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Eight areas in Spain remain under lockdown as Storm Adam continues to wreak havoc

Eight areas in Spain remain under lockdown after restrictions were lifted for some 137 municipalities earlier on Monday, October 19.

Large swathes of the country were ordered to stay indoors as Storm Adam wreaked catastrophic havoc across eastern Spain. Initially, the emergency lockdown covered 78 municipalities in Valencia province and 67 in Alicante. However, according to the Olive Press: “Restrictions have ended for 137 of 145 municipalities, but eight towns in La Safor and La Marina Alta remain under lockdown.

“Please be aware that the following areas are still confined: Bellreguard, Daimús, Oliva, Xàbia, Pego, Miramar, Piles, and Els Poblets. Stay safe and always check local guidelines before travelling through these areas.”

Two fatalities have been confirmed, with a third potential victim of the storm discovered on Monday afternoon when Military Emergency Unit (UME) personnel uncovered the body of an elderly woman in her flood-ravaged home in Oliva, Valencia province. Authorities are yet to officially confirm whether the death was a direct result of drowning or natural causes.

According to the Majorca Daily Bulletin, rainfall totals surpassed 600 litres per square metre, rivers burst their banks and residents were left stranded on rooftops. Helicopters were deployed to rescue those trapped as torrential downpours swept through eastern Spain on Monday, triggering devastating floods that claimed at least two lives and prompted authorities to issue shelter-in-place orders for more than 800,000 residents.

In the past three years, following the October 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the wider region has been marked by conflict, economic turmoil, and a shattering of the balance of power.

The network of alliances maintained by Iran, long central to its regional power, has been hit hard and severely weakened. Yemen’s Houthi rebels remain one notable exception.

Israel has made gains. Many of the leaders of the Lebanese group Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas have been killed, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was also assassinated in February. Israel occupies most of Gaza, where it has also killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the enclave to rubble.

Its military aggression has come at a cost, isolating it from its traditional allies and making it globally unpopular, including in the United States. The potential for more normalisation deals with Arab countries seems unlikely, at least in the short term.

Instead, Israel continues to launch attacks across the region, crossing previously held red lines – such as the 2025 attack on Doha, Qatar – and making many governments around the world view it as the primary source of unrest in the Middle East.

US not a protector

“Before October 7, the US’s entire policy in the Middle East rested on normalising Israel’s presence in the region through its so-called Abraham Accords,” HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute said, referring to the normalisation deals with several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates. “Israel’s response to the October 7 attack ended that.”

Instead, rather than a stable Middle East with Israel at its centre, the US entered into a war with Iran this year, and has since looked on as Tehran targeted US allies across the Gulf, shattering the perceived security of the US security umbrella.

Drones and missiles hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas hub and started fires near Dubai airport and at Fujairah’s oil zone. In September, the Houthis surged down Yemen’s Red Sea coast, taking the port of Mocha and nearby islands. Their gains tightened their grip on the Bab al-Mandeb strait, threatening a key route for global trade and energy supplies that had become even more important amid disruption in the Strait of Hormuz.

“There’s been a loss of faith in the US as a singularly sufficient security guarantor,” Hellyer continued.

“This is why you’re seeing many in the region talk to other external actors, in addition to continuing, and in some cases deepening their US ties, as well as initiatives such as the Mecca security pact as states in the region look elsewhere for ways to safeguard their security,” he said, referring to the defence agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan, signed in August, agreeing that an attack on one was to be regarded as an attack on all.

Alliances

Alongside the loss of confidence in the US as a security guarantor has come a dramatic reordering of alliances and rivalries. Much of Iran’s network – most notably Hezbollah, whose reputation had long served as a deterrent against Israeli attack – appeared to buckle under Israeli pressure.

That, in turn, emboldened an Israeli military push that saw troops invade Lebanon in October 2024 and again in March 2026, and seize Syrian territory during the brief power vacuum that followed Bashar al-Assad’s ouster in 2024.

“The Middle East has always been multi-aligned. However, now it’s even more so,” Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, said of the increased leverage given to external actors, such as Turkiye in Syria and China’s involvement in negotiations over the end to war on Iran, as Beijing finds its own energy supplies under threat.

“It’s ironic, since October 7, it’s Israel that has emerged as the revisionist power and Iran almost as the status quo power,” she said of the apparent reversal in status of the two belligerents, with Tehran seemingly more focused on regaining the ground it has lost in the last three years rather than advancing beyond them.

However, none of this was to overstate Israeli influence, or liken it to a regional superpower, Vakil cautioned. “Israel may currently be the preponderant military power in the Middle East, but real power is typically classed as being able to project stability, which Israel hasn’t shown itself able or willing to do,” she said.

Clogged arteries

While Israel and the US hoped February’s attacks would swiftly topple Iran’s government, they have instead opened a new front. Tehran now wields economic leverage over Israel, the US and their partners through the Strait of Hormuz, which borders Iran and typically carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, and through Bab al-Mandeb, which is now threatened by its Houthi allies.

Whatever Tehran’s intentions, the economic pain has been uneven. The West, cushioned by emergency reserves, record US oil production and supplies from countries such as Norway, has so far avoided the turmoil of the 1970s oil shocks, when US drivers queued for petrol, even though the current disruption is on a greater scale. In April, the International Monetary Fund trimmed its 2026 global growth forecast only slightly, to 3.1 percent from 3.3 percent.

Gulf exporters, in contrast, have fared far worse. The same assessment cut its forecast for Saudi Arabia from 4.5 to 3.1 percent, and turned Qatar’s from growth of 6.1 percent into a contraction of 8.6 percent.

“It’s curious, in many ways the West’s reduced need for Gulf oil has increased the degree to which Israel has become a liability for the US,” Israeli political economist Shir Hever told Al Jazeera, referring to a diplomatic alliance between the two states long underpinned by Israel’s strategic position in an oil-rich region central to US interests.

“There’s a train of thought in Israel that the current crises may push the Gulf states into allying with it,” he said, while noting the irony that Israel had been the main aggressor in the conflicts that followed October 7. “Though that seems fairly unlikely.”

WASHINGTON — For the third time this month, the Supreme Court has rejected Missouri’s bid for one more Republican-leaning congressional district.

With no dissents, the justices upheld a state court order requiring the use of a 2022 election map, which favors Republicans in six of the eight districts.

“At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos,” the justices wrote.

The GOP, with the backing of conservative federal judges, wanted to use a new 2025 election map that redrew the district in Kansas City that had elected a Black Democrat.

That would have given Republicans a 7-1 advantage, but the Supreme Court stood in the way.

“As a matter of state law, the 2022 map — not the 2025 map — must be used in the 2026 congressional election,” the justices said in an unsigned opinion. “This Court has repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not ‘alter the election rules of a state on the eve of an election.”

Each side in this messy dispute accused the other of seeking to change the voting districts on the eve of the election.

On Tuesday, the opponents of the newly drawn GOP-friendly map appealed to the Supreme Court for the third time. They said it is too late to switch the districts because ballots had gone out based on the existing map.

They said the Republicans “demand a new map after votes have already been cast. Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed, and absentee voting, both by mail and in-person, began today.”

But the state’s Republican attorneys said the primary elections took place under the new 2025 map, and that argues for keeping those districts in place for the general election in November.

Last September, the Missouri General Assembly, following President Trump’s lead, voted to redraw its eight congressional districts. In recent years, the state had sent six Republicans and two Democrats to Congress.

The Legislature’s goal was to flip one more seat in favor of Republicans. The new map would do that by breaking up the Kansas City district that had elected Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Black Democrat, with a new district that favored a Republican.

But a group called People Not Politicians and its executive director, Richard von Glahn, gathered more than 300,000 signatures for a referendum to challenge the new law before it took effect.

After waiting nine months to respond, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, denied the referendum in early August on the same day the primary elections got underway.

Von Glahn and his group of voters sued and won a unanimous decision from the Missouri Supreme Court on Sept. 3. Its judges said the state Constitution authorizes such a referendum and a new election map cannot take effect until the voters have spoken.

Hoskins filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court and cited the “chaotic fallout” from the state court “irresponsible decision.”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who oversees appeals from the 8th Circuit Court based in St. Louis, denied the appeal without comment on Sept. 8.

But shortly after his decision was issued, U.S. District Judge Stephen R. Clark, a Trump appointee, issued a temporary restraining order that prohibited the state from using the any voting map other than the new one.

People not Politicians appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

On Sept. 10, Kavanaugh and the full court granted the appeal and blocked the judge’s order from taking effect.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, but the meaning of the order was clear. The state Supreme Court ruling meant the new map could not be used for this year’s election.

But that did not stop the 8th Circuit Court from ruling the state must use the new map.

Siding with several Republican candidates, a 2-1 majority said the use of 2022 map was unconstitutional because the primary elections were held under the new map. Its decision ordered the elections to be held using the new map.

This was a surprising ruling, since the Supreme Court’s order on Sept. 10 barred judges in Missouri from intervening further in the dispute over the voting maps.

But after a third trip to the court, the justices said the state must use the 2022 map.