In India and China, torrential rains have killed more than 250 people in the past week. Three others died in Pakistan. Widespread flooding has been reported in North Korea near the border with China with no word on whether anyone died.
This time of year is monsoon and typhoon season in Asia, and climate change has intensified such storms. Heavy rains have triggered landslides and flooding, devastating crops, destroying homes and taking lives.
Click to Gallery
In India and China, torrential rains have killed more than 250 people in the past week. Three others died in Pakistan. Widespread flooding has been reported in North Korea near the border with China with no word on whether anyone died.
FILE - This undated photo provided on July 29, 2024 by the North Korean government, shows a flood-hit area in North Phyongan province, North Korea. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)
FILE - This undated photo provided on July 31, 2024 by the North Korean government, shows a flood-hit area in Sinuiju city, North Phyongan province, North Korea. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)
FILE - Rescuers search through mud and debris for a third day after landslides set off by torrential rains in Wayanad district, Kerala state, India, on Aug. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
FILE - Children push their father's scooter through a flooded street as it rains in Mumbai, India, on July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
FILE - In this drone photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a landslide destroys a house in Yuelin village of Shouyue town of Hengyang city, central China's Hunan Province on July 28, 2024. (Chen Zhenhai/Xinhua via AP, File)
FILE - Rescuers use a dinghy boat to evacuate villagers trapped by floodwaters in Jingtang village, Zixing city, in southern China's Hunan province, on July 28, 2024. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
Historical data shows that China is having more extremely hot days and more frequent intense rains, according to a report released last month by the China Meteorological Administration, which forecasts more of both in the coming 30 years.
Governments have launched disaster prevention plans to try to mitigate the damage. Rescue teams scramble to evacuate people ahead of approaching storms and deliver relief goods by helicopter to cut-off areas. China has deployed drones for emergency communication in rain-prone provinces.
Sometimes it isn't enough, as the tragic consequences playing out in Asia show.
Heavy rains sent torrents of mud and water through tea estates and villages in Kerala state in southern India early Tuesday, destroying bridges and flattening houses.
Hope of finding survivors has waned as the search entered its fourth day. Bodies have been found as many as 30 kilometers (20 miles) downriver from the main landslides.
The area is known for its picturesque tea and cardamom estates, with hundreds of plantation workers living in nearby temporary shelters. “This was a very beautiful place," a shopkeeper said. “I used to visit here many times. ... Now there is nothing left.”
India regularly has severe floods during the monsoon season, which runs between June and September and brings rain that is crucial for crops.
Typhoon Gaemi was blamed for more than 30 deaths in the Philippines and 10 in Taiwan as it churned through the western Pacific last week, but it was still fatal after weakening to a tropical storm in China.
Rain drenched parts of inland Hunan province for several days. On Sunday morning, a mudslide slammed into a homestay house in a popular weekend spot, killing 15 people.
Elsewhere in Hunan, the bodies of three people were found on Monday, believed to be victims of another landslide. And authorities in nearby Zixing city announced Thursday that 30 people had died in floods, with 35 others missing.
One other death in China was apparently tied to the storm, a delivery driver on a scooter struck by falling tree branches during high winds in Shanghai.
China has recorded 25 major floods this year, the most since it began keeping statistics in 1998, the Ministry of Water Resources said this week.
The tropical storm also generated heavy rain in northeast China on the border with North Korea, overflowing the Yalu River, which divides the two countries.
In North Korea, the rain flooded 4,100 houses, 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of farmland and many public buildings, roads and railways.
Its state media did not give information on deaths, though the nation's leader Kim Jong Un implied there were casualties when he was quoted blaming public officials who had neglected disaster prevention, causing "the casualty that cannot be allowed.”
Military helicopters and navy and other government boats evacuated stranded residents. State TV aired footage showing Kim and other officials riding on rubber boats to examine the scale of the damage. The footage showed houses submerged in muddy waters with only their roofs visible.
On the Chinese side, state television showed excavators in rushing water trying to clear debris after a mudslide in Jilin province. One city near North Korea asked people living below the third floor to move higher as the Yalu River rose.
In Dandong, a large Chinese city along the river, rescuers evacuated residents in rubber dinghies on streets turned into virtual lakes. There were no reports of deaths.
Record rainfall in the city of Lahore flooded streets and left at least three people dead in Pakistan on Thursday. The deaths at the start of August came on top of 99 rain-related fatalities the previous month.
Some parts of Lahore recorded 353 millimeters (14 inches) of rain in a few hours, breaking a 44-year-old record. The rain was so heavy that it entered some hospital wards in the capital of Punjab province.
The victims included two children, one who drowned in a flooded street and another who fell from the roof of her house.
The spelling of Zixing city has been corrected in this story.
FILE - Motorcyclists and cars drive through a flooded road caused by heavy monsoon rainfall in Karachi, Pakistan, on July 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan, File)
FILE - This undated photo provided on July 29, 2024 by the North Korean government, shows a flood-hit area in North Phyongan province, North Korea. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)
FILE - This undated photo provided on July 31, 2024 by the North Korean government, shows a flood-hit area in Sinuiju city, North Phyongan province, North Korea. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)
FILE - Rescuers search through mud and debris for a third day after landslides set off by torrential rains in Wayanad district, Kerala state, India, on Aug. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
FILE - Children push their father's scooter through a flooded street as it rains in Mumbai, India, on July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
FILE - In this drone photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a landslide destroys a house in Yuelin village of Shouyue town of Hengyang city, central China's Hunan Province on July 28, 2024. (Chen Zhenhai/Xinhua via AP, File)
FILE - Rescuers use a dinghy boat to evacuate villagers trapped by floodwaters in Jingtang village, Zixing city, in southern China's Hunan province, on July 28, 2024. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Arms raised high. Banners denouncing the war in Gaza. Crowds united in song and wrapped in keffiyehs, the black-and-white checkered scarves that have become a badge of Palestinian identity.
It could have been any other pro-Palestinian rally erupting over the Israel-Hamas war if it weren’t for the fact that these thousands of protesters were actually soccer fans at a league match in Santiago, the capital of Chile.
Although the players darting across the field had names like José and Antonio and grew up in a Spanish-speaking South American nation, their fervor for the Palestinian cause and red, white, black and green-colored jerseys underscored how Chile's storied soccer club serves as an entry point for the world’s largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East to connect with an ancestral home thousands of miles away.
“It’s more than just a club, it takes you into the history of the Palestinians,” said Bryan Carrasco, captain of Chile's legendary Club Deportivo Palestino.
As the bloodiest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages in the Gaza Strip, the club's electric game atmosphere, viewing parties and pre-match political stunts have increasingly tapped into a sense of collective Palestinian grief in this new era of war and displacement.
“We're united in the face of the war,” said Diego Khamis, director of the country's Palestinian community. “It's daily suffering.”
In a sport where authorities penalize athletes for flaunting political positions, particularly on such explosive issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Club Palestino is an unabashed exception that wears its pro-Palestinian politics on its sleeve — and on its torso, stadium seats and anywhere else it can find.
The club's brazen gestures have caused offense before. Chile's Football Federation fined the club in 2014 after the number “1” on the back of their shirts was shaped as a map of Palestine before Israel's creation in 1948.
But players' fierce pride in their Palestinian identity has otherwise caused little controversy in this country of 19 million, home to 500,000 ethnic Palestinians.
“It’s our roots and it feels like home,” said Jaime Barakat, a Palestino fan and shawarma vendor.
Leftist President Gabriel Boric, who called Israel a “genocidal, murderous state” on the campaign trail in 2021, has harshly criticized Israel’s campaign in Gaza. His government recalled the Israeli ambassador and joined South Africa's case accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice — allegations that Israel denies.
Israel has pushed back, castigating Chile for what it sees as an insufficient response to Hamas' brutal Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people and led to the abduction of 250 others.
The country's small Jewish population of 16,000 is unsettled. “Boric, who frequently speaks of peace, has imported the Middle East conflict to Chile,” the Jewish Community of Chile said in a statement.
Chile's Palestinians say the Mideast conflict was imported decades before Boric, spurring waves of displacement that forged the surprising history of Arab immigration to this Pacific coast nation from the late 1800s as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and the Zionist movement took root.
In 1920, the League of Nations approved the British Mandate of Palestine, unleashing tensions over Britain’s Balfour Declaration that promised historic Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people. More Palestinians crossed the Atlantic and braved treks across the Andes by mule to reach far-flung Chile. That same year, Club Palestino was created by a group of Palestinian soccer enthusiasts who gathered one winter day in Chile’s southern city of Osorno.
“My father told me they came here because there were more possibilities,” said 90-year-old Juan Sabaj Dhimes in Patronato, a historically Palestinian neighborhood in the capital, with its coffee shops and hookah bars splashed in the colors of the Palestinian national flag and plastered with Palestino club crests.
Chile's Palestinian community exploded after the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — in which more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were pushed from their homes in what Arabs call the Nakba, or “catastrophe," and dispersed all over the world.
Chile was then an upwardly mobile nation among poorer neighbors seeking to attract migrants to populate the country. Palestinian descendants say the arid land, coastal desert and fresh figs and olives conjured an earlier generation’s nostalgia for historic Palestine.
“The climate is one of the things that most captivated the Palestinians who arrived,” said Mauricio Abu-Ghosh, former president of Chile's Palestinian Federation.
The scrappy soccer club went professional in 1947, becoming the pride of the community. Rocketing to Chile's top division and clinching five official titles, its appeal soon stretched to the Middle East, where the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan still congregate in camps and cafes to catch Palestino matches broadcast by satellite network Al Jazeera.
The team's political message also won supporters across Chile — a soccer-crazed country with a spirit of social activism and an ex-protest leader as president — and beyond.
Despite of being a small soccer club, with an average of only about 2,000 spectators per game, Deportivo Palestino — winner of five official titles and a regular fixture in continental tournaments — is the third most followed Chilean club on Instagram, with more than 741,000 followers, only behind eternal rivals Universidad de Chile (791,000) and Colo-Colo (2.3 million).
“They tell us about the violence suffered by their people,” said 20-year-old Chilean fan Luis Torres at Palestino's home stadium in Santiago. “It makes me angry, sad, so we're here to bring a bit of joy.”
Joy has been harder to come by in the Palestinian diaspora since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack triggered Israel's bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 40,000 Palestinians and spawned a humanitarian catastrophe.
Palestinians streaming out of church in Patronato on a recent Sunday said they had prayed for the safety of their families in Gaza. “We all have cousins, siblings, grandparents who still live there,” said Khamis.
The war has wrenched Palestino, forcing the club's training school in Gaza to shut down and disrupting programs it supports across the occupied West Bank.
But within Chile it has breathed new life into players and fans. Before kickoff, the team now rushes the pitch clad in keffiyehs, brandishing anti-war banners and taking a knee.
In May the team abandoned one little pre-match ritual of emerging on the field holding hands with child mascots. Instead, players extended their arms to the side, grasping at empty space.
It was a subtle gesture — a tribute to the “invisible children” killed in Gaza, the team later explained — that could have been lost entirely on ordinary soccer fans.
Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
A Club Palestino fan waves a Palestinian flag during a local league soccer match against Santiago Wanderers at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino soccer team fans celebrate their second goal against Santiago Wanderers at a local league match at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
A Club Palestino fan wears a keffiyeh during a local league soccer match against Santiago Wanderers at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino soccer team fans celebrate their second goal against Santiago Wanderers at a local league match at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino's Nicolas Linares plays in a local league soccer match against Santiago Wanderers at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
A Club Palestino player wears socks with an outline of territory Palestinians claim as theirs during a local league soccer match against Santiago Wanderers at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino soccer team fans watch their team play Santiago Wanderers at a local league match at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino soccer team fans watch their team's game with Santiago Wanderers at a local league match at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino supporters watch a local league match against Santiago Wanderers at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
Club Palestino soccer team fans celebrate their victory over Santiago Wanderers at a local league match at La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, Chile, Friday, July 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Basualdo)
