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Asfura says he is ready to govern after narrow vote as the US urges ‘all parties to respect the confirmed results’.

Nasry Asfura, a conservative candidate backed by United States President Donald Trump, has won the closely contested presidential elections in Honduras, the country’s election council has said.

The final results, announced on Wednesday – more than 20 days after the vote took place – are likely to lead to challenges in the Central American nation.

According to the electoral authority, known as the CNE, Asfura won 40.3 percent of the vote, edging out centre-right Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, who received 39.5 percent.

In a brief social media post, Asfura thanked the CNE on Wednesday. “Honduras: I am prepared to govern. I will not fail you,” he wrote.

Trump had come out strongly in support of Asfura, attacking Nasralla and left-wing candidate Rixi Moncada, who ended up garnering less than 20 percent of the votes.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quick to congratulate Asfura on Wednesday, saying that Washington looks forward to working with him.

“The people of Honduras have spoken: Nasry Asfura is Honduras’ next president,” Rubio wrote in a social media post.

In a separate statement, Rubio urged “all parties to respect the confirmed results” of the elections.

Earlier this month, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez – a member of Asfura’s National Party – who was serving a lengthy prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking.

Asfura, the former mayor of Honduras’s capital, Tegucigalpa, is of Palestinian descent. But his National Party is staunchly pro-Israel.

Under Hernandez in 2021, Honduras became only the fourth country to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in breach of international law. Asfura has also aligned himself with Trump and other right-wing leaders in the Americas, including Argentina’s Javier Milei.

The Argentinian president hailed Honduras’s election results on Wednesday, calling it a victory against “narcosocialism”, although the National Party’s Hernandez is a convicted drug trafficker.

“The Honduran people expressed themselves with courage at the ballot boxes and chose to end years of authoritarianism and decay,” Milei wrote in a social media post.

“From Argentina, we celebrate the triumph of freedom and reaffirm our commitment to democracy, the popular will, and the unrestricted respect for institutions in the region.”

Asfura’s victory marks another win for right-wing candidates in Latin America over the past year. Chile and Bolivia have also elected ultraconservative presidents in 2025, and last year, El Salvador’s right-wing leader Nayib Bukele comfortably won re-election.

The results appear to reverse the “Pink Tide” – the wave of left-wing leaders who rose to power in the region in the early 2020s.

The rise of right-wing governments in the region coincides with a US pressure campaign against Venezuela’s left-wing President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump has imposed an oil blockade on Venezuela and amassed US troops and military assets near the country.

Authorities board vessel off Swedish coast after it suffered an engine failure.

Sweden’s customs service has said that authorities boarded a Russian freighter that anchored in Swedish waters on Friday after developing engine problems, and were conducting an inspection of the cargo.

The owners of the vessel, the Adler, are on the European Union’s sanctions list, Martin Hoglund, spokesman at the customs authority, said on Sunday.

“Shortly after 0100 (00:00 GMT) last night we boarded the ship with support from the Swedish Coast Guard and the police service in order to make a customs inspection,” Hoglund said. “The inspection is still ongoing.”

Hoglund declined to say what the customs service had found on board the ship.

According to ship-tracking service Marine Traffic, the Adler is a 126-metre-long, roll-on, roll-off container carrier. It is anchored off Hoganas in southwest Sweden.

EU and US sanctions

In addition to the Adler being on an EU sanctions list, the vessel and its owners, M Leasing LLC, are also both subject to US sanctions, suspected of involvement in weapons transport, according to OpenSanctions, a database of sanctioned companies and individuals, persons of interest and government watchlists.

Hoglund said the ship had left the Russian port of St Petersburg on December 15, but he said customs did not have any information about its destination.

The night-time operation was led by the Swedish Customs Administration along with the coastguard, National Task Force, Swedish Security Service and prosecutors.

In a previous incident, the Adler was boarded by Greek forces in the Mediterranean in January 2021. The operation was carried out under the auspices of the EU’s Operation Irini, which monitors the United Nations arms embargo on Libya.

Authorities in Gaza have warned that stormy weather could spur more war-damaged buildings to collapse and heavy rains are making it more difficult to recover bodies still under the rubble.

Authorities sounded the alarm on Monday, three days after two buildings collapsed in Gaza, killing at least 12 people, during winter rains that have also washed away and flooded the tents of displaced Palestinians and led to deaths from exposure.

A ceasefire has been in effect since October 10 after two years of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, but humanitarian agencies said Israel is letting very little aid into the enclave, where nearly the entire population has been displaced.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abou Azzoum said despite a shortage of equipment and fuel and the weather conditions in the enclave, Palestinian Civil Defence teams retrieved the bodies of 20 people on Monday.

The bodies were recovered from a multistorey building bombed in December 2023 where about 60 people, including 30 children, were believed to be sheltering.

Gaza Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal called on the international community to provide mobile homes and caravans for displaced Palestinians rather than tents.

“If people are not protected today, we will witness more victims, more killing of people, children, women, entire families inside these buildings,” he said.

Father mourns children killed in building collapse

Mohammad Nassar and his family were living in a six-storey building that was badly damaged by Israeli strikes earlier in the war and collapsed in heavy rain on Friday.

His family had struggled to find alternative accommodation and had been flooded out while living in a tent during a previous bout of bad weather. Nassar went out to buy some necessities on Friday and returned to a scene of carnage as rescue workers struggled to pull bodies from the rubble.

“I saw my son’s hand sticking out from under the ground. It was the scene that affected me the most. My son under the ground and we are unable to get him out,” Nassar said. His son, 15, died as did a daughter, aged 18.

Exposure warning

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Monday that more aid must be allowed into Gaza without delay to prevent putting more displaced families at serious risk.

“With heavy rain and cold brought in by Storm Byron [late last week], people in the Gaza Strip are freezing to death,” UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.

“The waterlogged ruins where they are sheltering are collapsing, causing even more exposure to cold,” he added.

Lazzarini said UNRWA has supplies that have waited for months to enter Gaza that he said would cover the needs of hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s more than two million people.

UN and Palestinian officials said at least 300,000 new tents are urgently needed for the roughly 1.5 million people still displaced. Most existing shelters are worn out or made of thin plastic and cloth sheeting.

Gaza authorities, meanwhile, were still digging to recover about 9,000 bodies they estimated remain buried in rubble from Israeli bombing during the war, but the lack of machinery is slowing down the process, spokesman Ismail al-Thawabta said.

Azzoum reported that Civil Defence teams said they require a surge in heavy machinery to expedite the work.

“They are saying that they are still in need, initially, for 40 excavators and bulldozers in order to achieve some slight progress in the whole process on the ground,” Azzoum said, reporting from Gaza City.

Israel’s continuing ban on the entry of heavy machinery into the Gaza Strip is a violation of the ceasefire, he added.

Earlier on Sunday, Hamas said Israel’s continuing violations of the ceasefire risk jeopardising the agreement and progress towards the next stage of United States President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war.

Since the ceasefire began, Israel has continued to strike Gaza on a daily basis, carrying out nearly 800 attacks and killing nearly 400 people, according to authorities in Gaza, while blocking the free flow of humanitarian aid.

“There is no real sense of safety nor protection for families,” Azzoum said of the ongoing violations.