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.

Syria and Israel are close to striking a “de-escalation” agreement in which Israel will stop its attacks while Syria will agree to not move any machinery or heavy equipment near the Israeli border, a senior US envoy said on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of UN General Assembly meetings in New York, US Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack said the agreement would serve as the first step towards the security deal that the two countries have been negotiating.

Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli airstrikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.

US President Donald Trump has sought to strike an agreement between the two sides that would be announced this week but not enough progress has been made so far and the Rosh Hashana holiday, the Jewish New Year this week, has slowed down the process, Barrack said.

“I think everybody is approaching it in good faith,” Barrack said.

Israel and Syria have been Middle East adversaries for decades. Despite the overthrow of Syria’s longtime President Bashar al-Assad last December, territorial disputes and deep-seated political mistrust between the two countries remain.

Israel has voiced hostility to Syria’s government, pointing to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s former jihadist links, and has lobbied Washington to keep the country weak and decentralised.

After months of encroaching into the demilitarised zone, Israel abandoned the 1974 truce on December 8, the day a rebel offensive ousted Assad. It struck Syrian military assets and sent troops to within 20km (12 miles) of Damascus.

Since then, Israel has carried out more than 1,000 strikes on Syria and conducted more than 400 ground incursions, Sharaa said last week.

Speaking shortly before Barrack at an event in New York, Sharaa, a former al Qaeda leader who led rebel forces that overthrew Assad’s government last year, expressed concern that Israel may be stalling the talks.

“We are scared of Israel. We are worried about Israel. It’s not the other way around,” he said.

• Shift occurs after Trump and Zelensky meet at UN.
• Trump says Russia bracing for economic problems.
• Kyiv welcomes shift, but no sign of US policy changes.

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he believed Ukraine could retake all its land occupied by Russia and that Kyiv should act now, with Moscow facing “big” economic problems, in a sudden and striking rhetorical shift in Ukraine’s favour.

But there was no sign that Trump’s words would be matched by a change in US policy, such as a decision to impose the heavy new sanctions on Moscow sought by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he travelled to New York this week.

“Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, shortly after meeting Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

“After seeing the Economic trouble (the war) is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” he said.

That would ostensibly require Kyiv to expel Russian forces from 20% of its territory, including the Crimean peninsula Moscow has held since 2014, in what would be an extraordinary reversal.

Trump has previously suggested Kyiv should consider giving up territory in order to make peace, fueling Ukrainian fears of behind-the-scenes talks for a deal that would seek to recognise its occupied lands as legally Russian.

Europe’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, praised Trump’s statements, saying: “These have been very strong statements that we haven’t heard before in such formats, so it is really good that we are in the same understanding now.”

Good, constructive meeting

The US president’s tone was in stark contrast to his red-carpet treatment for Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Alaska last month, part of an ostensible push to expedite an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Zelensky told reporters at a briefing that he had a “good, constructive” meeting with Trump, declining to go into detail, while praising Trump’s statement on Truth Social as a “big shift.”

Zelensky later told Fox News that he thought the positions of the Ukrainian and US teams were “closer than any time before,” and that he thought Trump’s position had changed.

The US statement criticised Russia, saying it had been fighting “aimlessly” in a war that a “real military power” would have won in less than a week. That, Trump added, made Russia look very much like a “paper tiger”.

Nonetheless, the only firm commitment from Trump on Truth Social was to “continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them,” an apparent reference to a new mechanism allowing European countries to buy US weapons for Ukraine.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks to the UN Security Council suggested the United States had not given up hope of a peaceful resolution.

“This war needs to end. But if it does not, if there is no path to peace in the short term, then the United States and President Donald J. Trump will take the steps necessary to impose costs for continued aggression.”

Zelensky has been urging the United States to ramp up sanctions pressure on Russia to coerce it into entering negotiations to end the war launched in February 2022, a call he repeated at the United Nations.

Addressing the General Assembly earlier, Trump said he was ready to impose strong economic measures if Russia did not end its war, but that allies would have to do the same. He also derided some European powers for continuing to buy Russian oil.

Zelensky said he and Trump discussed Russia’s stuttering economy and “there was an understanding” that Trump would be ready to provide security guarantees to Ukraine when the war ended.

He said that Trump had the power to prove a “game-changer” for Ukraine in the war. Zelensky noted China retained influence over Russia, though he added he had seen no sign from Beijing that it wanted the war over.

Speaking to reporters, Russia’s Deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy played down the significance of Trump’s statement on Truth Social.

“Don’t get so excited about every tweet,” said Polyanskiy.

Former Democratic US Representative Tom Malinowski said the Trump statement was “an amazing 180-degree turn, which might not last long”.

Malinowski, also a former assistant US secretary of state, added on X: “But Putin will have only one question back. What more is Trump actually going to do to help Ukraine win? If nothing, then it’s just words.”