A seventh consecutive night of attacks by United States forces on targets across Iran has left 10,000 people without water after a desalination plant was hit, with Iran retaliating by launching another wave of drones and missiles at US-allied Gulf states.

Hamzeh Pour, chief executive of the Hormozgan Water and Wastewater Company, was quoted by the Tasnim news agency on Saturday as saying that a seawater pumping station and a power transformer at the Bunji desalination plant in Jask in southern Iran were “completely destroyed”, depriving 20 villages of water.

Iran’s retaliation also targeted civilian infrastructure, a war crime under international humanitarian law.

In the early hours of Saturday, Kuwait announced the closure of its airspace and said two power and water desalination plants were hit by Iranian attacks. Several Kuwaiti firefighters were wounded while responding to a fire sparked by the strikes, the country’s firefighting force said.

Air raid sirens also sounded repeatedly in Bahrain, where authorities urged residents to seek shelter.

In Jordan, authorities said they intercepted 10 Iranian ballistic missiles.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said its naval forces had targeted a US military fuel pier at Kuwait’s al-Ahmadi port and a US warplane assembly site at Bahrain’s Sheikh Isa Air Base. The IRGC also said it attacked a US base in Azraq in Jordan, claiming to have destroyed two American fighter jets.

The Iranian attacks came after the US military’s Central Command, or CENTCOM, announced it had carried another wave of overnight strikes targeting “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities” in Iran.

[Aljazeera]

Rescuers are rushing to locate dozens of people missing in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, after a deadly landslide buried homes in the area, according to Chinese authorities.

The landslide took place around 9:10am (01:10 GMT) on Friday in Chongqing’s Pengshui county, killing eight people, leaving 34 unaccounted for and displacing more than 1,100, reported state media.

Footage shared by China’s CCTV broadcaster showed a huge buildup of rocks and dirt covering part of a residential and commercial street at the bottom of a mountain in the region.

Ten people have been rescued from the debris, including two who are seriously injured, reported China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.

Water, electricity and gas supplies were cut off within a one-kilometre (0.6-mile) radius of the landslide to prevent further disruptions. More than 800 rescuers have gone to the site, reported CCTV.

Authorities said they sent more than 8,000 disaster relief items to Chongqing, including tents, folding beds and family emergency kits.

Pengshui county is located in the southeast part of Chongqing, bordering the provinces of Hubei and Guizhou.

The area where the landslide happened is known for “unpredictable” steep terrain, a local official told a news conference, adding that dangerous rocks remain along the sides of the cliff.

The government has allocated 50 million yuan ($7.36m) in natural disaster relief funds to support the rescue and relief operations and to provide assistance to affected residents, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Emergency Management said.

[Aljazeera]

Almost 5,000 people are known to have died in two earthquakes that devastated Venezuela in June, but the United Nations estimates that as many as 50,000 people may still be missing – with many feared buried under rubble.

The number of confirmed deaths is now higher at 4,930, lawmaker Jorge Rodriguez announced on Thursday

The disaster almost a month ago impacted tens of thousands of others. Nearly 17,000 people are wounded, and 21,120 are living in shelters.

Venezuelan teams have been operating since the earthquake struck, but locals say their response has been slow.

“From the very first moment, from when the earthquake happened, there was an immediate response, but from civilians. Civilians and independent people. The state’s response is only being seen now,” Cinthia Pulido, a Venezuelan displaced by the earthquakes, told Al Jazeera. “We’re watching and waiting for some kind of answer.”

International rescue teams sent in the immediate aftermath of the disaster have left as the focus moves to providing humanitarian relief.

“The little I can get is just for me to survive, support my children, and help my mum,” Louismarez Paez, who has also been displaced, told Al Jazeera.

Her mother, she said, does not receive any assistance other than that which she herself provides.

Venezuela has ‘crucial resources’ it cannot access

Venezuela has faced tight US sanctions since 2015, which experts say is making the government’s job even harder.

“Venezuela has crucial resources that it is not being allowed to access,” Mark Weisbrot, senior economist and co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said.

That includes $11bn blocked by the US and European countries that Venezuela “should legally have”, Weisbrot said.

Earlier this week, a group of 14 Democratic lawmakers in the US sent a letter urging the White House to ease economic sanctions on Venezuela to aid recovery efforts, according to a report from Spanish newspaper El Pais.

The sanctions, they wrote, are “severely hampering urgent relief efforts” and have “severely undermined the country’s response and reconstruction efforts”.

The UN estimates that the recovery efforts in Venezuela could cost the country $37bn.

[Aljazeera]