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On a sweltering Thursday morning in mid-August 2026, central London’s streets hit an unprecedented 30 degrees Celsius by 10 a.m., marking what climate officials confirm will be the United Kingdom’s hottest summer ever recorded. Just steps from Oxford Street’s iconic Selfridges department store, discarded newspapers carry headlines of spreading wildfires across the British countryside, while a unhoused man calls out for spare change under the unforgiving sun. Inside the cool, air-conditioned building, a Saudi Arabian coffee stand promotes the kingdom, a nod to the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s 40 percent controlling stake in the century-old luxury retailer.

It was here just one week earlier that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, faced a rare public confrontation during a walk through nearby North Audley Street. A Sudanese protester, shouting across the road at the delegation, called out “UAE is killing people in my country, stop killing my people” over the UAE’s widely reported involvement in Sudan’s ongoing civil conflict. A member of the Sheikh’s large entourage responded by hurling a racial slur at the protester, calling him a “Black bitch”.

As of mid-August, Sheikh Mohammed has remained in London, where he has held closed-door meetings with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and been photographed visiting the upscale west London neighborhood of Chelsea. For Gulf’s wealthiest citizens, however, London’s Mayfair district—home to North Audley Street, one of the most expensive addresses in the world, lined with Michelin-starred restaurants, luxury supercar showrooms and five-star hotels—has long functioned as a home away from home.

For Gulf visitors, the annual August pilgrimage to central London blends business, leisure, and familiarity, shaped by decades of historical and financial ties between Gulf states and the UK. Inside Selfridges, 15-year-old Khaled and his 53-year-old uncle Mohammed, visiting from Dubai, framed their regular trip as a natural extension of Gulf investments in the UK. “We come to London because we have a lot of investments here and we like to help them out,” Khaled told Middle East Eye, when asked about the confrontation with Sheikh Mohammed. Dismissing the Sudanese protester as “ignorant,” he added, “We are helping Sudan. We are sending humanitarian aid. It was disrespectful.”

His uncle, who grew up in Dubai before the oil boom transformed the emirate into a global luxury hub, echoed the sentiment. “Yes, you can have freedom of speech, but you can’t say that to a leader; it’s not respectful,” he said, noting that today’s Emirates offer instant access to any service imaginable: “you can get whatever you want within minutes. Someone will bring it to you. You don’t even have to get up.”

The pair are part of a decades-long pattern of Gulf leadership and elite families sending young people to the UK for education, with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, and many other senior Gulf leaders all having attended British universities or received military training in the country. Khaled, who plans to enroll at a London university, says he prefers the British capital’s relatively cool summer temperatures to Dubai’s habitual 40-degree August heat, where even daily life is confined to air-conditioned spaces. Like many young Gulf visitors, he keeps his time in London limited almost exclusively to the capital’s most affluent central neighborhoods, avoiding working-class and migrant-heavy outer areas. “We don’t go to the areas where there are roadmen and lots of migrants and stabbings,” he explained, pulling up a phone map marked with what he calls “prime khaleeji hangouts”—all clustered within Mayfair, including high-end restaurants Cipriani, Ivy Asia, Sexy Fish, Supernova and Nobu.

Khaled’s wariness of London outside its elite core is shared by many other young Gulf visitors. A Saudi woman, speaking on condition of anonymity, recalled the reaction of a 15-year-old Saudi student attending a residential summer school in the capital: the teen insists on hiring a personal bodyguard, claiming “people here are so poor they will try to stab me for my Hermes” bag. Even for middle-class Gulf families, London’s central luxury districts function as a self-contained enclave where visitors can easily encounter fellow Gulf citizens. Two teenage sisters from Bahrain, shopping in Selfridges, said they had unexpectedly run into multiple school friends during their trip, a common occurrence in Mayfair. “When we go to Harrods we see people from the Gulf, we see friends and family… It’s not hot, it’s nothing compared to back home where we spend all the time with the AC on,” the 17-year-old sister explained. Still, some aspects of London life remain unfamiliar: “We don’t really have or use public transport in Bahrain. The underground here is very crowded and chaotic. The architecture is different here too.”

Across North Audley Street from Selfridges, at the historic Marlborough pub, temperatures continue to climb through the afternoon. Apart from a small group of regulars drinking pints, the street is dominated by Gulf visitors. Two Kuwaiti fashion and lifestyle influencers, Sarra and Elaf, pose for photos against the street’s Georgian townhouse facades, as a Bugatti supercar roars past. “We mainly spend our time here in Mayfair,” Sarra said. “We come for the weather, the people, the shopping. In our country we can’t find a lot of the brands you have here… For us, it’s good weather. We also come in November because we love the cold, and we love the Christmas vibes.”

For local Mayfair businesses, the annual August influx of wealthy Gulf visitors is not just a seasonal trend—it is the backbone of their annual revenue. At Grays Antique Market, a historic covered market housing more than 80 independent luxury dealers, one senior jeweller says he never takes holiday in August, relying on Gulf shoppers to make his year. “They are an integral part of the business, especially in August; I can’t go away now,” he explained, noting that members of the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE are all regular customers. “Mayfair is the mecca of the Arab world in a way. They love fine things. The men come here to buy silver jewellery, the women come here because they know they can get brands like Cartier, Tiffany and Bulgari at a steep discount.” He added that young Gulf shoppers regularly spend four-figure sums on small luxury items, and one customer recently purchased an £18,500 piece without hesitation—half the price she would have paid back home.

The jeweller also noted a dramatic shift in the source of luxury capital in London over the past four years. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the city was widely nicknamed “Londongrad” for the massive flow of Russian oligarch money into its luxury sector. “I used to deal with a lot of Russians, but they’ve all left like rats from a sinking ship,” he said. “The Russians still here don’t have any money.” Today, that void has been filled by capital from Gulf states, which now own major London landmarks including Selfridges and Harrods, the rival Knightsbridge department store purchased by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2010.

At the heart of Mayfair sits Grosvenor Square, which housed the United States’ diplomatic mission to the UK from 1785 until 2018. The former embassy building has since been converted into a luxury hotel, home to the Qatari-owned Qinwan Cafe, another popular gathering spot for Gulf visitors, where three small chicken sandwiches sell for £20 and authentic Palestinian dates—familiar to Gulf visitors—are on offer. On a recent afternoon, women in abayas and men in designer polo shirts sat at outdoor tables, scrolling through social media and posting photos of their coffee to Instagram.

For London’s working-class residents, however, Mayfair’s wealth is a distant, often stark contrast to their own economic struggles. Sitting in his delivery van outside the square, Hash, a delivery driver from south London, waited for his next job amid the 30-degree heat. “Mayfair means money,” he said, reflecting on how his own earnings have fallen over the past six years. “There was a time six years ago, when he could make £500 a day driving a delivery to Scotland and back. Now he says he is lucky to earn more than £100 a day.”

A short walk away, long queues of Gulf tourists wait outside Marchesi, the historic 19th-century patisserie, while a Ferrari dealership glints in the midday sun on Berkeley Square. Deep underground at Green Park Underground station, temperatures climb close to 40 degrees Celsius, as station announcements warn passengers of partial line closures and severe delays across the London Underground network—an inconvenience most Gulf visitors never encounter, confined as they are to the air-conditioned comfort of Mayfair’s luxury spaces.

For six straight days, three Palestinian families have been trapped under a settler siege in the occupied West Bank village of Qusra, near Nablus, in a standoff that has exposed alarming gaps between Israeli military announcements and on-the-ground action, even as settler violence across the occupied territories surges to record levels.

The blockade began last Sunday, when a group of Israeli settlers surrounded three residential properties on Qusra’s Ras al-Ain hilltop, erecting tents directly outside the homes in what local residents describe as a deliberate campaign to seize Palestinian-owned land by forcing the families to abandon their properties. Settlers quickly cut off access to running water and electricity for the besieged homes, leaving children and adults trapped inside without reliable access to basic supplies including food and critical medicine.

When the trapped families called on the Israeli army for intervention, arriving troops were captured on online footage socializing with the settlers—drinking and praying alongside them—rather than executing orders to remove the interlopers. After the incident gained widespread international attention, the Israeli military officially announced it had launched an operation to evict the settlers and designated Qusra a closed military zone. To date, however, no settlers have been removed from the area, and no arrests have been issued in connection with the illegal blockade.

Far from targeting the settlers, Israeli forces responded by deploying more than 1,000 troops to Qusra, where they forcibly evicted approximately 20 Palestinian families from their homes and seized eight residential properties to convert into military outposts. Village council head Abdul-Azim Wadi told reporters that military liaison officials informed local leaders the army intended to seize 16 homes, giving residents only immediate eviction orders with no explanation for the seizure. When soldiers later withdrew from some of the seized properties, returning residents found widespread damage: one home had $1,500 stolen and all furniture destroyed, while others had personal property looted. Multiple properties were left with graffiti reading “We will return” scrawled on interior walls by troops.

Qusay Abu Rida, who has been sheltering in one of the three besieged homes to guard the property on behalf of his brother (a U.S. resident who built the home in 2023), said settlers have targeted the land for months. Previous attacks have seen settlers break through the home’s gate, destroy security cameras, and steal outdoor belongings, forcing Abu Rida and his family to move into the property four months ago to defend it from seizure. “They would constantly come into the yard, shouting and vandalising things. Then, on Sunday, they came and erected a tent directly in front of the house, cutting off our electricity and water,” Abu Rida explained to Middle East Eye.

Abu Rida added that Israeli forces have not only failed to remove the settlers, but have actively increased pressure on the trapped families. Soldiers forced Abu Rida and his neighbors out of two homes, confining them to a single smaller property, cut off all remaining access to essential supplies, and banned residents from leaving even to retrieve necessities from their abandoned homes. Though soldiers eventually withdrew from Abu Rida’s home after causing internal damage, and dismantled one settler tent, they also destroyed all security camera footage documenting the siege. Settlers quickly re-erected their tents, restoring the blockade.

Abu Rida noted the pattern of harassment mirrors an incident in nearby Jalud just one month prior, where repeated settler attacks backed by Israeli military inaction forced the al-Tubasi family to abandon their home, which settlers subsequently seized.

Local Qusra activist Hani Odeh described the ongoing crisis as “heartbreaking”, saying settlers and soldiers take turns pressuring Palestinian residents to abandon their land. Three out of four of the village’s expansion zones have already been seized by Israeli forces and settlers, leaving northern Qusra’s Ras al-Ain area as the only space remaining for the village to grow. Odeh explained that settlers have targeted Ras al-Ain for its strategic position overlooking five villages south of Nablus, despite the area being classified as Area B under the 1995 Oslo Accords—an administrative designation that puts the zone under Palestinian civil control, with only security responsibilities shared with Israel. Until recently, the nearest Israeli settlement activity was located 15 kilometers away.

According to Odeh, the encroachment began quietly months ago, when a single settler started grazing livestock in the area. More settlers gradually joined, launching repeated attacks on Palestinian homes to drive residents out. Attempts to deliver aid to the trapped families have been repeatedly blocked by Israeli forces: even Israeli activists who attempted to bring food last Friday were turned away, and an ambulance carrying supplies was also stopped and turned back at checkpoints. “This whole situation is worrying all the residents of Qusra. We don’t know where the settlers will go next after attacking homes in an area classified as Area B. The soldiers do not have the authority to remove the settlers; they only oppress us,” Odeh said.

The ongoing siege in Qusra comes amid a documented sharp spike in deadly settler violence across the occupied West Bank. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that as of July 20, 2026, it has recorded more than 1,330 settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage across 250 Palestinian communities since the start of the year—an average of more than six attacks per day. So far in 2026, settler violence has killed at least 18 Palestinians, wounded 880 more, and displaced more than 2,300 people from their homes.

Currently, approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers reside in roughly 300 settlements and outposts across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled that all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory violate international law. In recent years, despite the Oslo Accords’ administrative divisions, settlers have increasingly expanded their illegal activity into Area B, a zone previously not targeted for large-scale settlement encroachment.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a sunlit office in central Beirut, prominent British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah leans over a stack of patient files, his weekend operating schedule filled with names that tell a devastating story of Israeli military campaigns across Lebanon and Gaza. All 11 patients waiting for his care are children, each bearing catastrophic, life-altering injuries from ongoing conflict.

Among the cases he reviews are two siblings carrying unexploded shrapnel from the 2024 cross-border war that has only recently begun to trigger dangerous secondary complications. There is a young boy with a partial foot amputation in need of complex reconstruction, another who requires final work on an amputation stump to prepare for prosthetic rehabilitation, and a child with a severe elbow injury that will demand hours of delicate surgery to save the joint from permanent disablement. “And so on, they are all like that… catastrophic,” Abu Sittah told Middle East Eye in an interview.

One of those waiting for their next procedure is 12-year-old Fatima al-Jabal, the youngest of three surviving sisters who escaped death when an Israeli strike flattened their family home in the small mountain village of Libbaya, located in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, on March 7. The attack killed Zainab, their 10-year-old fourth sister, whose body was torn apart in the blast and never fully recovered. Their mother, who was severely wounded in the strike, later died of her injuries in a Beirut hospital.

Fatima survived, but she lost an eye, suffered a dislocated jaw and extensive foot damage that has already required multiple surgeries. Now, Abu Sittah plans to remove remaining shrapnel embedded in her face and back to stop recurrent, life-threatening infections.

Days before her upcoming procedure, a Middle East Eye reporter visited the three surviving sisters and their father, 60-year-old Hassan Ali al-Jabal, in their temporary two-bedroom hotel apartment in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, where they have stayed while receiving ongoing care at the American University of Beirut Medical Centre. The smell of caramelized onion hung in the air as Hassan cooked moudardara, the traditional Lebanese lentil and rice dish that is his daughters’ favorite. In the corner of the living room, the three girls, still in soft pajamas, sat shoulder to shoulder stringing blue and pink beads into bracelets and phone straps to sell for pocket money, snacking on barbeque-flavored potato chips. Leaned against the balcony wall, a folded wheelchair waited – a reminder that only months ago, all three girls relied on it to move.

When 16-year-old Malak, the eldest sister, instinctively tugged her lavender nightdress down to cover the extensive burns that scar her legs, Hassan gently reassured her there was no reason for shame. Malak suffered the most devastating injuries of the three surviving girls: a traumatic brain injury, multiple compound fractures across her body, and permanent disfigurement that left her reliant on round-the-clock care for months. After months of intensive physiotherapy, she has reclaimed small but vital pieces of independence. “I can now go to the bathroom on my own, so I have improved a lot,” she said, weeks after spending months in intensive care following the strike.

Fourteen-year-old Kawthar now walks with the support of a walker, but an external fixation frame held in place by metal pins drilled into her bone still stabilizes a finger on her right hand and her entire left leg. A thick scar stretches across half her face, a permanent marker of the attack.

“All three have progressed a lot, but they still have a long road ahead and it can take a long time,” Hassan said, as he stirred his pot of lentils and rice. He explained that each girl faces a unique, lifelong set of medical challenges: Kawthar’s leg requires months more of reconstruction to regain function; Malak still carries extensive unhealed back injuries from broken vertebrae, and spent two and a half months unable to move on her own, her skin shredded from shrapnel that required multiple skin grafts to repair. “It was like something was eating off her body because of all the shrapnel,” Hassan said of Fatima’s recurrent wound infections, common for blast injuries where shrapnel carries contaminants deep into tissue.

None of the three girls wanted to speak about the harrowing weeks they spent in intensive care after the strike. But when Hassan teased them about their contrasting personalities – Malak the responsible, caring oldest sister, Kawthar the quiet stubborn thinker, Fatima the rambunctious youngest – giggles filled the small apartment, and for a few minutes, the space felt like any other family home. When he began to recount anecdotes of their quiet life in the village before the strike, the moment of soft warmth held, until he turned to the day he dug his surviving daughters out of the rubble that had been their home.

The smiles faded quickly. A framed portrait of Zainab, decorated with painted flowers, sits on the mantelpiece above the girls’ shared bed. “There is no point in a nice picture,” Hassan said, his voice thick with anger. “People tell me that my daughter is in heaven. I want her here, with me, not in heaven. I raised her for 10 years.” This is not the first time Hassan has lost a family member to Israeli war: his brother was killed during Israel’s 1982 full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon, 44 years to the month before Zainab’s death. The pain of the past has blurred into the present, leaving him struggling to untangle the multigenerational tragedy that has destroyed his family.

For years, Hassan had built a quiet life in the Bekaa Valley village, nursing a dream to build four stacked apartments for his four daughters, so they would always live close to one another. He never once considered leaving Lebanon, he said, until the day the strike hit. Now, he wonders what the future holds. “Kawthar said no. She doesn’t want to live elsewhere,” he said. “It is nice in Lebanon, but you need a future. And wars keep happening. I am 60, so I have lived my life. I don’t know how long I have left.”

Malak, Kawthar and Fatima still long to return to the Bekaa Valley to see their old friends and the home they loved, even as they know nothing will be the same. Israeli military operations and demolitions continue across southern Lebanon, and Israeli officials have repeatedly stated they have no plans to withdraw from territory seized during the 2024 offensive. “We used to love our lives before,” Malak said, her voice carrying a gravity no teenager should ever have to hold. “We were all good students in school… We will certainly go back, carry on, and love life. But, of course, things won’t be the same as before. We want to be a support system to each other and want to go back and divide the work in the house and be like our mum would want us to be.”

The al-Jabal sisters are just three of more than 400 children across Lebanon who have received care through the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund, launched by the surgeon in January 2024 to provide free reconstructive care to child war victims in both Gaza and Lebanon. For decades, Abu Sittah – who resides primarily in London – has traveled to conflict zones to treat the most vulnerable victims of war, from the First Intifada in Gaza to the Gulf War, Yemen and Syria.

He says the pattern of pediatric injuries he is treating in Lebanon today is “almost identical” to what he witnessed in Gaza when Israel launched its full-scale military campaign in October 2023. As of August 2026, Israel has killed more than 73,200 Palestinians in Gaza since the offensive began, including more than 1,250 after a May 2025 ceasefire took effect, with thousands more still buried under rubble. Across the Lebanese border, more than 4,330 people have been killed by Israeli strikes since March 2024. Combined, more than 185,000 people across both fronts have been wounded by Israeli military action.

“These children were wounded when Israel bombed their homes… so all of their injuries are either a direct result of the blast wave – shrapnel injuries, burns and tearing of tissue – or they were pulled under the rubble and they have crush injuries,” Abu Sittah explained. “And you rarely get a child with a single injury. It is usually a head injury and a fracture and a burn and other things, and they are all severe.”

Nearly all of his young patients have sustained life-altering injuries that will leave them with permanent disability or disfigurement, he said, with roughly 80 percent requiring intensive care at the time of their first treatment. Saving a child’s life is only the first step of care; ongoing reconstruction will require an average of 12 to 16 surgeries before the child reaches adulthood, as growing bodies require repeated re-intervention: scar tissue and damaged tissue does not grow at the same rate as healthy tissue, leading to complications that require additional procedures as children age.

Even after the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that took effect on April 16, 2024, the number of injured children requiring care continues to climb, as previously undiagnosed complications emerge and delayed care becomes available. Lebanon’s already fragile, heavily privatized healthcare system has been pushed to the breaking point by the crisis, leaving NGOs like Abu Sittah’s fund to fill gaps in care.

For children like the al-Jabal sisters, a ceasefire cannot undo the harm already done, nor does it guarantee safety in the future. Abu Sittah acknowledges that the cumulative weight of working with such profound daily suffering is difficult to process, but he says action is the only antidote to despair. “I deal with it by seeing it within the bigger picture and by being grateful that I have ended up in a junction in my life that I am able to not feel paralysed and not feel like a spectator,” he said. “Being a spectator is probably the worst thing that you can do when you are watching this horror unfold.”