altering the geopolitical landscape and causing immense human suffering. The 2022 invasion saw Russian forces launch multi-pronged attacks, targeting Kyiv from the north, as well as advancing from Crimea in the south and the Donbas in the east. The initial push towards the capital met fierce Ukrainian resistance, logistical challenges, and eventually led to a Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv region by April 2022. The discovery of atrocities in places like Bucha after the Russian retreat further highlighted the brutality of the conflict and prompted widespread international condemnation.