Israel flew eight strikes against the runway and storage buildings at the Abu al-Duhur base in Idlib, hours after a Turkish delegation had left the site. Netanyahu's office says the raid was meant to stop a Turkish troop deployment; Ankara calls the claim baseless and says it serves Netanyahu's expansionist policy before the Israeli election. The US envoy for Syria called the strike an unnecessary escalation.
US Syria envoy Tom Barrack says Washington is working on a mechanism to keep the three countries from colliding, after Türkiye was given no warning of the Abu al-Duhur strike and watched Israeli aircraft move north towards its own airspace. Barrack argues such a channel costs far less than letting the militaries communicate by weapon.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Öncü Keçeli says the Special Spatial Framework for Renewable Energy Sources that Greece announced on 19 August, covering the Aegean, will carry no legal consequences for Türkiye. Ankara repeats that unilateral moves should be avoided in enclosed and semi-enclosed seas, and points back to the Athens Declaration on good-neighbourly relations.
Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa say the International Criminal Court's officials must be able to work without outside pressure, after Marco Rubio sanctioned its president Tomoko Akane and a lawyer in the prosecutor's office. Rubio calls the court corrupt and politicised. The Netherlands and Germany condemned the move as well, and all 27 member states have joined the court.
The movement that demonstrated for a month for dismissed defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has broken up after he demanded a presidential election under martial law. Organiser Dmytro Koziatynskyi says soldiers at the front could not vote and that the protests were about defence policy, not Fedorov's own career. Ukrainian law allows elections to be postponed while martial law holds.
Germany's federal prosecutors say a Ukrainian national, a trained diver, has been arrested in Pula on a European arrest warrant and will be extradited. He is alleged to have been part of the group that attached explosives to Nord Stream 1 and 2 off Bornholm in September 2022. Charges were brought last month against a former Ukrainian officer in the same case.
A three-page questionnaire obtained by Al Jazeera asks allies whether they have publicly backed American foreign policy priorities and whether they restricted US base access or overflight. The document is circulating during the six-month review of American forces in Europe due to conclude in December. NATO officials object that it conflates the alliance's collective defence with US operations in the Middle East.
Forensic teams have excavated three suspected mass graves in northern Kosovo and found skeletal remains of at least 23 people. They are believed to be Kosovo Albanians taken from Mitrovica and executed in the spring of 1999. The DNA work is expected to take months; about 1,600 people are still missing from the 1998 to 1999 war, and three local men have been arrested.
The president wrote on Truth Social that he is launching the most crushing economic operation ever mounted against any country, after talks with Tehran broke down, and warned that any state letting its banks, businesses or airports give Iran a lifeline will be hit itself. Iranian state media say the threat repeats sanctions Tehran has already learned to work around. Analysts point to Chinese banks as Washington's real leverage, with Iraq and Türkiye harder targets.
Abu Dhabi announced that all trade, commercial exchange and financial transactions with Iran would stop until further notice, after what it says were two Iranian ballistic missiles fired towards the country on 18 August. Tehran denies that Emirati territory was the target and says it struck ships instead. The Emirates have long been one of the main trade routes into the sanctioned Iranian economy.
Trump announced on social media that joint exercises with South Korea will be cut back sharply because they send an inappropriate and hostile signal to North Korea, adding that Seoul had declined to join the war against Iran. The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise was shortened from eleven days to five. South Korean officials say they learned of it from a post rather than through diplomatic channels, and the debate over a national nuclear weapon has revived.
Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson says he wants to aim for the prime minister's job in 2030 or later, and that the party stands behind Ulf Kristersson as the right bloc's candidate on 13 September in return for real influence and senior ministries, particularly migration and integration. A Verian poll on 19 August gives the government side 43.9 percent against the opposition's 53.9.