Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that he was “ready” to resign as leader if it meant peace in his country, suggesting he could swap it for NATO membership.

Asked at a press conference if he was ready to quit if it ensures peace for Ukraine, Zelensky said: “If [it guarantees] peace for Ukraine, if you really need me to resign, I am ready. I can exchange it for NATO.”

The Ukrainian president previously said his country’s army will need to double in size if NATO denies it membership to the alliance. Earlier this month, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that Kyiv joining NATO was unrealistic.

Zelensky’s comments follow an escalating spat between Zelensky and Donald Trump after the US president falsely accused Ukraine of starting the conflict.

When Zelensky hit back – accusing the US president of being in a “disinformation space” – Trump called Zelensky a “dictator,” straining ties at a pivotal moment in the conflict.

The Israeli military is expanding its operations in the occupied West Bank and will remain in some refugee camps for the “coming year,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said Sunday.

Israel has been carrying out “Operation Iron Wall” – a military campaign focused on the northern West Bank which launched last month, just two days after the Gaza ceasefire began. At least 27 people have died in the offensive, the Palestinian health ministry says.

“I have instructed the IDF to prepare for a prolonged presence in the cleared camps for the coming year and to prevent the return of residents and the resurgence of terrorism,” Katz said in a statement.

The Israeli military meanwhile said Sunday that it was operating in “additional towns” in the Jenin area.

“Simultaneously, a tank platoon will begin operating in Jenin as part of the operational activity,” it added, the first time Israeli tanks have operated in the Palestinian territory since the end of the second intifada, or uprising, in 2005.

The Israeli military has launched regular incursions into Jenin and its refugee camps in recent years but has not established a permanent presence in the immediate area. Jenin came under Israeli occupation in 1967 but was put under the administration of the Palestinian National Authority in 1995 as a result of the Oslo Accords.

Since Hamas’ October 7 attack, Israel has engaged in an increasingly militarized campaign that it says targets West Bank militants, employing tactics like airstrikes that were once nearly unheard of there.

Katz said Sunday that the Israeli military is “conducting offensive operations to eliminate terrorist strongholds, neutralizing militants, and destroying terror infrastructure, buildings, and weapons caches on a large scale.”

He vowed to “continue clearing refugee camps and other terror hubs to dismantle the battalions and terror infrastructure of radical Islam.”

“We will not return to the previous reality,” he said.

The Palestinian foreign ministry has dismissed such justifications as “pretexts” to bring the territory under Israeli control.

The long-delayed funeral for Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah is taking place Sunday, nearly five months after he was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Hezbollah has been left badly depleted by Israeli attacks and the mass event is intended as a show of strength for the militant and political group.

Tens of thousands of mourners flooded Beirut’s largest stadium, where the ceremony begins, and packed the surrounding streets. A large procession will trail a vehicle carrying the late militant leader’s coffin to a shrine in southern Beirut, erected as his final resting place.

Sunday’s ceremony also commemorates Nasrallah’s successor, Hashem Safieddine, who led the militant group for just days before an Israeli strike killed him in early October.

Nasrallah was secretly buried in a private ceremony shortly after his death, according to Hezbollah officials. That he is only being buried now underscores the militant group’s weakened state, after an Israeli military campaign in Lebanon last autumn nearly wiped out the group’s top military brass and killed thousands of its fighters, in addition to hundreds of civilians.

A ceasefire agreement between Hezbollah and Israel was signed last November, ending a months-long war, but drove the militant group deeper underground with Israel continuing to strike what it describes as Hezbollah targets. Israel struck several locations in Lebanon hours before the start of the mass funeral, according to local and state media.

Nasrallah’s death marks the end of an era for a militant group that grew from a rag-tag group of guerrilla fighters in 1982 to a regional force whose influence spanned at least four countries.

He was elected leader of the armed group in 1992 as a 32-year-old cleric. He went on to preside over a guerrilla campaign in southern Lebanon that ultimately drove Israeli forces out of the country in 2000, ending a 22-year occupation. In 2006, he led Hezbollah militants in an all-out war against Israel, which devastated large parts of Lebanon but foiled Israel’s stated goal of dismantling the group.

When wars raged in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, Nasrallah’s forces intervened on behalf of groups backed by Iran, shoring up Tehran’s support.

But Hezbollah’s fortunes changed after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israel which killed around 1,200 people on October 7, 2023. The militant group launched daily rocket attacks on Israel’s northernmost territory, in support of Hamas, displacing some 60,000 Israelis. Around 100,000 Lebanese residents of the south were also displaced in Israeli attacks as part of a tit-for-tat that spanned nearly a year before it spiralled into an all-out war last September.

Nasrallah called it a “supportive front” that he said aimed to pressure Israel into ceasing its retaliatory offensive in Gaza, which has laid waste to large parts of the besieged territory and killed over 48,000 people.

In mid-September, Israel detonated explosives implanted in thousands of pagers and walkie talkies carried by Hezbollah members and assassinated several of the group’s leaders, laying bare Israel’s thorough infiltration of the armed group.

Severely weakened, Hezbollah’s future as a militant group is being called into question. Israel has vowed to continue to strike the group’s positions until the group disarms and has maintained five strategic positions inside Lebanon’s southern-most territory, breaching the November ceasefire agreement.

Domestically, the group has come under increasing pressure to lay down its arms. That culminated with the newly elected President Joseph Aoun’s inaugural speech in January when he called on weapons to be monopolized under the authority of the state.

Hezbollah has long resisted calls to give up their arms, which it argues have prevented Israel’s reoccupation of the country. Its detractors say their militancy makes a viable Lebanese state impossible.

A rocket-propelled grenade believed to be more than 25 years old killed two cousins, a girl and a boy both 2 years old, when it blew up Saturday near their homes in rural northwestern Cambodia, officials said.

The accident happened in Siem Reap province’s Svay Leu district, where there had been heavy fighting in the 1980s and 1990s between Cambodian government soldiers and rebel guerrillas from the communist Khmer Rouge. The group had been ousted from power in 1979.

Muo Lisa and her male cousin, Thum Yen, lived in neighboring homes in the remote village of Kranhuong. Their parents were doing farm work when the two toddlers apparently came across the unexploded ordnance and it detonated. Experts from the Cambodian Mine Action Center determined afterwards from fragments that it was a rocket-propelled grenade.

Old unexploded munitions are especially dangerous because their explosive contents become volatile as they deteriorate.

“Their parents went to settle on land that was a former battlefield, and they were not aware that there were any land mines or unexploded ordnance buried near their homes,” CMAC Director-General Heng Ratana said. “It’s a pity because they were too young and they should not have died like this.”

Some 4 million-6 million land mines and other unexploded munitions are estimated to have littered Cambodia’s countryside during decades of conflict that began in 1970 and ended in 1998.

Since the end of the fighting in Cambodia, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and about 45,000 injured by leftover war explosives. The number of casualties has declined over time; last year there were 49 deaths.

“The war is completely over and there is fully peace for more than 25 years, but the blood of the Khmer (Cambodian) people continues to flow because of the remnants of land mines and ammunition,” Heng Ratana said on his Facebook page.

Cambodian deminers are among the world’s most experienced, and several thousand have been sent in the past decade under U.N. auspices to work in Africa and the Middle East.

Cambodia’s demining efforts drew attention earlier this month, when U.S. financial assistance for it in eight provinces was suspended due to President Donald Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Heng Ratana said Thursday he had been informed that Washington had issued a waiver allowing the aid — $6.36 million covering March 2022 to November 2025 — to resume flowing.

Editor’s Note: This article contains details that readers may find distressing.

Five years ago, a 13-year-old girl, the daughter of poor wage laborers from one of India’s most marginalized communities, was allegedly sexually abused by one of her neighbors in the village where she lived.

Her alleged abuser filmed it and police are investigating whether he used the images to blackmail and manipulate the girl into being raped and sexually abused by dozens of other men and boys over the next five years.

Police say the allegations only came to light after the girl, now 18, spoke to a counselor visiting her college in Kerala state and detailed the years of horrific abuse.

Charges have not yet been filed and the 58 men remain in detention. None of the accused has spoken publicly about the allegations. Under Indian rape laws, the girl has not been identified.

Violence against women is rampant in India due to entrenched sexism and patriarchy, despite laws being amended to include more severe punishments for abusers.

In August the rape and murder of a trainee medic in the eastern city of Kolkata sparked a nationwide doctors’ strike that brought tens of thousands into the streets to demand change.

The Kerala case has not sparked similar outrage.

Experts and activists say that’s because the victim is from the Dalit community at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, a 3,000-year-old social and religious hierarchy that categorizes people at birth and defines their place in society.

Dalits traditionally carry out occupations viewed as ritually “unclean” by Hindu scripture, such as manual scavenging, waste picking and street sweeping.

They are often banned from visiting temples and forced to live apart from higher-caste communities, often in squalor and farther from access to services.

Despite legislation banning discrimination based on caste, activists say the stigma leaves India’s more than 260 million Dalits vulnerable to abuse and less able to seek redress for crimes committed against them.

“When it’s Dalit women, in general the outrage is less across the country,” said Cynthia Stephen, a Dalit rights activist and social policy researcher.

There is a sense that “this girl is not ‘one of us,’” she said.

Manipulated, kidnapped and abused

At least three of her abusers promised to marry her, according to police. One threatened to kill her if she reported the abuse.

Some of the men acted alone, police said. But others are accused of gang rape. “It’s not that all the cases are connected. But in one case, there might be four or five accused,” said Begum, from Kerala Police.

Many of the men contacted the young girl on her father’s phone, through social media apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp, late at night after he went to sleep, police said.

The alleged abuse took place in private and public spaces, in homes and in cars, at bus stops and in fields. Some of the cases allegedly involved men who were strangers, living in towns dozens of miles away.

Some of the cases involve allegations of human trafficking, because the men forced the girl to travel outside her village, police said.

The allegations have sent shock waves through the girl’s village in the green hills of Kerala, where many work as wage laborers in low-paid jobs like construction and farming.

Police say the girl’s parents worked long hours and did not know about the alleged abuse of their daughter.

When the allegations emerged in January, some women in the community were sympathetic toward the accused and angry at the survivor, according to local media outlet The News Minute.

The women criticized the girl’s clothing and lifestyle and blamed her mother for not watching over her more closely, The News Minute reported.

One mother, whose son was among the accused, said he was innocent. She said he had known the girl since she was a baby and “had raised the girl in his arms,” according to the outlet.

‘Monsters in her own backyard’

More than half of Dalits in Kerala live in designated areas called “colonies,” known for cramped and harsh living conditions, after years of being denied land ownership under historical laws.

Madhumita Pandey, a professor in criminology and gender justice at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom, said the tight-knit nature of communities such as these colonies could explain why the alleged abuse of the teenage girl was not reported until recently.

“They could sometimes be your friend, uncle or neighbor,” she said.

It can be harder to report abuse when “the so-called monsters are in our own backyard,” she said.

Official statistics support her point: the alleged perpetrator is known to the victim in more than 98% of reported rape cases in Kerala, according to government data.

There were 4,241 reported cases of rape against women from oppressed castes in India, including Dalit women, in 2022, the most recent year for which data exists, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. That’s equivalent to more than 10 rapes per day.

There were more than 31,500 rapes reported overall in 2022, according to the NCRB.

However, given the difficulties in reporting such crimes, especially for the Dalit community, the true figure is likely higher.

Furthermore, in close communities, and especially in Dalit communities, women and girls also risk isolating themselves or being seen as bringing dishonor upon their families if they report abuse, Pandey said.

In at least 16 of the cases from the alleged Kerala village abuse, the accused men are from more privileged castes, according to police. If found guilty, these men could face harsher punishments under Indian laws designed to protect disadvantaged castes.

A 2020 report by the NGO Equality Now found that sexual violence is used by dominant castes to oppress Dalit women and girls, who are often denied justice because of a “prevalent culture of impunity, particularly when the perpetrators are from a dominant caste.”

Even when Dalit women report sexual abuse, they face an uphill battle to justice.

The Equality Now report followed 40 cases of rape against Dalit women and girls, and the seven cases that resulted in convictions involved either rape and murder together or were committed against girls under the age of 6.

N Rajeev, the head of the Child Welfare Committee in Pathanamthitta, the Kerala district where the girl is from, said an increase in reported child sexual abuse cases was in part thanks to campaigns in schools that help children identify and disclose abuse. The number of reported child sexual abuse cases in the state has surged to 4,663 in 2023, more than four times the 1,002 reported in 2013, according to government data.

The Dalit girl is now living in a shelter where she is receiving counseling and support, Begum, the police officer, said. The girl’s mother is also being given counseling and has the option to stay in a women’s shelter if she feels unsafe in the neighborhood. Begum said police have dedicated “maximum manpower” to the case.

The case will likely take years to go through the courts.

Across India, rape has one of the lowest conviction rates of major crimes, with 27% of cases resulting in convictions in 2022, according to the NCRB.

While child sexual abuse continues to be a “a grim reality” in Kerala, the fact that the Dalit girl was able to report the case is a step in the right direction, Stephen said.

“Otherwise, this would have just gone on unreported for years on end, then she would have nobody to help her.”