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Zelenskyy calls for ‘strong decisions’ at Nato summit after Russia kills 14 in overnight strikes on Kyiv – Europe live

in Brussels In other news, an official EU investigation has found that Hungarian intelligence posted spies to Brussels under the previous government led by Viktor Orbán, but stopped short of attributing responsibility. In a letter to MEPs the European commissioner for budget and public administration, Piotr Serafin, said that Hungarian intelligence had posted several officers to Hungary’s diplomatic outpost in Brussels between 2013-16, where they used their position for “a specific mission that appears to have gone beyond the tasks” usually associated with diplomats. The letter, seen by the Guardian, is dated 27 April 2026 and states that the activities of the intelligence officers were “initially discreet but gradually became much more overt from 2015 onwards” which ultimately hampered their efforts. The commission believes such activities stopped in 2016 and did not cause any serious security breach. The letter was first reported by Politico. The spying covers a period when Hungary’s permanent representation to the EU was led by Hungary’s serving EU commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi. Várhelyi was Hungary’s EU ambassador, or permanent representative, from 2015-19, having served as deputy from 2011-15. He has always denied any knowledge of the spying at the organisation he used to run. The letter does not refer to Várhelyi, but nonetheless raises awkward questions about his oversight at the perm rep. In his letter Serafin said it had not been possible to attribute individual responsbility or involvement beyond the intelligence officers themselves. Varhelyi was appointed by Orbán in 2019 to serve as Hungary’s EU commissioner and is expected to remain in post until the end of his mandate in 2029. The espionage charges emerged last year, when the Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36, working with Belgian and German media, reported that Hungarian intelligence began attempting to spy on the commission more than a decade ago, with efforts to recruit officials and get them to hand over classified documents. Every EU member state has a permanent representation in Brussels focused on EU decision making, but using these outposts as a base to spy on the EU institutions is seen as unprecedented.

Wildfires rage across southern Europe, forcing thousands to flee homes

Wildfires raging across southern Europe have forced thousands to flee their homes and prompted officials to ban spectators from a stage of the Tour de France, amid warnings of “powder keg” conditions after a record-breaking early summer heatwave. Hundreds of firefighters are tackling blazes that have burned through almost 20,000 hectares (49,500 acres) in Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. Strong winds are forecast to fan the flames and temperatures are expected to rise again this week. In the remote foothills of the French Pyrenees near the Spanish border, 700 firefighters were struggling to contain an out-of-control wildfire that has ⁠scorched 5,000 hectares and prompted the evacuation of more than 10,000 people. “This morning, conditions are ⁠deteriorating again,” said the French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, on Monday, adding that with wildfires now blazing in five departments, twice as much land had burned in France so far this season compared with the same time last year. The Pyrenees fire has nearly tripled in size since Sunday. “It came within 300 metres [984ft] of the houses. We were shocked by how fast it spread, it was staggering – bordering on panic,” Patrice, from the village of Trévillach, told Agence France-Presse. The blazes follow a premature May heatwave and another in June that shattered temperature records across western Europe, caused thousands of excess deaths and left vast areas of land particularly vulnerable to wildfires. The World Weather Attribution group of scientists has said the extreme temperatures recorded in June would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis. Temperatures are forecast to climb again this week, rising to 40C locally. “Climate change is here, we are living the consequences and it is only the start of July,” said the fire chief for Pyrénées-Orientales, Eric Belgioino. “This season is going to be a long one for the soldiers fighting fires. You have to help us.” The regional prefect, Pierre Regnault de la Mothe, ordered Tour de France spectators “not to go near the route or to the finish area” of Monday’s third stage of the cycling race through the Pyrenees from Spain into France. He said it would be “limited to the passage of the riders only and vehicles essential to the race”. On the Spanish side of the border, fire has ravaged 2,200 hectares, 97% of which has been in the protected natural area of Les Gavarres. The head of operations of the Catalan fire service, Eduard Martinez, said the blaze had a perimeter of 40km (25 miles). Firefighters said their efforts would be complicated by rising temperatures and the many “smoking hotspots” within the perimeter, but announced late on Sunday that the blaze was stable and they hoped it should be extinguished ⁠during the week. South of Catalonia, in Spain’s eastern Castellón province, more than 500 people were evacuated after a wildfire spread into the Sierra de Espadán national park. In central Portugal’s Vouzela area, more than 1,200 firefighters supported by nearly 400 vehicles and 15 aircraft were trying to extinguish a blaze that broke out on Thursday and had burned across an area of 13,000 hectares by Sunday. Spain and Italy sent firefighters and aircraft to help and emergency services said on Monday that while dangerous spots remained, 80% of the blaze was under control. Portugal’s interior minister, Luís Neves, described conditions as a “powder keg”. Elsewhere, large fires also destroyed hundreds of hectares of forest, vineyards and scrub on the Croatian island of Hvar and at Tale in Albania, while in Greece, flames set off by a forest fire tore through two factories in the northern city of Thessaloniki. Greek authorities issued evacuation alerts for three suburbs and urged residents in parts of the city to stay indoors indoors and shut their windows and doors because of toxic smoke from one of the factories, a recycling plant. Another large wildfire broke out Sunday afternoon west of Athens, with 210 firefighters, supported by volunteers, specialised teams and 29 aircraft deployed to tackle the blaze burning through pine forest in the Mandra area.

Middle East crisis live: Funeral procession for supreme leader Ali Khamenei begins in Iran

Aliyah Abdel Majid al-Halaq is the mother of Mohammad, who was killed by Israeli forces last year when he was nine years old. She writes: ‘At first, you believe your tragedy is unlike any other. Then you discover that your family has become part of an ever-growing list. More mothers, each carrying the memory of the moment after which life was never the same.’ Philip Goodwin, who leads UNICEF UK, writes that Mohammad’s story ‘resonated deeply’ after travelling to the West Bank to meet Palestinian families there. ‘I have worked in humanitarian development for more than two decades, but nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed there,’ he says. You can read his letter here:

‘Better safe than sorry’: Greece installs floating barrier to ward off toxic fish

From his deckchair, his arms thrown above his head, his feet sliding back and forth in the sand, Pavlos Beleyiannis watches his grandchildren bathe in his favourite bay. It’s an idyllic scene, infused with a serenity that the newly retired truck driver attributes squarely to a sense of security. For the first time, a floating barrier has been installed across the bay. Ducking, splashing and larking about, the children have not ventured beyond it. “Thank god it’s there to protect them,” he says with evident relief. “There weren’t such dangers in these seas when I was a child.” Until last summer, the perils that lurked beneath the northern Gulf of Euboea – waters that separate the island of Evia from the Greek mainland – were, it was thought, limited to purple jellyfish. Last year, the mauve stingers had pharmacists working overtime in Chalkida, the island’s bustling capital 80 miles (130km) north of Athens, after a surge of attacks on swimmers. The arrival, thanks to the climate crisis, of toxic, long-toothed pufferfish – capable of chomping through bone, metal and wooden blocks – has posed a different threat: in an unprecedented step, the Greek Red Cross issued a public health warning advising citizens to seek emergency care if bitten by the fish because its “beak-like jaws” could cause severe wounds and heavy bleeding. In no way should the species be consumed, it said, because of a potentially lethal neurotoxin, tetrodotoxin, contained in its organs and flesh. With no known antidote to counter the poison, the invasive species can kill not only predators – investing pufferfish with an unparalleled ascendancy in the food chain – but also any humans who eat it. “Our duty and primary concern has to be the safety of our citizens,” says Antonis Spanos, Chalkida’s vice-mayor, who oversaw the installation of the floating barrier – the first in Greece – last month. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” At 40, the energetic Spanos belongs to a new breed of determinedly proactive local politician. He says authorities have spent months going through the process of securing funds and putting out tenders to ensure the most protective barrier could be installed, before the system was approved by the state general laboratory. “Two and a half kilometres of this net will be set up in bays around the gulf to allow for a carefree summer,” he says. “Last year it was bad with the jellyfish but, as you say in English, we’ve killed two birds with one stone. Now if there are puffers, we’ll be ready for them too.” He says phones at the town hall have been ringing off the hook with elderly people calling to ask when the systems would be installed. “Just this morning a woman called in saying she’d only feel safe to go swimming with her grandchildren once it was there.” Chalkida, it turns out, is not alone. This week Nikos Choulieris, 63, who has long run a diving school in the town, was out with his team in a fast-moving inflatable boat, anchoring yet more of the floating barriers to the seabed off beaches further up the gulf, as other municipalities followed suit. “I’ve been diving for more than 40 years and never thought the day would come when I’d be doing this,” Choulieris says. “Sea temperatures have definitely risen and that has made it all the more favourable for what we’re seeing now.” In the coming weeks, an estimated 7km of floating barrier will be delivered by truck to the region from Athens. “I don’t think anything will be able to get through that net, not even the fangs of a pufferfish,” Choulieris says. “It’s very tightly knit and very durable. They’d have to bite away at the same point for a long time to tear it and I don’t think they’re going to do that.” Such is the proliferation of the Lagocephalus sceleratus that officials speak of the entire eastern Mediterranean falling prey to the aquatic pest. Like lionfish, which are naturally native to the Indo-Pacific region, the torpedo-shaped species is said by scientists to have been lured by the Mediterranean’s warming waters, entering the basin through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea. Fishers in Cyprus were the first to report their catches and nets being decimated by the inedible intruder. In 2024, Cypriot authorities introduced financial incentives to quell the proliferation under a government-backed eradication scheme that has resulted in more than 103 tonnes of the silver-cheeked toadfish being removed from coastal waters. The island’s fisheries officer, Katerina Georgiou, has attributed the species’ spread to its “remarkable adaptability”, telling the local outlet Sigma that in the absence of a census it was “impossible to draw reliable conclusions about the overall stock, or future population trends”. The presence of the pufferfish was not a temporary phenomenon but a new reality that could not be ignored, she said. Last week Athens announced a similar “catch” programme, offering a reward of €5.33 (£4.57) for each kilogram of the toxic menace surrendered to authorities. Greek fishers, who similarly complain of nets and fishing gear being destroyed by the species, will also be given fuel subsides under the EU-funded action plan to be applied, initially, in Crete and the southern Aegean. Once collected, the fish, as in Cyprus, will be frozen and incinerated in government facilities, said Margaritis Schinas, the agriculture minister and a former European Commission vice-president. With the initiative aimed as much at protecting the marine environment as supporting coastal and island communities, he said it would probably be expanded. “All this is too late,” sighs Nikos Ayiaskoufitis, 54, enjoying a glass of wine with other amateur fishers in a small harbour that houses the squat building used by their organisation in Chalkida. “No measure is going to be effective because what we’re seeing is part of the law of nature. “The waters have warmed, these fish have migrated, or are going to migrate this way, and I don’t think the bounty is really enough for professional fishers to want to focus on catching pufferfish.” Greek authorities have also come up against an unforeseen enemy: lovers of the species. A club calling itself the Initiative to Save Puffer Fish emerged last week decrying the eradication efforts, which it argued raised “serious ethical questions” for a creature that clearly required “protection and respect”. With support from the tourist industry and leading marine fish experts – who have described the outcry as overblown – it is unlikely that the catch campaign will go unchallenged. “Everything we’re hearing is exaggerated,” says Ioannis Batjakas, a marine scientist at the University of the Aegean on the island of Lesbos. In more than 15 years of scuba diving, he says he has only ever seen one pufferfish, although he acknowledges they are prevalent in the seas around Crete. “Yes, they have long teeth and look scary, and, yes, they can be a problem for fishers and their nets, but like most wild animals they don’t attack humans. If they do, it’s very rare and only because they’re provoked. All of this is a case of much ado about nothing.” Still, Beleyiannis remains unconvinced as he looks out at his grandchildren splashing about in the bay. “If you ask me, these barriers should be installed across Greece,” he says. “I saw two jellyfish in the water just outside it this morning. Why not pufferfish? In life, you never know what’s next.”

Israeli command system identified 850,000 targets in Gaza and Lebanon wars, says supplier

Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon with its command and control system, according to a presentation by the country’s largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems. A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all the military’s theatres of war between 7 October and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London. It describes the number of people, vehicles and other objects detected in real time for possible follow-up attack from land, sea or air, and illustrates the high intensity of the deadly wars fought by Israel over the last three years. The 850,000 total was presented at a land warfare conference organised last week by the Royal United Services Institute by Miki Edelstein, an IDF reservist major general, who is an executive vice-president of Elbit. Nato’s second most senior military commander, Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, was sitting next to him on a panel at the event. A third speaker at the session was a brigadier from the British army. Though the presence of the two senior British officers had been advertised on the agenda in advance, Edelstein was simply billed as a “speaker to be announced” until the session on “integrating novel with core capabilities” began. A slide presented by Edelstein to the largely military audience included a line describing the “high-tempo operations” run by the Israel Defense Forces, and cited more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 “R.T. [real-time] intel targets”. The targets were described by Edelstein as “an enemy that we are not aware of before”, that “pops up” from under the ground or by manoeuvre, “and we want to hit it accurately” but “don’t have enough ammunition” to do so immediately. Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon who specialised in civilian harm assessments, said he believed the 850,000 figure was highly concerning. There were 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings in Gaza before October 2023, the main theatre of war in the two years following, Bryant said, suggesting that the IDF had at one point or another targeted “up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure” of the territory. Elbit supplies the IDF’s Tzayad, or Hunter, digital army programme, a command system that maps the positions of friendly units and of those deemed to be enemies. Earlier this year, the company won a contract to further develop Tzayad, using artificial intelligence to support tactical decision-making. When contacted by the Guardian, an Elbit spokesperson denied that the 850,000 figure cited by Edelstein referred to targets, despite the slide specifying this, saying it reflected “aggregated system activity and operational data generated through the IDF’s digital army program across all operational theaters since October 7, 2023”. The spokesperson added that it demonstrated the volume of information being processed by the Israeli military: “The figures represent system activity and operational data, rather than the number of enemy targets or actual strikes.” Bryant said it was impossible for soldiers in any military to adequately assess each piece of information to conclude if the threat was real and the target legal at the volumes indicated. “I will say, definitively, that there is no way each and every one of the 1,000 targets a day – let alone 850,000 targets in aggregate – are thoroughly and effectively characterised in terms of collateral damage analysis and assessed risk to civilian populations. Even characterising 50 a day is hard enough (but possible),” the former US military officer said. Military leaders across Nato countries believe that wars between states or against near-state opponents are being conducted at a faster rate than previous counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where there was far greater time to consider the legality of targeting decisions. Israel has been engaged in a series of wars after Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 people, and has repeatedly been criticised for killing tens of thousands of civilians in high-intensity attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A UN inquiry has found Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a claim the country is fighting in international courts. According to the World Health Organization, 71,269 Palestinians were killed in Gaza to the end of last year, the IDF’s principal theatre of operation during the time referenced by Edelstein. A little over half were children, women and elderly people. A total of 3,961 were killed in Lebanon during the war in the autumn of 2024, according to the country’s ministry of public health, about a quarter of whom were women and children. The recent war of 2026 is outside the period cited. Edelstein said the Elbit-run digital army programme helped increase the speed of external fire support – extra attacks on targets confirmed by the IDF from artillery, warships or fighter jets – from “40 to 50 minutes to one to seven minutes”. A line afterwards on the Elbit slide, not directly referred to by the speaker, adds there were more than 46,000 “joint strikes and closing fire on real-time intel”, or a little over 50 a day. A “man in the loop” would decide on whether fire support missions went ahead, Edelstein said, because it was “the right thing to do”. Sophia Goodfriend, a research fellow at Cambridge University specialising in the impact of artificial intelligence on warfare, said she believed it would be very difficult for intelligence and air force units to thoroughly vet 1,000 targets a day without relying on support from artificial intelligence. “Any military would struggle to do so without outsourcing verification to other automated systems, which raises questions of accountability and concern about shrinking amounts of human oversight,” she said. While Tzayad detects possible enemy activity on the battlefield, Israel’s military also uses two other AI-powered databases, Lavender and Hasbora (or the Gospel), to increase the pace at which it can attack people and buildings, having previously run out of targets in wars in 2014 and 2021. Lavender at one stage identified 37,000 people as potential targets based on its assessment of their apparent links to Hamas. Hasbora recommended buildings to target and was able to generate 100 targets a day, according to reports in 2023. One Israeli intelligence officer said targets flagged up by Lavender were assessed by a human for “20 seconds a time” because so many had been generated by the system. Two intelligence officers said it was permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants during the early stages of the Gaza war.

Millions join funeral procession for Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei

A crowd of millions assembled on Monday for the funeral procession of Iran’s assassinated supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The scale and depth of the march, however engineered, represents an extraordinary turnaround for a country that only seven months ago was gripped by street protests at which thousands of people were killed by government security forces. Many will say the assembly was a monument to a misconceived war launched on Iran by Donald Trump in February. The throng moved from east to west, through Tehran from Revolution Square to Azadi Square, after the two-day funeral of the supreme leader and members of his family in the Grand Mosalla mosque in Tehran. The mourners wore black clothing and carried flags that bore the slogan “We will rise”; others held aloft the flag of Iran and pictures of Khamenei. The Tehran metro was packed as people attempted to join the march. They chanted: “Mourning is mourning today, mourning day is today. Martyr Khamenei is before God today.” At the funeral on Sunday, “Kill Trump” was chalked on the stage by the mourners who throughout the ceremony expressed a desire for revenge and personal grief. Khamenei was killed by Israeli bombs in February in an attempt to destabilise and ultimately topple the government. The funeral procession was expected to last between 10 and 12 hours, depending on the numbers participating. It was always likely to draw the largest crowds because only limited numbers could enter the huge Mosalla mosque at any one time. On Sunday, the entire Iranian leadership, depleted by successive Israeli assassinations, turned out for the morning prayer with the one exception of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late supreme leader and now his appointed successor. Iranian officials said Khamenei’s absence was not due to wounds sustained in Israel’s attack on the presidential building but to concerns for his safety. However, his three grieving brothers attended. In a feat of organisation by the state authorities and the volunteer civic army that fed and housed the mourners, no one was killed – unlike at previous state-linked funerals that rapidly descended into chaos, including that of the previous supreme leader. The Iranian president praised the crowds’ behaviour and expressed hope that the images emerging from Iran would force the west to reflect on its determination to change Iran. Masoud Pezeshkian said: “If I want to say something, only a few Persian speakers will understand it, but the behaviour and presence of the people are understood by the whole world.” Rejecting Trump’s claim that the grief seen at the funeral had been “fake tears”, Pezeshkian said: “This greatness, these tears that flow from the eyes of girls, men, and children, is not something that can be created by order. Tears arise from the pain and sorrow that surges within a person, and the world sees this truth.” More than 300 foreign journalists, in addition to foreign reporters based in Iran, had been granted rare visas to report on the funeral and the display of national cohesion. Pezeshkian, a reformist elected two years ago who has put emphasis on building consensus within Iran’s political elite, said: “I do not accept the interpretation of farewell. It is a covenant for continuing on the path. This is not actually a farewell but rather a pact to continue on the path. “By entering this war, the enemy disrupted the geography of the region, but in fact it strengthened the unity and cohesion among Muslims and even made the people of the world aware of its human rights claims.” The president accused Israel of perpetrating “all the crimes that are taking place in the region … with the support of the United States and European countries”.

Turkey blocks cruise ship carrying 2,000 LGBTQ+ passengers and a ‘furious’ Patti LuPone, citing ‘moral values’

A cruise ship carrying 2,000 LGBTQ+ passengers and the Broadway performer Patti LuPone has been blocked from entering Turkey after local authorities said their behaviour didn’t “align with the structure of our society and our moral values”. Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady set sail from Athens, Greece, on 5 July for what was billed as “an epic all-gay voyage” over 10 days run by Atlantis, a US company that puts on cruises and vacations for LGBTQ+ people. The Scarlet Lady was expected to dock in the Turkish port town of Kuşadası on 7 July, followed by a trip to Istanbul. But authorities in Turkey’s Aydin province, where Kuşadası is, published a statement online saying the cruise was chartered “by groups known for behaviours that do not align with the structure of our society and our moral values”. The ship’s arrival had been “cancelled” after it “sparked significant public concern”, they added: “There is absolutely no possibility of the group in question visiting our province for an event of this nature.” Atlantis has docked gay cruises in Istanbul and Kuşadası 13 times in the last 25 years, Rich Campbell, the president and chief executive of Atlantis Events, told USA Today. LuPone, the 77-year-old Tony award winner who is performing on the ship, took to Instagram to share her shock regarding the news on Saturday. “The Atlantis cruise I am performing on next week has been banned from entering Turkey,” she wrote. “A ship – a magnificent ship – full of gay men. And me. Denied entry to Turkey simply because of who is on board. “I am furious, but I am sailing, as the ship will make other ports of call. I am ready to perform for all the wonderful men on this Atlantis cruise, who deserve so much better than this.” Campbell told CNN he was shocked by the decision and said it was the first time Atlantis had been “actively told we may not berth here because of who we are” in its 36-year history. “It’s pretty stunning, to be honest,” he said. “I mean, and the reasoning behind it is that it’s a gay group. It’s very concerning to me when a country decides they can pick and choose which tourists are allowed in and which are not.” He told USA Today that the company had not been able “to get the Turkish authorities to move”, despite extensive calls with the US embassy in Turkey. “When we pull into port, the ship looks like any other ship,” he said. “It’s not like we’re not a gay pride rally, we’re not a march, we’re not an organisation, we’re not a political statement in any way. The cruise was advertised a year ago, it’s not new.” The ship will now stop in Cairo and Crete instead of Turkey. Representatives of the Turkish government have yet to comment on the matter. Homosexuality is not criminalised in Turkey but homophobia is widespread. It reaches even the highest levels of government, with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, regularly describing LGBTQ+ people as “perverts” and a threat to the traditional family. Istanbul Pride was once a lively affair with thousands of marchers but it has been banned each year since 2015 by Turkey’s ruling conservative government. In 2000 the then tourism minister apologised after police prevented more than 800 gay tourists on a cruise liner from entering Kuşadası and the nearby Roman ruins at Ephesus. “I hope they will complete their trip without any problems,” Erkan Mumcu said. “We cannot discriminate according to people’s sexual preference.”