Spain and Portugal plugged back in following unexplained power outage
More than 99 percent of power networks in Spain were restored by Tuesday morning and most had 'stabilised' in Portugal, according to the respective power operators, following Monday's outage that stranded people in buildings, elevators and public transport and cut access to phones and the internet.
Authorities in the Iberian Peninsula have yet to explain what caused the sweeping power cut.
Spain's electricity grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to supply virtually all of the country's electricity demand on Tuesday morning.
Portugal's REN said by late Monday it had all of the country's 89 power substations back up and running.
In the Spanish capital Madrid, 'loud cheers' erupted overnight as the power returned, Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen reported. 'But many people were still stranded in the stations because the trains were not moving,' she said.
Madrid's metro system said 80 percent of the trains would be operating again during rush hour on Tuesday morning.
In Portugal, the majority of the nation's 6.5 million households had their power restored overnight, according to REN.
With the power back on, attention is turning to what caused such widespread failure of the region's networks.
Barely a corner of the Iberian Peninsula, which has a joint population of about 60 million, escaped the blackout. Officials said there was little precedent.
Freak climate conditions and cyberattacks are among the candidates suggested. Officials have urged calm as the process of analysing the incident starts.
Both the Spanish and Portuguese governments scheduled crisis meetings on Tuesday morning.
Officials at the Portuguese grid operator have cited a 'rare atmospheric phenomenon' as the culprit, Al Jazeera's Sonia Gallego reported.
Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said the source of the failure was 'probably in Spain'.
Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said 'all the potential causes' of the incident are being analysed and warned the public 'not to speculate' because of the risk of 'misinformation', noting that 'no hypothesis or possibility is being ruled out.'
He said about 15 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to about 60 percent of the power being consumed at the time, had 'suddenly disappeared'.
Red Electrica stated that the outage was 'exceptional and totally extraordinary'.
The company's director of network operations told media that the disconnection of the European power grid in France was responsible. However, it remains unclear what led to this disconnection.
The outage was the second large failure of European power systems in as many months. In March, Europe's busiest airport, London's Heathrow, was forced to close after it suffered a 'significant' power failure, disrupting air transport worldwide.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Jazeera
3 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Church leaders, diplomats, condemn Israeli settler violence in West Bank
Top church leaders and diplomats have called on Israeli settlers to be held accountable during a visit to the predominantly Christian town of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank, after settlers intensified attacks on the area in recent weeks. Representatives from more than 20 countries including the United Kingdom, Russia, China, Japan, Jordan, and the European Union, were among the delegates who visited the village in the West Bank on Monday. Speaking in Taybeh, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III and Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa denounced an incident last week when settlers set fires near the community's church. They said that Israeli authorities failed to respond to emergency calls for help from the Palestinian community. In a separate statement, the patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem demanded an investigation into the incident and called for the settlers to be held accountable by the Israeli authorities, 'who facilitate and enable their presence around Taybeh'. The church leaders also said that settlers had brought their cattle to graze on Palestinian lands in the area, set fire to several homes last month, and put up a sign reading 'there is no future for you here'. Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Doha, said church leaders have been calling this a 'systemic and targeted attack' against Christians. 'About 50,000 of them live in the occupied West Bank, a small but very proud minority,' Ibrahim said. 'They also consider themselves under attack, not just because they're Christians but because they're Palestinians.' The church has been trying for years to 'enhance the steadfastness of the Christian community in Palestine', Ibrahim said. 'We've been seeing how Israeli settlers have been pushing them out of their lands, out of their homes.' Settlers, who are often armed, are backed by Israeli army soldiers and regularly carry out attacks against Palestinians, their lands, and property. Several rights groups have documented repeated instances where Israeli settlers in the West Bank ransack Palestinian neighbourhoods and towns, burning homes and vehicles. Assaults have grown in scale and intensity since Israel's brutal war on Gaza began in October 2023. These assaults also include large-scale incursions by Israeli forces into Palestinian towns and cities across the West Bank that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and displaced tens of thousands. Pizzaballa, the top Catholic cleric in Jerusalem, said he believed the West Bank was becoming a lawless area. 'The only law [in the West Bank] is that of power, of those who have the force, not the law. We must work for the law to return to this part of the country, so anyone can appeal to the law to enforce their rights,' Pizzaballa told reporters. He and Theophilos prayed together at the Church of St George, whose religious site dates back centuries, adjacent to the area where settlers ignited the fires. The visit comes as Palestinians report a new surge of settler violence. On Monday, Israeli settlers and soldiers launched several more attacks across the West Bank, including in Bethlehem, where settlers uprooted hundreds of olive trees in al-Maniya village, southeast of the city, and Israeli authorities demolished a four-storey residential building. The head of the al-Maniya village council, Zayed Kawazba, told Wafa news agency that a group of settlers stormed al-Qarn in the centre of al-Maniya, set up four tents and uprooted approximately 1,500 olive saplings belonging to families from the al-Motawer and Jabarin clans. A day earlier, hundreds descended on the village of Al-Mazraa ash-Sharqiya, south of Taybeh, for the funeral of two young men killed during a settler attack on Friday. The occupied West Bank is home to more than three million Palestinians who live under harsh Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority governing in limited areas separated from each other by a myriad of Israeli checkpoints. Israel has so far built more than 100 settlements across the West Bank, which are home to about 500,000 settlers who live illegally on private Palestinian land.
Al Jazeera
10 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
From Srebrenica to Gaza, why ‘never again' keeps failing
The raw statistics speak to the scale of the suffering in two places, separated by decades. Israel has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, many of them women and children, and injured more than 138,000. With constant bombardment, man-made famine, and tactics like declaring a safe zone and then bombing it, experts say what Israel is doing amounts to genocide. In the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 68,000 Bosniaks, rounding people up based on ethnicity. On July 11, 1995, Serb fighters rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a United Nations-declared 'safe zone' in the town of Srebrenica. That was the only legally recognised genocide of the Bosnian War. On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and as Israel's genocidal war on Gaza continues, Al Jazeera spoke to Iva Vukusic, assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, and Nimer Sultany, Palestinian legal scholar at the University of London, about the parallels between the two. Safe zones that aren't Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said his country intends to round up some 600,000 people who are in what Israel once designated as a 'safe zone' – and subsequently violated several times – and push them into a 'concentration zone' in Rafah. People would only be allowed to leave this 'concentration zone' if they were 'voluntarily emigrating' from Gaza. 'We have seen … Israeli academics, legal scholars, really objecting to this plan and calling it a manifest example of a war crime,' Vukusic explained. 'It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,' former Israeli Prime Minister said bluntly about the Katz announcement in an interview with the Guardian on Sunday. Implied in Israel's claim that it would secure this concentration zone from the outside, and that aid would be distributed within, is the idea that this zone will be yet another Israeli 'safe zone' in its war on Gaza. A unilaterally declared safe zone, however, does not include the external controls and mechanisms that were part of the Srebrenica safe zone 30 years ago, Vukusic pointed out. These controls included international peacekeepers as well as UN Security Council Resolution 819, declaring Srebrenica a safe area. The UN declaration of the safe zone came after thousands of Bosnians streamed into Srebrenica, seeking safety from relentless attacks by Bosnian Serb fighters acting under 'Directive 7' to cut Srebrenica off from any other areas. Hemmed in and starving, people were trapped. The external mechanisms monitoring it did not prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosniak boys and men, a failure of the international community's pledge to 'never again' allow mass atrocities. And, in Gaza, even the appearance of UN protection mechanisms is lacking. 'We see that failure of 'never again' when it comes to Gaza, because Israel has systematically expelled and dismantled any kind of UN presence and prevented international organisations from performing their minimal humanitarian objectives,' Sultany said. In Bosnia, as in Gaza, people were forced to flee for their lives in the face of relentless violence by the attacking forces. Israel has issued expulsion order after expulsion order, pushing people out of one part of Gaza into another, then back again. It declared certain areas as 'safe zones', then proceeded to bomb them as refugees slept in flimsy tents that Israeli bombs turned into infernos in seconds. Displacement and its physical and psychological toll on refugees have been studied in various contexts, with scientists finding that displaced people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders at much higher rates due to the uncertainty of displacement, the destruction of social support systems, and the inability to maintain a semblance of 'normal life'. Add to that the forced starvation Israel is imposing on Gaza, which takes a physical and mental toll, as people watch their loved ones die of malnutrition or from curable diseases that their bodies are too weak to fight. Sultany pointed out that 'forcible transfers, in which Palestinians are being forced into increasingly shrinking spaces with limited ability to survive and dire humanitarian conditions', have been a hallmark of Israel's war on Gaza. Therefore, while Katz's comments were a continuation/extension of what was already being seen on the ground, this now resembles an official plan. 'The question of forcible transfer is part of the declared objectives of the so-called Gideon's Chariots military campaign in early May 2025 [and] it was also part of the so-called General's Plan in northern Gaza in October till December 2024,' he clarified. How to make a society accept genocide Israel's actions in Gaza are widely documented, with daily accounts of unarmed Palestinians being shot by snipers or bombed from above. Israel has been denounced for its indiscriminate killing of civilians, especially after investigations showed that its army had allowed itself a higher 'margin of error' when it came to killing civilians in this conflict, compared to its past wars on Gaza. Both experts argued that this is widely accepted within Israel because Palestinians have been dehumanised, much as Bosniaks were during the 1990s. Sultany said, in both Bosnia and Gaza today, civilians have been stripped of their civilian status, or innocence, through repeated messaging to society at large. Early examples include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framing the assault on Gaza and its civilians as a 'holy war' and using Biblical references to equate Palestinians to ancient foes to justify these actions by saying: 'You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.' Most recently, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May that Gaza's population would soon be choked into a small strip of land to make them 'totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places'. Documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia pointed to several instances of propaganda by Bosnian Serb leaders to dehumanise Bosniaks and brand them as 'foreigners', including claiming that Bosniaks were all assassins with 'kill lists' of Bosnian Serbs. Such descriptors, Sultany said, give aggressors a 'justification for the killing of civilians' and make the killing more palatable to society. 'We see all of that now in Gaza in the last 21 months,' Sultany added. Vukusic agreed, telling Al Jazeera that in both Bosnia and Gaza, there has been a 'deep process of dehumanisation to allow for the societal acceptance of such acts where you see a people [who are] civilians as enemies'. There becomes a 'broad acceptance of acts committed by the government where only the suffering of yourself and your people [is seen] and it absolutely does not matter what the costs are for somebody else', she added. This shift is apparent in how freely and often Israeli officials have made openly genocidal statements. Serbian leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic (president of the Republic of Serbia from 1990 to 1997 and Serbia and Montenegro until 2000), were tried by the International Court of Justice for genocide and war crimes. Milosevic died before he was convicted. 'If you compare what Slobodan Milosevic was saying to some of the things that Israeli ministers are saying, Slobodan Milosevic was never, ever that open and was never, ever that explicit,' she said. Because statements by Israeli officials are so explicit, 'the determination of the genocidal intent would probably be much easier to make', she added. Inaction, politics and the international community Western nations were initially reluctant to involve themselves in the Bosnian War, but the horror of Srebrenica eventually moved them to action, with NATO conducting an air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces in August and September 1995, eventually leading to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war. Yet many of the countries that led the defence of the Bosniaks after Srebrenica are some of Israel's biggest backers. 'In many ways, this is a Western genocide,' Sultany said. 'There is a US-Israel genocide, a genocide that was backed from the beginning by major European and North American powers. 'This is fundamental to understanding the Western support for and justification for the genocide in Palestine,' Sultany said. 'It's not only that the West was a reluctant observer, and they failed to prevent the genocide. They were actively from the beginning supporting it, shielding it diplomatically and politically and financing and arming it.' Elusive justice What did justice look like for the victims in Bosnia, and is that a model that could be followed in Gaza? In the case of Bosnia, there is no universal position on the question of justice among the victims. Vukusic said some were satisfied with the prison sentences given to high-level officials convicted of genocide, while others are disappointed because not all the hundreds of people who participated in war crimes or genocidal acts were held to account. Sultany, after a recent visit to Bosnia, is convinced that Bosnians have been failed by international justice. 'The initial case was brought in 1993, [but] was delivered in 2007, almost 14 years later,' he said. 'So the wheels of justice grind very slowly.' He added that Srebrenica, a single massacre, was singled out among years of massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Bosnian Serb forces. 'Anyone who was killed before or after or [in] different areas is not considered a victim of genocide because of the detrimental effects of the legal delimitation of what is a genocide in the case of Bosnia,' he said. In Gaza, where attacks against Palestinians are ongoing, justice may be difficult to envision. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024, the international community has failed to follow through on them. Vukusic said expectations should be tempered when considering international justice, but that prosecutions are still important, allowing facts to be established in court, and messages sent about what the law does not allow. For example, Vukusic said: 'You cannot cut off a civilian population [from food and water], you cannot make them thirsty and hungry and without medicine, you cannot bomb universities, you cannot raze to the ground a whole area where two million people live. 'Those [messages] may be helpful, but nothing is going to restore what people have lost,' she said. 'Nothing is going to bring back dead family members.' 'In both cases [Bosnia and Palestine], there is a failure of prevention mechanisms,' Sultany said. 'And the fact that it fails again … is a miscarriage of justice in itself that requires us to rethink the international legal order.' Sultany added that the ongoing injustices against Palestinians are down to 'long-term impunity' and 'the fact that the Israelis have not been held to account by any meaningful legal mechanisms'. 'Never again' has not been put into practice when it comes to Palestinians, according to Sultany. 'We need to go to the root cause of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide … to guarantee that 'never again' becomes an effective and practical possibility,' he said.
Al Jazeera
11 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Israel killing Gaza civilians with commercial drones, probe finds
The Israeli army is weaponising Chinese-made drones to kill Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, according to an investigation by the Israeli publications 972 Magazine and the Local Call. The drones are operated manually by soldiers on the ground to bomb civilians – including children – to force them out of their homes or prevent them from returning to areas where Palestinians have been expelled, the outlets reported on Sunday. The publications interviewed seven soldiers and officers to produce their findings, they said. The report was published as criticism of Israel's plan to set up an internment camp in southern Gaza is growing. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Yair Lapid and Ehud Olmert said it would amount to a 'concentration camp' if Palestinians there are not allowed to leave. 'The weaponisation of civilian drones to kill and dispossess Palestinians is the latest revelation of the cruelties normalised in Gaza and further evidence of how Israel is trying to forcibly transfer the population to the south of the Strip,' Al Jazeera's Nour Odeh said, reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Israel has banned Al Jazeera from reporting from Israel and the occupied West Bank. Soldiers are using mostly Evo drones produced by the Chinese company Autel, which are sold commercially for about $3,000 and used by photographers, the investigation found. 'However, with a military-issued attachment known internally as an 'iron ball', a hand grenade can be affixed to the drone and dropped with the push of a button to detonate on the ground,' the report said, adding that a majority of Israeli military companies in Gaza use these drones. 'Deliberately targeted children' An Israeli soldier who served in the Rafah area this year and was identified in the report only as S was tasked with coordinating drone attacks in a neighbourhood of the city that the army had ordered to be evacuated, the Israeli media outlets reported. 'It was clear that they were trying to return to their homes – there's no question,' the soldier told the publications. 'None of them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired warning shots. Not at any point.' Israeli soldiers also said they did not allow bodies to be collected, sometimes letting stray dogs eat them as they watched and filmed from afar. In several cases, S told the outlets, the Israeli army deliberately targeted children. 'There was a boy who entered the [off-limits] zone. He didn't do anything. [Other soldiers] claimed to have seen him standing and talking to people. That's it – they dropped a grenade from a drone,' S said. Israeli soldiers said the drones 'were used to empty Palestinian neighbourhoods and to teach Palestinians, through blood, not to return', Odeh said. According to the soldiers interviewed, the commercial drones are advantageous because they are much cheaper than military-grade ones. 'It's very cheap, it's very easy to use. It's decentralised in a way, the use of these drones, because it's a platoon that can use them. It does not need to require the authorisation from central command,' Meron Rapoport, editor and writer at the Local Call, told Al Jazeera. Israeli army units in Gaza are also crowdfunding in Israel and the United States to buy more of these drones, posting videos to thank donors for their contributions, the report said. The drone attacks are part of Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed at least 58,026 Palestinians and wounded 138,520 since it began in October 2023, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.
