• Nine die of electrocution, two drown in heavy flooding.
• Flights, trains cancelled as Kolkata transport paralysed.
• Schools closed; IMD warns of more rain in coming days.

At least 12 people died as heavy rain lashed the eastern Indian city of Kolkata and surrounding areas ahead of a major festival, flooding streets, disrupting transport and leaving residents stranded for hours, officials said on Wednesday.

Most of the rain, as much as 251.6 mm(9.9 inches) in 24 hours, fell during the early hours of Tuesday and was the heaviest witnessed in the city since 1988, said HR Biswas, the regional head of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in Kolkata.

Police said nine people died in Kolkata, with most of the deaths due to electrocution. Two people drowned, they added.

The rains brought the state capital to a standstill, seriously hampering preparations for the upcoming Durga Puja — the biggest annual festival of Hindus in West Bengal state.

Many pandals, temporary structures built with bamboo and other materials for the festival, and clay idols of the deities also suffered damage across the city.

Roads were submerged under waist-deep water in some areas, stranding vehicles and forcing commuters to wade through flooded streets.

Road, train, and air traffic were severely disrupted, with several flights and trains cancelled or delayed. Power outages affected multiple areas for hours, compounding residents’ difficulties.

“I got stranded in my hotel as my flight got cancelled and the roads were all waterlogged,” said Ranjan Panda, a water and climate expert.

Authorities said they have deployed water pumps to clear streets and railway tracks, with relief measures, including food distribution and emergency services, underway.

The IMD predicted more rain in the state and eastern India over the next few days due to the formation of a low-pressure area over the Bay of Bengal.

The state government declared schools and other educational institutions closed on Wednesday and Thursday before the holidays for the festival to take effect from Friday.

Officials said conditions will normalise by Wednesday evening while urging residents to remain cautious as water levels gradually recede in low-lying areas.

“This should not have happened after four hours of rain. West Bengal is not in a good condition,” Sandip Ghosh, a local resident in Kolkata, told Indian news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority stake.

HUALIEN: Residents in an eastern Taiwan town where flooding from a strong typhoon killed 14 people took to shelters on Wednesday, fearing further disaster, as Premier Cho Jung-tai called for an inquiry into what went wrong with evacuation orders.

Sub-tropical Taiwan, frequently hit by typhoons, normally has a well-oiled disaster mechanism that averts mass casualties by moving people out of potential danger zones quickly.

But many residents in Guangfu, an inundated town in the beauty spot of Hualien thronged by tourists, said there was insufficient warning when the lake overflowed during Tuesday’s torrential rains brought by Super Typhoon Ragasa.

Cho said the immediate priority was to find the 129 still missing — a number that climbed to 152 after he spoke — but questions remained.

“For the 14 who have tragically passed away, we must investigate why evacuation orders were not carried out in the designated areas,” he told reporters in Guangfu.

“This is not about assigning blame, but about uncovering the truth.”

The barrier lake, formed by landslides triggered by earlier heavy rain in the island’s sparsely populated east, burst its banks to send a wall of water into Guangfu.

As heavy rain continued on and off in Hualien, police cars sounded sirens for a new flood warning in Guangfu on Wednesday, sending people scrambling for safer areas as residents and rescuers shouted, “The flood waters are coming, run fast.”

“We will not return until the overflow is finished or the risk of it bursting is reduced. It’s too dangerous,” said a woman who gave her family name as Tsai from a packed emergency shelter in an elementary school.

Deputy disaster command centre chief Huang Chao-chin said with rainfall easing and much of the water from the lake already released, he did not expect a repeat of Tuesday’s mass flooding.

Lamen Panay, a Hualien councillor, said government evacuation requests before the flood had not been mandatory.

Referring to guidance for people to head to higher floors, she said, “What we were facing wasn’t something ‘vertical evacuation’ could resolve.”

Taiwan has been lashed since Monday by the outer rim of Typhoon Ragasa, which was downgraded from a super typhoon and is now hitting China’s southern coast and the Asian financial hub of Hong Kong.

‘Like tsunami’

The water hit like a “tsunami”, said Guangfu postman Hsieh Chien-tung, who was able to flee to the second floor of the post office just in time. Later, he got home to find his car had been swept into the living-room.

Fire officials said all the dead and missing were in Guangfu, where the waters destroyed a major road bridge across a river.

Regions across Taiwan have dispatched rescue teams to Hualien, with the military sending 340 troops to help.

In Guangfu, soldiers operating from an armoured personnel carrier to keep clear of thick mud in the streets went door-to-door handing out water and instant noodles. Wrecked cars and scooters were littered around.

About 5,200 people, or 60% of the population, sought shelter on the higher floors of their own homes while most of the rest left to stay with families, government data showed.

The government said the overflow of the barrier lake released about 60 million tonnes of an estimated 91 million tonnes of water, enough to fill about 36,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office offered condolences, in a rare sign of goodwill from Beijing, which has a deep dislike of Taipei’s government.

China views Taiwan as its own territory, despite the strong objections of the island’s democratically-elected government.

Besides the wilderness beauty that makes it one of Taiwan’s top tourist draws, Hualien is also home to many members of the island’s indigenous groups, including the Amis.

The typhoon brought about 70cm (28 inches) of rain to Taiwan’s east, though the populous west coast, home to the crucial semiconductor industry, was not affected.

In 2009, Typhoon Morakot brought destruction to Taiwan’s south, killing about 700 and causing damage of up to $3 billion.

Growing international frustration with Washington over the war in Gaza spilled into the open at the UN General Assembly this week, with US allies recognising a Palestinian state in a major test for President Donald Trump’s Middle East policy.

After promising at the start of his second term to quickly end the war between Israel and Hamas, Trump now looks increasingly like a bystander as Israeli forces escalate their onslaught in the Palestinian enclave and he remains reluctant to rein in Washington’s closest regional ally.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blindsided Trump with a strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar earlier this month that all but doomed the Trump administration’s latest effort to secure a Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal.

Israel since then has launched a ground assault in Gaza City that the US accepted without objection, amid global condemnation of a widening humanitarian crisis in the coastal strip.

And defying Trump’s warnings against what he called a gift to Hamas, a group of US allies, including Britain, France, Canada and Australia, announced just before and during the UN gathering their recognition of the state of Palestine in a dramatic diplomatic shift.

“Trump has not been able to achieve any major progress or gains in the region, particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian top front,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think-tank in Washington. “In fact, things are worse than when he entered office.”

With an end to the nearly two-year-old conflict seeming more remote than ever, the apparent sidelining of Trump has added to skepticism over his repeated claims since his return to office in January that he is a masterful peacemaker who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday that if Trump really wants to win the coveted Nobel, he needs to stop the war in Gaza.

“There is one person who can do something about it, and that is the US president. And the reason he can do more than us, is because we do not supply weapons that allow the war in Gaza to be waged,” Macron told France’s BFM TV from New York.

Some analysts see Trump’s unwillingness to apply Washington’s leverage with Netanyahu as a realisation that the conflict — like Russia’s war in Ukraine — is much more complex and intractable than he has acknowledged.

Others see it as tacit acceptance that Netanyahu will act in what he considers his own and Israel’s interests and that there is little the US president can do to change that.

Still others speculate that Trump may have been distracted from the Middle East by domestic issues such as the recent murder of conservative activist ally Charlie Kirk, continuing fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the president’s deployment of National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities for what he says are crime-fighting missions.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump won’t be swayed

Despite appearing less engaged on Gaza recently, Trump met on the UN sidelines on Tuesday with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan.

He was expected to lay out US proposals for post-war governance in Gaza, without Hamas involvement, and push for Arab and Muslim countries to agree to contribute military forces to help provide security, Axios reported.

Although Trump has at times expressed impatience with Netanyahu’s handling of the war, he made clear in his UN speech on Tuesday that he is not ready to back away from strong support for Israel, or be swayed by other countries’ endorsement of Palestinian statehood.

Such announcements only serve to “encourage continued conflict” by giving Hamas a “reward for these horrible atrocities,” Trump said.

France, Britain, Canada, Australia and others have insisted that recognising a Palestinian state would help to preserve the prospects of a “two-state solution” to the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and help to end the Gaza war.

While leaders taking the podium at the UN gathering did not directly chastise Trump for his stance, some analysts saw a clear message to the US president.

“It all depends on Trump, who could end this war with one choice word to Israel’s prime minister,” said Laura Blumenfeld, a Middle East expert at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. That word, she said, is “enough.”

The US is Israel’s chief arms supplier and historically acts as its diplomatic shield at the UN and other world bodies. Last week, the US vetoed a draft Security Council resolution that would have demanded an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Trump, however, has given no sign he will use those pressure points.

Even after Israel bombed a Hamas office in the territory of US ally Qatar, he held a tense phone call with Netanyahu but took no action.

No matter how many countries recognise Palestinian independence, full UN membership would require approval by the Security Council, where the United States has a veto.

Abraham Accords at risk?

Still, some analysts declined to rule out the possibility that Netanyahu, due to visit the White House on Monday for the fourth time since Trump returned to office, may yet exhaust Trump’s patience.

Israel’s strike in Doha dampened Trump’s hopes for more Gulf states joining the Abraham Accords, a landmark agreement brokered by his first administration in which several Arab countries forged diplomatic ties with Israel.

Israel is now weighing annexing parts of the occupied West Bank, which might be fueled by anger against the international push for recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The most right-wing government in Israel’s history has declared there will be no Palestinian state as it pushes on with its fight against Hamas following its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s military response has killed more than 65,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials.

The UAE has threatened to suspend its membership in the Abraham Accords — which Trump has long touted as one of his crowning foreign policy successes — if Israel goes ahead with West Bank annexation.

Most Middle East experts say such a move would also close the door on the prospects for Gulf power Saudi Arabia ever joining, and that Netanyahu is not likely to go ahead without the green light from Trump, who has been non-committal so far.

“Trump is going to publicly let Netanyahu do what he thinks is right, especially in Gaza,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy US national intelligence officer on the Middle East. “But privately the president and his team could apply some pressure.”