Typhoon Yagi, Asia’s most powerful storm this year, was downgraded to a tropical depression on Sunday, after wreaking havoc in northern Vietnam, China’s Hainan and the Philippines, claiming dozens of lives, according to preliminary reports.

Vietnam’s meteorological agency issued the downgrade on Sunday but cautioned about the ongoing risk of flooding and landslides as the storm, the strongest to hit the country in decades, moves westwards.

On Saturday, Yagi disrupted power supplies and telecommunications in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, causing extensive flooding, felling thousands of trees and damaging homes.

The government said the storm has led to at least three deaths in Hanoi, a city of 8.5 million, with these figures being preliminary. Fourteen people have died in Vietnam so far, according to reports, including four from a landslide in the province of Hoa Binh, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Hanoi.

A 53-year-old motorcyclist was killed after a tree fell on him in the northern Hai Duong province, state media reported. At least one body was recovered from the sea near the coastal city of Halong, where a dozen people were missing at sea, with rescue operations expected to start on Sunday when conditions allow.

Yagi has claimed the lives of four people on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, according to the latest update from local authorities. The civil defense office in the Philippines, the first country Yagi hit after forming last week, raised the death toll there on Sunday to 20 from 16 and said 22 people remained missing.

Risk of flash floods

After it made landfall in Vietnam on Saturday afternoon, Yagi triggered waves as high as 4 meters (13 feet) in coastal provinces, leading to extended power and telecommunication outages that have complicated damage assessment, the government said.

The meteorological agency warned of continued “risk of flash floods near small rivers and streams, and landslides on steep slopes in many places in the northern mountainous areas” and the coastal province of Thanh Hoa.

Relative calm returned on Sunday morning to Hanoi, where authorities rushed to clean up streets from toppled trees scattered across the city center and other neighborhoods.

“The storm has devastated the city. Trees fell down on top of people’s houses, cars and people on the street,” said 57-year-old Hanoi resident Hoang Ngoc Nhien.

Hanoi’s Noi Bai international airport, the busiest in northern Vietnam, reopened on Sunday after closing on Saturday morning.

In Hainan, preliminary estimates suggested significant economic losses and widespread power outages, according to emergency response authorities cited by state-run Hainan Daily.

Residents of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, are taking stock after nine days of what they say has been the most intense and sustained Israeli military operation in their city since October 7.

Witnesses describe it as a Gaza-style campaign, with widespread destruction of infrastructure, severed water and electricity supplies, and people rationing food for fear of going outside. It has been the deadliest period in the West Bank since November, according to the UN.

The military withdrew from Jenin and Tulkarem on Friday, according to residents. But an Israeli security source said that “the overall operation in Jenin is not over, it is only a pause.”

Though the war in Gaza has attracted most attention, Israel’s military has persistently and increasingly brought unsparing military tactics to the West Bank.

Israel’s security forces on August 28 launched what they dubbed a “counterterrorism operation” in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, in the northern West Bank. It has come to be known as Operation Summer Camps.

“We will not let terrorism in Judea and Samaria raise its head,” the head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said during a visit to Jenin over the weekend, using the biblical names for the West Bank commonly used in Israel.

Residents say Jenin has been left transformed and scarred.

“It felt like Gaza,” 36-year-old Lina Al Amouri said by telephone from Jenin. She and her husband fled several days into the IDF incursion, but went back when they heard rumors that the operation had quieted.

“When we returned yesterday, we saw that all the streets were destroyed,” she said. “Soldiers were everywhere, continuing to bulldoze everything around them, not just the streets.”

“We heard many gunshots, and then we received news that my mother-in-law’s nephew had been shot seven times near the camp. They let him bleed until he died and prevented ambulances from reaching him.”

The IDF has previously said that it often must impede ambulances to check for militants.

Eight children killed

Nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah and the UN, whose figures do not distinguish between militants and civilians.

Since the Israeli operation began last Wednesday, 39 Palestinians have been killed, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah reported. Among them were at least nine militants, according to public statements from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Eight children have also been killed according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

He left home on Friday to get food and attend Friday prayers. On his way back, Arafat said, he was gunned down in the street, where he lay for hours as he bled out.

The Israeli military has severely restricted access to the city since its operation began, so international media have had to rely on residents, local journalists, and social media video for independent information about the operation.

Journalists this week said that they were fired on by the Israeli military during a raid in Kafr Dan, near Jenin. Mohammed Mansour, a journalist for WAFA, was injured when the car he was driving was struck by gunfire, according to video of the aftermath and his employer.

Armored bulldozers also daily used heavy duty plows to tear up roads. The military says this is necessary to unearth improvised explosive devices planted under the tarmac. But the tactic has caused significant infrastructure damage, leaving many roads impassable.

The UN says that since October, Israeli authorities have “destroyed, demolished, confiscated, or forced the demolition” of 1,478 structures in the West Bank. Jenin’s mayor said that more than 70% of his city’s critical infrastructure has been destroyed.

While deadly ground raids in the West Bank were a regular occurrence before Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack, air strikes – though not entirely unheard of – were extremely rare. When in July 2023 Israel used a drone to launch airstrikes as part of a large operation in Jenin, it made headlines around the world. Not a single Palestinian in the West bank was killed by an air strike in the preceding three years, according to the UN.

‘Don’t play with us’

Since October, such strikes have become a near-daily occurrence. And their use has dramatically ramped up in recent weeks. The UN says that of all deaths by Israeli air strikes since October, nearly a third came in August alone.

“No place in Palestine is safe, not just Gaza,” Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said during a visit to Jenin on Thursday – the first time a Palestinian official visited the city since Israel’s operation began. “We witness the occupying enemy repeating the systematic destruction I saw before, targeting both human life and infrastructure.”

Brigadier General Nitzan Nuriel, who ran the counter-terrorism bureau of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office until 2012, and now serves in the reserves, said that Operation Summer Camps was launched to send a message to Israel’s adversaries.

“The message to the other side is, ‘Don’t play with us. Don’t think that if we are very much down in the south and probably we are going to be busy up in the north, we will not be able to take care of what’s going in Judea and Samaria.’”

The Israeli military, Halevi said during his visit to Jenin, will go “city to city, camp to camp, with excellent intelligence, very good operational capabilities, very strong aerial intelligence support, and above all, with very moral and determined soldiers and commanders.”

Duha Turkman, 18 years old, sheltered with her sister at an aunt’s house for a week when the operation began, too scared to go outside because of the Israeli snipers they saw on surrounding rooftops.

“We tried to conserve food as much as we could,” she said. “We were eating very little, had no water, and no electricity.”

Suddenly, on the seventh day, Israeli soldiers burst through their door, she said. A video taken by Turkman shows shrapnel pockmarking the stairwell of the house. They soon fled to an uncle’s house elsewhere in the city.

“When we look at Gaza, we realize that we have been going through this for nine days, and it is already incredibly difficult for us,” she said. “We can only imagine what the people in Gaza are enduring. The situation here mirrors Gaza with airstrikes, bulldozing, and it doesn’t seem like the situation will change anytime soon.”

An American activist has been shot and killed during a protest near Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian officials.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA said the activist was shot in the head during a protest in Beita, near Nablus, on Friday. She was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead, WAFA reported.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Marathoner Rebecca Cheptegei ran in the Paris Olympics last month. This week, her boyfriend doused her with gasoline and set her ablaze, police said — the third horrific killing of an Olympian in Kenya in recent years.

In the past three years, two other female Olympians have been killed in Iten, Kenya, about 70 miles away from where Cheptegei died. The women were killed by their significant others, authorities said, bringing international attention to a pattern of domestic violence against female athletes who live and train in Kenya’s Rift Valley region, home to some of the world’s most elite runners.

In October 2021, the body of Agnes Tirop, a rising star in distance running, was found inside her home with numerous stab wounds. She was in her running gear — a black sports bra and shorts — and likely going to a training session when her husband attacked her, authorities said.

About six months later, marathoner Damaris Mutua’s boyfriend allegedly strangled her and left a pillow over her face. He fled the country after the attack and has been a fugitive ever since, according to police.

Tirop’s husband was arrested in the coastal city of Mombasa as he allegedly tried to leave the country, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations said at the time. He’s free on bail and his case is ongoing. He pleaded not guilty to murder but admitted to killing Tirop in an affidavit requesting bail, according to court documents.

And as yet another killing stuns the nation’s running community, activists and officials are calling for more action and resources in the ongoing fight against domestic violence.

“We must do more to combat gender-based violence in our society, which in recent years has reared its ugly head in elite sporting circles,” Kenya’s sports minister Kipchumba Murkomen said in a statement.

Deaths of female athletes spark outrage and calls for action

Cheptegei ran for Uganda, but trained in Kenya. Her father told local media that she bought land in Trans Nzoia and built a house to be near the hub of long distance training. His daughter and her boyfriend were fighting over the land shortly before the attack, Joseph Cheptegei said.

Her boyfriend, who was also burned, is being treated at a hospital in the city of Eldoret.

The deaths of the female athletes have sparked outrage and reignited calls for more action against domestic abuse. In 2022, a group of female athletes in the region formed Tirop’s Angels to educate runners about gender-based violence and engage Kenyan men and leaders on prevention efforts.

“We started Tirop’s Angels out of emotions, we were heartbroken,” Chelimo said. “We realized that female athletes are suffering, and they’re silent. They needed to know they’re not alone, and they have rights, too.”

After Cheptegei’s death, Tirop’s Angels said it was devastated to mourn yet another loss in the running community.

“Another talented athlete taken from us by the menace of gender-based violence,” the group said in a statement Thursday. “This ongoing violence must not be ignored.”

Wealth and fame make young female runners more vulnerable

All three women were working to make a mark as elite runners.

Cheptegei finished 44th in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics. Tirop had just returned from a race in Switzerland and had broken the women’s 10km record in Germany a month before she was killed. Mutua, who had just placed third at a half marathon in Angola days before her death, was a bronze medalist at the 2010 Singapore Youth Olympics.

Iten and its surrounding regions are revered training grounds for long-distance runners due to their crisp air and high altitude. Success in races overseas can mean brand sponsorships, stipends, performance bonuses and sometimes paid travel expenses for races — resources that allow runners to participate in international competitions.

This makes domestic violence especially prevalent in running communities in the region, said Chelimo, a long-distance runner who also trains in the area.

A mix of (potential) wealth, fame and a patriarchal culture — where a man is expected to be the breadwinner — leaves young, ambitious women either prey to unscrupulous men trying to get their hands on their future earnings or vulnerable to intimate partners who wish to control them, she said.

Tirop was 25, Mutua was 28 and Cheptegei was 33.

“We (society) don’t protect these young women … we don’t even give them training (to advocate for themselves) … we just expect them to run and break records. Where is the outrage? Where is the anger?” said Njeri Migwi, founder of Usikimye, an organization that provides refuge to victims of sexual- and gender-based violence across Kenya.

As part of its education efforts, Tirop’s Angels brings in experts to help young runners live well-rounded lives and provides them with tips on financial literacy, investments and relationship red flags.

But it acknowledges that a major cultural shift is needed in the region for real change to happen. The group said it’s working with local schools to educate children on forms of abuse and ensure that future generations of runners learn crucial lessons at a young age.

Domestic abuse in the region is rooted in patriarchy, an expert says

The root cause of sexual and gender-based violence in Kenya is the country’s entrenched patriarchy, which is more dominant in remote rural regions, Migwi said.

In Kenya, according to government data from 2022, more than one-third of women ages 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence by a husband, intimate partner or someone else. Married women are much more likely to have been victims of violence than those who have never been married (41% versus 20%), according to the survey.

But domestic violence is a worldwide problem.

A review of data from 2000 to 2018, covering girls and women aged 15 to 49 in 161 countries, found that 27% of ever-partnered women have experienced domestic violence.

In the United States, one in four women have experienced severe violence by a domestic partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Advocacy groups have described the murder of US women by men they know as “a silent epidemic.”