WORLD BRIEFING: July 29, 2024

Venezuela’s opposition claimed victory in Sunday’s presidential election, setting up a showdown with the government, which earlier declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner. “The Venezuelans and the entire world know what happened,” opposition candidate Edmundo González said. The National Electoral Council, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, earlier said Maduro had secured 51% of the vote to 44% for González. But it didn’t release the tallies from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering the ability to verify the results. - AP

Israel has vowed that Hezbollah will “pay the price” after holding the Lebanese militant group responsible for a rocket attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 children. This incident has reignited fears of a potential full-scale war in the region. Hezbollah has “firmly denied” any involvement in the strike, which is the deadliest attack on Israel since the October 7 assaults. In response, Israeli warplanes launched airstrikes on Hezbollah targets both deep inside Lebanese territory and along the border overnight Sunday. It remains unclear if there were any casualties from these strikes. During a visit to Majdal Shams, the town near the Syrian and Lebanese borders where the rocket attack occurred, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant promised a severe retaliation. “Hezbollah is responsible for this and they will pay the price,” Gallant stated. He also emphasized in a previous statement, “We will hit the enemy hard.” - Lebanon Star

President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey might enter Israel as it had done in the past in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, though he did not spell out what sort of intervention he was suggesting. Erdogan, who has been a fierce critic of Israel's offensive in Gaza, started discussing that war during a speech praising his country's defence industry. “We must be very strong so that Israel can't do these ridiculous things to Palestine. Just like we entered Karabakh, just like we entered Libya, we might do similar to them," Erdogan told a meeting of his ruling AK Party in his hometown of Rize. - Reuters

Italy and China signed a three-year action plan on Sunday to implement past agreements and experiment with new forms of cooperation, Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on an official visit to the Chinese capital. Meloni is trying to reset relations with China as fears of a trade war with the European Union are interwoven with continued interest in attracting Chinese investment in auto manufacturing and other sectors. “We certainly have a lot of work to do and I am convinced that this work can be useful in such a complex phase in a global level, and also important at a multilateral level,” she said at the start of a meeting with Premier Li Qiang - Euronews

Georgia’s largest opposition party, the United National Movement, will submit a lawsuit against the controversial “foreign agent” law to the Constitutional Court on July 29, the party has told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service. Thirty-two opposition lawmakers signed the lawsuit on July 22. Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, a fierce critic of the law, filed a challenge against the legislation with the Constitutional Court on July 16. Zurabishvili vetoed the law in May, but the country's parliament, which is dominated by the ruling Georgian Dream party, overrode her veto. Signed into law on June 4, it has jeopardized the country's aspirations to join the European Union.