November 23

On November 23, 1996, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 was hijacked shortly after leaving Addis Ababa. Hijackers demanded the plane be flown to Australia though it carried only fuel for its scheduled multi-stop route. After hours over the Indian Ocean, the aircraft ran out of fuel and was ditched near Mitsamiouli on Grande Comore. Of 175 people aboard, 125 died and 50 survived; local fishermen and island residents led the first rescues.

Shortly after it left Athens for Cairo on November 23, 1985, EgyptAir Flight 648 was seized by three armed hijackers and forced to land at Luqa Airport, Malta. After a prolonged, tense standoff the night of November 23–24, Egyptian commandos were allowed to board and retake the Airbus A300. The assault was chaotic and deadly: dozens of passengers were killed or injured, the hijackers were neutralized (one captured), and the operation left lingering questions about the use of force, jurisdiction, and how states respond to hijackings.

On the evening of November 23, 1980, a powerful earthquake struck the Irpinia region in southern Italy, killing nearly three thousand people, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, and triggering a decades-long reconstruction marred by controversy. The Mw ~6.9 shock at 19:34:52 CET ruptured normal faults in the Apennines, collapsing masonry towns and exposing both the physical and institutional fragility of rural Italy.

In mid‑November 1978 a tropical storm that formed over the southeastern Bay of Bengal intensified and struck Sri Lanka’s eastern coast in the nights around November 22–24, 1978. Batticaloa, Ampara and nearby low‑lying villages took the brunt: storm surge, gale‑force winds and torrential rains flattened homes, ruined paddy fields and swept away fishing boats. Contemporary reports put the death toll near 900–1,000 and left hundreds of thousands homeless; the disaster exposed gaps in warning, shelter and infrastructure that shaped Sri Lanka’s later disaster planning.

On 23 November 1946, French warships bombarded the port city of Haiphong in northern Vietnam after a series of escalating confrontations over control of the docks and customs. The shelling and subsequent ground operations killed and wounded large numbers of civilians and combatants, devastated port infrastructure, and shattered a fragile truce—turning a tense standoff into the open fighting that would become the First Indochina War.

On November 23, 1939, HMS Rawalpindi — a converted P&O passenger liner serving as an armed merchant cruiser on the Royal Navy’s Northern Patrol — sighted two large Kriegsmarine warships in the North Atlantic. Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy challenged the strangers, sent warning signals, and engaged the German Scharnhorst‑class ships; Rawalpindi was heavily outgunned, suffered catastrophic damage and sank, with heavy loss of life and a small number of survivors recovered from the water.