disputes

A China Coast Guard vessel has fired its water cannon at Philippine government boats near Scarborough Shoal, the latest in a series of confrontations in the disputed South China Sea.

The incident adds to concern that Moscow’s war on Ukraine risks spilling over to entangle neighbouring NATO states.

A Romanian fighter jet has shot down a drone, suspected to be Russian, that breached the country’s airspace.

The incident on Friday marked the first time the Eastern European country has intercepted an intruding aircraft since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, President Nicusor Dan noted.

However, concern that Moscow’s war on Ukraine risks entangling neighbouring NATO states is on the rise. Romania is one of several alliance members to confront repeated stray drones recently, as Russia and Ukraine launch hundreds of drones daily.

Dan reported that a Romanian F-16 jet shot down the drone after it entered the country’s airspace, adding that the fighter had shot over an uninhabited area.

A Romanian military source told the Reuters news agency that Russia was the suspected point of origin, given the pattern of previous incursions in the region.

Romania’s Ministry of National Defence said a radar first detected the drone about 20km (12 miles) east of the Black Sea port of Sulina, before it crossed into national airspace on a path through Braila, Fetesti and Buzau county.

Two Italian Eurofighter Typhoon jets, deployed to Romania under NATO’s air policing mission, were joined by two Romanian F-16s. One F-16 engaged the target with an air-to-air missile, downing it over unpopulated ground near the village of Padina. No casualties or injuries were reported.

Romania, an EU and NATO member sharing a border with Ukraine, has recorded dozens of drone incursions since the war began. This incident marked the first successful interception.

In late May, a drone struck an apartment building in the city of Galati, injuring two people – the first time such a strike hit a populated area in a NATO country.

NATO and European Union officials condemned the incident. The European Commission said it showed Russia’s war had “crossed yet another line”.

A month later, a Ukrainian sea drone exploded at the port of Constanta. Kyiv said that it had launched the vessel, which had been knocked off course by Russian jamming.

The Baltic states have also reported repeated airspace violations in recent months, incursions that contributed to the collapse of Latvia’s government in May.

NATO chief Mark Rutte has said Moscow’s “reckless behaviour is a danger to us all”. United States ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, has pledged the alliance will “defend every inch” of its territory.

Thousands of people who travel every day between the southern tip of Spain and the British territory of Gibraltar will no longer have to cross a physical border from Wednesday.

This came after the European Union and United Kingdom on Tuesday signed a treaty that delivers “economic and trade certainty for the people and businesses of Gibraltar, safeguards British sovereignty and protects the autonomous operation of UK military facilities”.

The treaty was signed in Brussels by the European Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, British Minister of State for Europe Stephen Doughty, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares and Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo.

“Gibraltar was left out of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement following Brexit, creating the prospect of a devastating ‘hard border’ for the 15,000 people – more than half of Gibraltar’s workforce – who cross the land border between Spain and Gibraltar every day,” the treaty said.

Here’s what we know about the treaty:

What does the treaty include?

Britain secured Gibraltar, a strategically important enclave at the southern tip of Spain, in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession.

The contested British overseas territory of 38,000 people is perched at a strategic location, only 8 nautical miles (15km) from Morocco where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea.

The new agreement allows residents of Gibraltar to cross into Spain using residence cards without needing to have their passports stamped. In return, Spanish citizens will be allowed to enter Gibraltar using a government ID card.

The treaty in effect brings Gibraltar into the EU’s Schengen free-travel area, which allows people from 29 countries to move among them freely without needing visas.

At Gibraltar’s airport and port, entry and exit checks will be conducted by both British and Spanish border officials. The arrangement is similar to what’s in place at Eurostar train stations in London and Paris, where both British and French officials check passports.

Travellers to Gibraltar from countries outside the Schengen area, including the UK, will have to contend with the EU Entry/Exit System, which was rolled out in Europe in April and replaced passport stamps with biometric data collected through photographs and digital fingerprints.

Under the older system, every person had to face two border checks, one by Gibraltarian border agents and the other by Spanish officials when entering or exiting the Schengen area. The checks caused long queues, heavily impacting the workers who made the crossing daily.

The British government said the agreement brings “fluidity for people and goods crossing the Gibraltar-Spain border to support economic growth and jobs in the region”.

What was the motivation behind the treaty, and how does Brexit feature in it?

In a 2016 referendum in which UK voters approved leaving the EU, 96 percent of voters on “the Rock”, as Gibraltar is popularly known in English, supported remaining in the bloc.

When Britain eventually left the EU in 2020, the relationship between Gibraltar and the bloc was left unresolved. Previous talks on a deal to ensure people and goods could keep flowing across the border had made halting progress.

While the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which came into force in 2021, broadly covered relations between the bloc and Britain, it was decided that Gibraltar would be addressed in separate negotiations because of its unique situation because it’s not in the EU customs union or the Schengen area.

In 2025, the EU and UK announced an agreement on those issues after more than three and a half years of negotiations.

Does the treaty place Gibraltar in a special position, and do any other British overseas territories have the same privileges?

Yes, Gibraltar is in a unique position because it has now gained EU privileges without being an actual EU member.

Still, it is under British sovereignty, and the treaty solely seeks to resolve post-Brexit cooperation with the EU and border management due to its open land border with the EU.

None of Britain’s other overseas territories, which include 14 territories scattered across the Caribbean and the Antarctic, has a deal similar to Gibraltar’s due to the shared land border.

Some of the territories have international arrangements, including Bermuda, which has its own immigration and tax systems, and the Falkland Islands, which govern themselves.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Two roadside bomb blasts in northwestern Pakistan have killed at least seven people.

The first explosion on Saturday hit a vehicle, and the second was detonated as rescuers responded, police said.

“A private pick-up truck carrying passengers was targeted with a remote-controlled IED,” said Yasir Afridi, a police officer in Bannu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan, using a common acronym for a homemade bomb.

“The injured were being transported to hospital in a car for emergency treatment when a second IED exploded,” he said, adding that three people were wounded.

Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack and said the government would bring those responsible to justice.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the blast, but the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, and other armed groups operate in the area.

Pakistan has blamed Afghanistan for a surge in attacks near the border, although the Taliban government in Kabul has repeatedly denied Pakistani accusations that Afghan territory is used as a sanctuary for armed groups.

Frosty relations have escalated into clashes in recent months, including Pakistani air strikes on Afghan cities.

Pakistani air strikes near the border this month killed at least 26 Taliban fighters, the Pakistani government said, while the Afghan government said 12 civilians were killed.

The border has remained largely closed since violence escalated in October, freezing bilateral trade and disrupting the movement of people and goods.

Preah Vihear/Siem Reap provinces – When asked how she spends her day, 11-year-old Sokna rattled off a list of chores.

She first fetches water, then washes dishes and sweeps the leaves and dust from around the blue tarpaulin tent her family now calls home, in the grounds of a Buddhist pagoda in northwestern Cambodia.

Sokna and her sister have stopped attending school, their mother Puth Reen said, since moving to this camp for people displaced by the recent rounds of fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.

The two sisters are among more than 34,440 people who remain in displacement camps in Cambodia – 11,355 of whom are children – as of this month, according to the country’s Ministry of Interior.

“I tried to tell them to go to school, but they don’t go,” Puth Reen told Al Jazeera, explaining how precarious life had become since returning to live in Cambodia after fleeing neighbouring Thailand, where she had worked for many years, as the fighting started.

Like Puth Reen and her family, the future looks murky for the tens of thousands of Cambodians – including many schoolchildren – who are still in displacement camps, and their lives remain disrupted months after the last outbreak of fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.

Forced to flee their homes in areas where local troops are now stationed and on high alert, or in areas occupied by opposing Thai forces, Cambodia’s internally displaced say they are surviving off aid donations, while those more fortunate are transitioning from emergency tents into wooden stilted houses provided by the Cambodian government.

But with tension still evident between the leadership in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, the tenuous ceasefire along the Thai-Cambodia border means life cannot yet return to normality.

Some areas on the Cambodian border, such as the villages of Chouk Chey and Prey Chan in Banteay Meanchey province, have become rallying points for nationalists who post on social media about the Thai occupation of Cambodian territory. Their anger is directed at the large shipping containers and barbed wire that Thai forces have used to block access to villages once inhabited by Cambodians and occupied during fighting.

The Thai military-installed containers now form a sort of new frontier between the two countries.

The Cambodian military has also prevented people, such as local farmer Sun Reth, 67, from returning to their homes in front-line areas, which are still highly militarised zones, with troops ready at any moment for a new round of fighting.

“Now the Cambodian military base is just next to [my house],” Sun Reth said, adding that she was not allowed by authorities to sleep in her modest home or pick cashew nuts from her farm to sell for a little income.

Cambodian children more focused on ‘rumours’ of war

The long-held border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia erupted into two rounds of conflict last year, over five days in July and almost three weeks in December.

Dozens were reported killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes as both countries’ armed forces fired artillery, rockets, and, in the case of Thailand, conducted air strikes deep into Cambodian territory. Thailand has a modern air force, a military capability not possessed by its smaller neighbour.

Cambodian and Thai officials reached a ceasefire on December 27, but the situation remains tense five months on.

For families who fled the fighting, school continues for most children in the displacement camps, but parents say education is fragmented while their lives are still so unsettled.

Mothers at the Wat Bak Kam camp for the displaced in Preah Vihear province told Al Jazeera that primary school students can join classes at a local school, but high school students need to travel daily to the provincial capital, about 15km (9 miles) away.

Now the rising cost of petrol, due to the US-Israel war on Iran, has made it even harder for teenaged students, who have access to motorcycles, to make the journey to school.

Kinmai Phum, technical lead for WorldVision’s education programme, which is providing support to the camps, said school dropout rates and children skipping classes have increased substantially among students from the displaced border regions.

Kinmai Phum said the situation is a perfect storm of problems: Displaced families have been forced to move around for shelters, schools and temporary learning spaces lack facilities, and some students have psychological trauma due to the conflict.

“Local authorities [are] concerned that many children may not return to school at all if displacement and economic hardship persist,” Kinmai Phum said.

Yuon Phally, a mother of two, said she had noticed the impact of the war on her daughter and son, who are in their first and third years in primary school.

When they return from school, Yuon Phally said, they tell her about rumours they had heard about Cambodia and Thailand resuming fighting.

“Their feeling is not fully focused on school; they focus more on these rumours,” she said.

Her children’s world was more impacted by the conflict because their father is a soldier stationed in the Mom Bei area of the border.

During the fighting in December, Yuon Phally said she could not convince her children to go to school because they all waited to see if their father would call on a mobile phone from the front line.

“I couldn’t hold back my tears, and that added more pressure onto my kids,” she said.

“They would ask about their dad and how he is doing now. Then they told me to eat rice. They understood my feelings.”

She said her children’s focus on their studies only improved after their father returned from fighting to the camp where they are staying, to rest and recover from sickness and injuries sustained in battle.

‘Who doesn’t want to have peace?’

Soeum Sokhem, a deputy village chief, told Al Jazeera how his home is located in the militarised “danger zone” along the border, but he feels compelled to return every few days to check on his house, tend crops, sleep an occasional night, and check in with other neighbours doing the same.

“I can’t just stay here”, he said of camp life.

“I have to go back.”

When asked how he felt about the border war, Soeum Sokhem said he had experienced so much war in Cambodia that he did not know how to describe his “inner feeling like I really want to”.

He then listed off all the conflicts he had lived through in Cambodia since the 1960s: The spill over into Cambodia from the US war in neighbouring Vietnam; the US bombing campaign in Cambodia; the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and the civil war that followed after Vietnam’s intervention to topple the regime’s leader Pol Pot in 1979, and which lasted until the mid-1990s.

Then in the 2000s, sporadic border fights with Thailand began, he said.

Cambodia’s contemporary history has been anything but peaceful, a fact which might explain why the current Cambodian government so often speaks of peace. Government buildings and billboards proclaim the government’s unofficial motto: “Thanks for peace.”

“But who doesn’t want to have peace?” Soeum Sokhem said, after charting his life and the many conflicts he had lived through.

Now the 67-year-old said he once again hears gunfire occasionally when he returns to check on his home on the front line.

“Before, when I walked there, it was normal,” he said.

“But nowadays, I walk with fear when going back there.”