博客

Shifting security dynamics in the Persian Gulf, fueled by escalating confrontation between the US-Israeli bloc and Iran, have pushed Kuwait to open early-stage negotiations for a broadened defense agreement with Pakistan, a deal that would be paired with expanded energy cooperation and Pakistani investment access, senior diplomatic sources cited by Reuters confirm.

According to a senior Pakistani official who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, Kuwait’s proposal calls for Islamabad to deploy a substantial security contingent to the Gulf state: thousands of ground troops, combat fighter jet squadrons, armed drone units, integrated air defense systems, and supporting defense infrastructure. While discussions have only just begun, the outreach underscores a profound reordering of Gulf security alliances amid rising regional fallout from the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran.

Kuwait has emerged as one of the highest-impact targets of retaliatory Iranian strikes launched in response to the war. Just last week, Kuwaiti government officials confirmed that a critical national power generation and water desalination facility suffered severe damage during one such Iranian attack, threatening core public services for the country’s 5 million residents.

What makes Kuwait’s overture to Pakistan particularly notable is the Gulf state’s longstanding status as a major host for U.S. military forces. Currently, approximately 14,000 U.S. troops are based in Kuwait — a larger deployment than any other Middle Eastern nation — anchored by two large strategic American installations: Camp Arifjan, a major army logistics and command hub, and Ali al-Salem Air Base.

Pakistan occupies a unique diplomatic position in the region that makes it an attractive security partner for Kuwait. It maintains formal security cooperation with the United States, with particularly deep ties built during the Trump administration, while also preserving cordial, open diplomatic relations with Iran. This balanced stance has allowed Islamabad to carve out a niche as a trusted mediator between competing regional powers. Most recently, Pakistan and Qatar co-brokered a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, though that truce has come under severe strain as fighting has escalated in recent weeks.

The talks with Kuwait also highlight a growing broader trend: Pakistan is emerging as an alternative or complementary security provider for Gulf states seeking to supplement their security arrangements with the United States. In September 2025, Saudi Arabia — the Arab world’s largest economy — signed a formal mutual defense pact with Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed state in the Muslim world. During the most intense wave of Iranian strikes on Gulf targets earlier this year, many Saudi public commentators framed the new defense pact as placing Riyadh under Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent umbrella. A U.S. official speaking to Middle East Eye at the time noted that Pakistani leadership was uncomfortable with that framing and held diplomatic discussions with Saudi officials to clarify the agreement’s scope.

Beyond the defense pact, Pakistan has already leveraged its warm relations with Iran to lobby against attacks on Saudi Arabia, including strikes launched by the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen. As Reuters previously reported in May, Pakistan already deployed 8,000 troops, one full fighter jet squadron, and a Chinese-built air defense system to Saudi Arabia to bolster the kingdom’s security.

Kuwait and Pakistan first signed a baseline security cooperation agreement in 2023, focused on mutual military training and joint exercises. Expanding that deal to include a formal mutual defense clause, modeled after the agreement Islamabad reached with Riyadh, would carry significant new risks for Pakistan. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which holds substantial regional diplomatic leverage over Iran thanks to its economic and political influence, Kuwait is a far smaller state with far less capacity to de-escalate tensions on its own.

Geographically, Kuwait’s position in the northern Persian Gulf leaves it uniquely exposed to missile and drone attacks from both Iran and Iran-aligned militias based in neighboring Iraq, a vulnerability that has been amplified dramatically since the outbreak of the current regional war. The U.S. military established its permanent footprint in Kuwait only in the 1990s, following Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of the country that pushed Kuwait to align closely with Washington. Historically, during the Ottoman Empire, Kuwait was part of a provincial administrative district that also included Iraq’s Basra region.

This reporting was compiled and distributed by Middle East Eye, an outlet that provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.

As a high-profile trial over a Palestine Action raid on an Israeli-owned arms factory unfolds, one defendant has shared devastating personal details about losing his terminally ill mother while he was held in pre-trial detention, opening a new chapter of debate over the case and its ties to the Gaza conflict.

Thirty-five-year-old William Plastow, the grandson of Julius Nyerere — Tanzania’s revered first president — is one of eight people facing criminal charges linked to the August 2024 raid on an Elbit Systems facility in Filton, near Bristol. While none of the eight are accused of entering the factory premises during the action, prosecutors allege they coordinated the break-in by carrying out reconnaissance and purchasing necessary equipment. Last week, presiding judge Patrick Field acquitted Plastow of violent disorder, ruling the prosecution had failed to present sufficient evidence to support the charge; he remains formally charged with criminal damage.

Giving evidence to the court this week, Plastow laid out a personal and political context for his actions. Raised as an only child by his mother Jane Plastow in Leeds, he recalled childhood trips to Eritrea and Ethiopia, where his mother ran community theatre outreach programs for war veterans and children living in poverty. These experiences, he said, shaped his lifelong commitment to social justice. That commitment deepened dramatically after the October 7 2023 attacks and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza. “My awareness of Israel’s actions in Gaza increased vastly,” he told the jury. “I saw those images every day of kids being blown into pieces, massacres, buildings being knocked down with everyone inside them. How is anyone supposed to feel about seeing dismembered children and not being able to do anything about it?”

Plastow explained that he first turned to conventional forms of activism: joining mass protest marches, writing to his Member of Parliament, signing public petitions. But he soon came to see these actions as futile. “It felt very obvious that all of that was pretty futile,” he said. It was around this time that he first encountered Palestine Action, a direct-action group targeting companies linked to Israeli arms supplies. The group first caught his attention after a successful rooftop protest that forced a property owner to cut ties with Elbit, and he noted the group had already managed to shut down multiple facilities supplying what he described as “genocidal machinery to slaughter children in Gaza”. He compared the discovery of Elbit’s UK operations to learning that Zyklon B gas for Auschwitz was being manufactured 10 minutes from his home, with no public pushback.

After attending a Palestine Action training session, where he heard firsthand accounts of “unimaginable suffering” from a Gaza native, Plastow said he agreed to participate in a low-profile lock-on protest at an Elbit drone factory in Leicester in April 2024. He was convicted of criminal damage for that action. He emphasized that the group operates on a strict “need to know” basis, with very little information shared with participants ahead of actions, and described the loosely affiliated network as “chaotic” rather than the tightly organized conspiracy prosecutors have described. “Nothing about Palestine Action could be described as highly organised,” he said. “It’s a bunch of loosely connected people scrabbling around.”

Following the Leicester action, Plastow said he had no interest in participating in further on-the-ground direct actions due to work commitments, but agreed to purchase equipment for the group when asked in early August 2024. Co-defendant Sean Middlebrough contacted him via the encrypted messaging app Signal to request he buy rucksacks, protective gear, and crowbars, but never disclosed what the equipment would be used for. “It was a very busy time for me, a play I’d been trying to put together was falling apart,” Plastow told the court. “I was just paying attention to the things I’d been asked to buy and get them ready in as time-efficient a way as possible.” He told the jury he never heard of the Filton site before the day of the raid, and had no idea the equipment was destined for the action.

Days later, when a Palestine Action activist named Charlotte Head — part of the on-the-ground team that entered the Filton factory — arrived at his Manchester home in a distinctive prison van to collect the equipment, Plastow said he was caught completely off guard. Head appeared frazzled, he said, after being told she could not go to the pre-planned staging location she expected. She had nowhere to go, so Plastow allowed her to stay the night, and when Middlebrough and co-defendant Ian Sanders arrived the next day, the three left together in the van. Prosecutor Harry Warner suggested that by hosting Head, Plastow was knowingly assisting the group’s plan to damage Elbit property. Plastow pushed back on this: “I was trying to assist a young woman who was stressed out to have a place to stay for the night and not have to sleep in a van.”

Plastow only learned of the Filton raid on the morning of August 6, when he saw a public post from Palestine Action on X (formerly Twitter) announcing the action. The post stated that activists had “directly intervened in Elbit’s genocidal supply chain” by dismantling weapons and machinery inside the factory. After seeing a subsequent BBC News report confirming the raid and the arrest of multiple activists, Plastow said he strongly suspected the equipment he had purchased had been used for the action — and that he felt “duped”. He told the jury he would never have agreed to participate had he known the scope of the operation.

Five days after the raid, on August 9, Plastow was arrested by roughly 20 counter-terrorism police officers. He told the court he was held for six days in a windowless white cell where the lights stayed on 24 hours a day, conditions he compared to the treatment of fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter. What made this timing even more devastating, he said, was that this period of detention was the final days he could have spent with his mother, who was in the end stages of terminal cancer. He was denied bail for 18 months following his arrest, only granted release on compassionate grounds to spend the final four days of his mother’s life at her bedside. “I missed the last year of her life,” he told the court.

Forensic analysis of Plastow’s phone and laptop, conducted by investigators, has backed up his account of no prior knowledge of the Filton operation. His defense lawyer Alex Rose told the jury that no evidence was found of Plastow accessing the encrypted planning document for the Filton raid, no history of searching for the Filton site or related planning materials, and no record of him joining group Signal calls related to the action. The only reference to the raid found on his devices before August 6 was the public Palestine Action post he viewed on the morning of the action.

When pressed by prosecutors that he must have known the equipment he bought would be used to damage Elbit property, Plastow acknowledged he knew the items would serve Palestine Action’s core goal. “I knew they were going to be used towards the aims of Palestine Action, which were ultimately to save lives,” he said.

The trial against the eight defendants is ongoing.

A decades-long insider from Morocco’s domestic intelligence apparatus has blown the whistle on the North African kingdom’s years-long use of sophisticated surveillance tools, including Israel’s infamous Pegasus spyware, to target domestic critics, journalists, and even high-ranking foreign officials from allied nations. The explosive new disclosures from the anonymous whistleblower, codenamed Safir, form the core of a major new collaborative investigation published Thursday by a global consortium of press freedom and human rights groups, including Forbidden Stories, Amnesty International, and 13 additional independent media organizations.

Safir, who spent nearly 10 years as an officer with Morocco’s Direction Generale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST), the country’s primary domestic intelligence agency, offers a firsthand, on-the-ground account of Morocco’s entire relationship with Pegasus, from the tool’s initial introduction to senior Moroccan officials to its repeated deployment against surveillance targets. His firsthand testimony is backed by a mountain of corroborating evidence compiled by the investigative consortium: leaked internal correspondence, targeting logs linked to Pegasus and other surveillance tools, statements from targeting victims, internal agency training documents, and leaked datasets analyzed forensically by Amnesty International’s specialized Security Lab.

According to the investigation’s reconstruction of events, Pegasus made its debut with Moroccan intelligence in 2017, during a closed-door presentation held at a luxury private villa in Rabat, the country’s capital. The villa, nicknamed the “FSSYS villa” for its ties to FSSYS Maroc, the Moroccan subsidiary of Emirati surveillance intermediary al-Fahad, hosted senior NSO Group representatives, the Israeli cyber firm that developed the Pegasus tool, who walked a group of high-ranking Moroccan intelligence leaders and technical specialists through the spyware’s full capabilities.

In his testimony, Safir made a startling claim about the origins of Morocco’s access to the extremely expensive tool: he says Pegasus was gifted to Moroccan intelligence by the United Arab Emirates, drawing a comparison to popular streaming subscriptions to explain the arrangement. “Millions for the Emiratis, that’s nothing,” Safir told investigators. “The Emirates bought it and redistributed it to friendly services. You could say it’s like Netflix: a friend pays for the subscription, and the others use their account.”

The investigation notes that even with this donated access, the high cost of operating Pegasus led the DGST to reserve the tool only for high-priority targets, deploying it only after exhausting far cheaper, traditional surveillance methods. These older tactics included compromising devices at public internet cafes and convincing local shop owners to sell pre-infected mobile phones to political dissidents, Safir explained. “We never start with Pegasus,” he said. “It’s the monster’s weapon.”

Data from the investigation confirms that just months after the 2017 Rabat presentation, the DGST began using Pegasus against Moroccan journalists and domestic human rights defenders. While domestic dissidents were the first targets, they were far from the only ones. Prominent Western Sahara human rights activist Aminatou Haidar and Spanish journalist Ignacio Combrero were both named among more than 200 Spanish mobile numbers selected for targeting by what investigators confirmed was a DGST-linked Pegasus user.

The targeting extended even to senior serving Spanish government officials, including Spain’s then-Defense Minister Margarita Robles and then-Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the investigation confirms. In a particularly striking revelation, the investigation found that Moroccan intelligence also deployed Pegasus against Spanish Civil Guard officers who traveled to Morocco to share counterterrorism training and expertise with their Moroccan counterparts. Spanish National Police typically take extra security precautions during trips to Morocco, but the Civil Guard officers skipped these measures, seeing Morocco as a trusted counterterrorism ally. One senior Civil Guard officer told the consortium, “We didn’t do it because we didn’t suspect we would be spied on.”

Notably, the investigation found no evidence of Pegasus deployment by Moroccan intelligence after late 2021. This gap lines up with major shifts in global regulation of the NSO Group: that same year, the United States added the Israeli cyber firm to its commerce blacklist, a move that reportedly prompted Israel’s then-defense minister to ban exports of Israeli cyber-surveillance technology to multiple countries, including Morocco and the UAE.

This new investigation marks the most detailed on-the-record account of Moroccan Pegasus abuse to date, five years after initial 2021 reporting first accused Rabat of using the spyware against domestic critics and allied foreign officials — claims Moroccan authorities flatly denied at the time.

Against the backdrop of Bristol’s historic city centre skyline, two new high-rise towers are climbing steadily skyward. The St James House development, now under construction in southwest England’s largest urban hub, pairs a 28-story purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) block with an 18-story co-living space targeted at young working professionals. When complete, the student tower will become the tallest structure in a city whose skyline has long been defined by modest, low-rise architecture – and it will also tie Bristol’s legacy of mercantile capitalism and radical grassroots activism directly to Israeli financial networks, pro-Israel lobbying in the UK, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The £1 billion+ development portfolio that includes St James House is backed by two major investors: global real estate investment firm Cain International and Menora Mivtachim, one of Israel’s largest pension and insurance groups. This project is far from an isolated investment: it is part of a growing flood of global capital pouring into UK student housing, a sector that has boomed alongside decades of expansion in Britain’s higher education system. At the turn of the 21st century, roughly 2 million students were enrolled in UK universities; today that number sits close to 3 million, with international students accounting for nearly a quarter of all enrolments. Severe cuts to public university funding starting in 2010 and a cap on domestic undergraduate tuition fees have left British institutions increasingly dependent on high-fee paying overseas students, the majority of whom in Bristol come from China and India. This group overwhelmingly prefers premium purpose-built accommodation over alternative housing options, creating a lucrative market for global investors.

For financial backers like Cain and Menora Mivtachim, the UK student housing sector offers uniquely stable, high returns: lower regulatory space standards, consistently high occupancy rates, annual rent adjustments, and the ability to house large student populations at high densities all reduce investment risk. Bristol offers particularly favorable conditions: the city’s student population has grown by 50% over the past decade, while purpose-built housing supply has failed to keep pace, creating one of the largest accommodation shortfalls in the UK. This gap has simultaneously driven up rental costs across the city’s broader housing market, pushing home ownership and even private rental out of reach for growing numbers of Bristol residents. Just steps from the St James House construction site, unhoused people camp in a central roundabout plaza; encampments also dot city parks and green spaces, and rising numbers of people living in vehicles have forced the local council to develop dedicated overnight parking sites.

Neither Cain International nor Menora Mivtachim responded to detailed requests for comment from Middle East Eye for this reporting. For both firms, investment in UK student housing marks a shift from their core business lines. Founded in 2014, Cain focuses primarily on luxury real estate investments in major global cities alongside private equity holdings in lifestyle, hospitality, and entertainment brands. The firm manages roughly $14 billion in global assets, with flagship projects including luxury Dubai hotels and the $billion-plus One Beverly Hills development anchored by the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. Tel Aviv-based Menora Mivtachim, by contrast, is one of Israel’s oldest and largest financial services groups, managing retirement savings, insurance reserves, and investments for 2 million Israeli customers.

According to Israeli research centre Who Profits, Menora Mivtachim is a major investor in Israeli military infrastructure projects in the Negev Desert via public-private partnership agreements. These investments include the sprawling “City of Training Bases,” built to house 10,000 permanent Israeli military personnel, and Kiryat HaModi’in, a massive intelligence and cyber campus for the Israeli military’s elite intelligence units. The firm also holds a substantial stake in Shikun and Binui, a construction firm deeply involved in building occupation and settlement infrastructure in the occupied West Bank, and is a major shareholder in G1 Secure Solutions, one of Israel’s largest private security and electronic surveillance companies.

Menora Mivtachim first entered Cain’s UK student housing platform in September 2023, injecting £500 million ($670 million) into a joint portfolio with developers Fusion Group and Olympian Homes. Cain expanded the portfolio through further acquisitions – including the St James House site in Bristol – throughout 2024, and Menora Mivtachim added additional capital later that year, pushing the portfolio’s total gross development value past $1 billion. Today, the portfolio includes student developments across Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds and York, with Cirrus Point, a 45-story, 660-bed tower nearing completion in Leeds, ranking as both the city’s tallest building and the tallest purpose-built student accommodation tower in the world.

Cain’s founder and CEO Jonathan Goldstein is a leading figure in UK pro-Israel lobbying, having previously served as chair of the pro-Israel Jewish Leadership Council (JLC). Goldstein played a central role in the high-profile 2010s campaign against former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which centered on accusations that Corbyn failed to address antisemitism within the party. In 2021, Goldstein stated that if Corbyn had become prime minister and the pro-Israel lobby had not mounted its campaign, “we’d never have forgiven ourselves.”

Goldstein began his career as a corporate solicitor and counted prominent pro-Israeli property tycoon Gerald Ronson – a key figure in UK pro-Israel institutions including the JLC, Community Security Trust (CST), and Bicom – as his “unparalleled mentor.” During the Corbyn era, Goldstein labeled the Labour leader “un-British” and argued he had made British Jews feel unwelcome in the UK. Today, he is a close ally and backer of current Labour leader Keir Starmer, hosting Starmer in the directors’ box at Chelsea Football Club, in which Goldstein holds a co-ownership stake, in 2022.

Goldstein’s ties to the current Labour leadership stretch back years. Alongside fellow pro-Israel businessman Trevor Chinn – a primary funder of Labour Together, the internal faction that worked to oust Corbyn and install Starmer – Goldstein donated to David Lammy’s 2015 campaign for London Labour mayoral candidate. Lammy’s campaign director was David Mencer, a former employee of Ronson and former director of Labour Friends of Israel who has since become a high-profile, belligerent spokesperson for the Israeli government during its military campaign in Gaza. As UK Foreign Secretary, Lammy has repeatedly rejected claims that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza.

As JLC chair, Goldstein has held multiple meetings with senior Israeli political figures including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister and diplomat Gilad Erdan. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Goldstein wrote in the *Times of Israel* that “We must give our unstinting and total support to whatever action Israel determines in its absolute discretion as an appropriate response to this atrocity.” In a November 2023 interview with Piers Morgan, he condemned the large pro-Palestine protests that swept British cities, defended Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Hamas’ senior leadership command center was located beneath a Gaza hospital. Declassified diary entries from former Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely confirm that Goldstein met with Hotovely for strategic discussions while the Gaza genocide was already underway.

Bristol’s modern identity is shaped by two conflicting historical legacies: once England’s second city, its position as a major Atlantic port allowed 18th-century merchants to amass enormous wealth from the transatlantic slave trade, tobacco, and sugar, while it also emerged as a historic hub for radical political dissent that challenged British establishment power. These competing currents are on stark display in the city’s current response to Gaza: Bristol is one of the UK’s most active centers for Palestine solidarity, hosting regular marches, vigils, fundraisers, and boycott campaigns, and is home to the UK’s only Palestine Museum and Cultural Centre, located in the heart of its Old City. Direct action campaigns targeting Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, which operates a facility in the city’s northern defence industrial cluster, have drawn nationwide attention. In the 2024 general election, Bristol Central – a constituency with a large university population – elected Green Party MP Carla Denyer, who defeated incumbent Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire on a platform driven by widespread anger at Labour’s complicity in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

It is a deep historical irony, rooted in Bristol’s longstanding internal tensions, that the city’s new tallest building will be anchored to the global financial and political networks that sustain Israel’s campaign in Gaza and enable its impunity in Western political circles. These networks extend far beyond the UK, connecting Cain and Menora Mivtachim to a broader web of Israeli, Gulf, and American interests that span politics, diplomacy, and real estate speculation. Menora Mivtachim provided a $30 million investment to Jared Kushner’s Kushner Companies in 2017, just before Kushner began his role as then-President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy. Though Jared stepped down as CEO to take the role, he retained significant ownership stakes in the family firm; his father Charles Kushner, a convicted felon pardoned by Trump who now serves as US Ambassador to France, has longstanding close personal ties to Netanyahu, who frequently stayed at the Kushner family home during visits to the US when he was a rising political figure.

Earlier this year, Cain launched a joint venture with Kushner Companies to finance luxury residential and mixed-use developments in South Florida, tying the firm directly to a family that played a central role in negotiating the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab states. After leaving the White House, Kushner founded private equity firm Affinity Partners, which received a $2 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) in 2022 to build an “investment corridor” between Gulf capital and Israeli businesses. Cain already operates within this same Gulf sovereign capital ecosystem: in 2022, the firm joined PIF in a $900 million joint investment in Aman Group, the global luxury hotel and resort brand. In 2025, Cain opened an office in Abu Dhabi and formed a partnership with Mubadala Capital, the private equity and asset management arm of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, to deploy billions of dollars in luxury real estate investments. Mubadala has emerged as a leading global investor and a key vehicle for Emirati investment in Israel’s technology sector in the wake of the Abraham Accords.

As the original reporting notes, the overlapping logics of speculative real estate investment and Israeli occupation stretch from New York’s skyscraper corridor to Gulf desert metropolises, through the post-Abraham Accords investment framework and the controversial “Gaza Riviera” development plan, and now to British university cities like Bristol. St James House is scheduled to open in time for the 2028/29 academic year, and will stand as a permanent monument to the flows of financial and political capital that sustain Israel’s expansionist policies and enable ongoing impunity for its actions in Gaza. Where 18th-century Bristol’s merchant elite could separate their city’s streets from the suffering of enslaved people transported across the Atlantic, the glass-and-steel exterior of Bristol’s new tallest tower cannot obscure the reality of ethnic cleansing and genocide that it underwrites.