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A highly confidential gathering of top military commanders from the United States, Israel, and multiple Arab nations took place in Germany last week to coordinate strategy around the ongoing Israel-US military campaign against Iran, details of which have been disclosed by anonymous Israeli sources to journalists. The exclusive report, published by Axios and written by Barak Ravid — a former Israeli intelligence officer who now works as a political and security correspondent — reveals that the closed-door “private retreat” was arranged personally by Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom).

According to two unnamed Israeli officials interviewed by Ravid, the meeting included the highest-ranking military chiefs of staff from eight nations: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt. This gathering marks the first formal collective meeting of these military leaders since the Israel-US war against Iran began more than six months ago.

While none of the participating regional nations have issued any public confirmation of the meeting, Centcom has released an official, albeit vague, acknowledgment of the event. In a short public statement, the command confirmed it “hosted senior military leaders from eight nations during a scheduled conference in Germany” and added that attendees “discussed opportunities for enhancing security cooperation in the Middle East.”

Beyond the broad public confirmation, leaked details from the closed-door sessions indicate that Admiral Cooper used the meeting to deliver a key reassurance to regional partner nations. Despite repeated large-scale Iranian strikes on U.S. military installations across the Middle East that have caused extensive damage, Cooper stated that Washington has no intention of withdrawing its military forces from the region.

Verified open-source satellite analysis conducted by *The Washington Post* has confirmed that Iranian attacks have left their mark on at least 15 separate U.S. military sites spread across the region, including bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan. Hundreds of structures and pieces of military hardware have been destroyed or damaged, with many bases rendered functionally unusable. The most severe impact has been felt at the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, where extensive damage forced Centcom to reroute all regional logistics operations to alternate sites.

In addition to addressing force posture, Cooper also outlined U.S. plans to increase commercial and military ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil and gas trade that has become a major flashpoint in tensions with Iran.

For his part, Israeli Chief of Staff General Eyal Zamir used the gathering to give attendees a full briefing on ongoing Israeli military operations across the Middle East, per one Israeli official quoted in the Axios report. A key structural change also followed the meeting: Israel was officially transferred from the U.S. European Command’s area of responsibility to Centcom, a shift that opens the door to far more direct military cooperation between Israel and the participating Arab states under the U.S. military command structure.

Not all regional and security observers view the new alignment and Admiral Cooper’s leadership positively, however. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London who specializes in Middle East security, noted that there is widespread underlying distrust of Cooper among Gulf Arab governments. Krieg argued that regional capitals see Cooper as excessively aligned with Israel, overly hawkish toward Iran, and prone to pushing military operational options that carry high risks of strategic disaster for the region.

A long-running campaign targeting international humanitarian medical organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) has escalated dramatically, with British pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) formally calling on the British government to designate the Gaza-operating charity as a terrorist organization.

The push from UKLFI is rooted in a recent report claiming unproven links between MSF employees and Palestinian militant groups, allegations that MSF has forcefully and repeatedly rejected. The core of the claims centers on Fadi Jihad Mohammed al-Wadiya, a physiotherapist on MSF’s payroll who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on June 25, 2024. Israeli officials immediately asserted al-Wadiya was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an armed Palestinian group.

MSF pushed back on the claim within months of the strike, stating in February that it had found no evidence of any military affiliation by al-Wadiya before his death at the hands of Israeli forces. In an official statement responding to UKLFI’s latest demand last week, the charity doubled down on its denial. “MSF unequivocally refutes the allegations made by the Israeli authorities that we knowingly hired people with ‘ties to terrorism’,” the organization said. “MSF would never knowingly employ anyone involved in military activities, which contradicts our core values and ethics.”

MSF further noted that Israeli authorities have only made claims of militant links against its staff after those employees have already been killed, with no advance warning or evidence shared while they were alive. “If Israeli authorities had reliable information about any MSF staff involvement in military activity, they never shared it with us before their deaths,” the statement added. The charity also confirmed it has been the target of a sustained disinformation campaign for months, and strongly condemned the deliberate spread of false accusations against its team.

The tensions come amid a string of recent attacks on MSF operations in Gaza: just this week, an Israeli airstrike damaged an MSF-owned bus carrying 10 humanitarian workers in Gaza City, adding to a long list of incidents that have threatened aid workers delivering critical care to the besieged enclave.

Financial records show MSF’s UK branch raised £11.3 million in 2023 specifically for its humanitarian work in occupied Palestine. In defending its demand for a ban, a UKLFI spokesperson argued that British donors deserve full transparency and rigorous vetting for any funds sent to Hamas-controlled Gaza. “The evidence we have assembled raises serious questions about people employed by MSF, the organisations with which it works and whether adequate safeguards have been put in place to ensure that charitable resources cannot be exploited by terrorist organisations,” the spokesperson said.

The UK’s Charity Commission confirmed last week it is now actively reviewing the concerns raised by UKLFI to determine what action, if any, it will take next. The current allegations are not new: they can be traced back to claims from the Israeli government earlier this year that two MSF employees held ties to Hamas and PIJ, another accusation MSF has emphatically denied. In February, Israel moved to ban MSF from operating in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank after the organization refused to turn over a full list of its Palestinian and international staff. MSF said it could not share the data because it could not secure guaranteed assurances that the information would be protected and not misused.

This is part of a broader pattern: the Israeli government has repeatedly accused international and local aid groups operating in Gaza of ties to Hamas in recent years. Earlier this year, Israel imposed bans on dozens of aid groups working in the enclave, a move that human rights organizations have warned has severely restricted already fragile humanitarian access to Gaza, where more than two million people face widespread food insecurity and collapsing medical infrastructure.

Founded in 2011, UKLFI has established itself as a leading British advocacy group focused on pressuring and discrediting UK-based individuals and organizations that criticize Israeli government policy, as well as humanitarian groups that provide aid to Palestinians. The group is prominently featured in the European Legal Support Centre’s Britain Index of Repression, a database that documents what the center calls systematic repression of pro-Palestine solidarity activism across the United Kingdom. UKLFI is listed 128 times in the database, and the center found that the group has contributed to a “chilling environment” that pushes people and organizations to pull back from or alter fully lawful pro-Palestine activity out of fear of legal action. The center’s analysis also shows UKLFI frequently acts as an initiating or escalating actor against pro-Palestinian solidarity work, often using formal complaint letters, legal threats, and public pressure to push schools, universities, employers, and public institutions to launch disciplinary investigations or cancel planned events related to Palestine.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has made a landmark call for the international arrest of 87 senior Iranian officials, accusing them of direct involvement in crimes against humanity carried out during the brutal state crackdown on the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The demand is anchored in a sprawling 1,000-plus-page investigative report, titled *Architects of Atrocities: State Machinery Orchestrating Crimes Against Humanity in Iran’s 2022 Woman Life Freedom Uprising*, which lays bare the full scale of systematic repression deployed by Tehran to crush the mass anti-government movement. The 2022 nationwide protests were ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in morality police custody shortly after being arrested for allegedly violating the country’s strict mandatory hijab regulations. In the months of unrest and state-led retaliation that followed, hundreds of protesters and bystanders lost their lives.

After years of meticulous evidence-gathering, Amnesty’s investigation has verified the deaths of 377 civilians caught up in the crackdown, 56 of whom were children. Disproportionately, the victims came from Iran’s marginalized Kurdish and Baloch ethnic minority communities, groups that have long faced systemic discrimination under the Islamic Republic. “Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity, against protesters demanding dignity, human rights and fundamental political change,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, told reporters at the report’s official launch press conference on Wednesday.

Callamard detailed the full scope of state abuses, confirming that Iranian security and political institutions carried out deliberate crimes against humanity including extrajudicial murder, widespread torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary mass imprisonment, sexual violence including rape, and targeted persecution on the basis of political belief, gender identity, ethnicity, and religion—all in a coordinated campaign to annihilate the uprising. The rights group is pushing for two key international actions to deliver accountability: first, it calls on the United Nations General Assembly to create a dedicated international criminal justice mechanism that can investigate crimes, prosecute perpetrators, and deter future repressive crackdowns on dissent. Second, it demands the UN Security Council refer the entire situation in Iran to the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor for formal investigation.

Joining Callamard at the press conference was Mahsa Piraei, an Iranian activist whose mother was shot and killed by security forces during protests in the western city of Kermanshah. Piraei emphasized that accountability cannot stop at low-level officers who carried out violence, arguing that blame extends all the way up Iran’s chain of command. “The person who fired the shot that killed my mother must be held accountable, but it must not stop there,” she said. “My mother was not killed by the actions of just one person – she was killed by a system.”

In a striking rebuke of outside military intervention, Callamard also warned that ongoing unlawful military attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel are severely undermining global efforts to secure justice for victims of the 2022 crackdown, and called for an immediate enduring ceasefire across Iranian territory. Since the US-Israeli military campaign launched in February, at least 3,600 Iranians—including both senior government officials and civilian non-combatants—have been killed. The US has publicly justified its military assault by pointing to a separate January 2025 crackdown on anti-government demonstrations, where Iranian security forces killed thousands of protesters within days.

But rights groups have documented that the US-Israeli war has also killed and wounded Iranian dissidents and opponents of the Islamic Republic, including political prisoners held in jails located in strategically targeted areas. In response to the external invasion, the Iranian government has also sharply ramped up internal repression against domestic dissent. Six of the 87 officials named in Amnesty’s report have already been killed in targeted strikes during the war, while other senior figures implicated in the 2022 crackdown—including Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps chief Ahmad Vahidi—have received promotions within the Iranian government.

Callamard made clear that Amnesty opposes both the targeted killing of Iranian officials and the efforts by Washington and Tel Aviv to instrumentalize documented human rights abuses in Iran to justify their full-scale military assault. “No matter how complex the panorama is…we want to insist that international law should guide the path of action right now,” she said. “A principled response required rejecting both unlawful military attacks and impunity for crimes against humanity.”

Perched on a strategic hilltop just outside Israel’s self-declared Yellow Line in south Lebanon, the small village of Ghandouriyeh bears the brutal, visible scars of months of cross-border conflict. Most of its residential buildings stand as hollowed rubble or flattened heaps of concrete, the result of Israeli strikes earlier this year that turned once-lived-in homes into uninhabitable wreckage. It is here that 66-year-old Mariam Ismail Ballout waited on August 28 at the entrance of a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) mobile medical clinic, desperate to collect medication and escape the chaos that has upended her life.

“All our houses are ruined, all our houses are on the ground, demolished,” Ballout told Middle East Eye, her voice cracking before tears overtook her. She lost everything when her home burned to the ground: no refrigerator, no washing machine, no access to gas for cooking—every basic necessity of daily life gone overnight.

Ghandouriyeh sits just south of Froun, one of Lebanon’s designated “pilot zones” in the Nabatieh governorate, a region that has remained on edge despite a US-brokered ceasefire announced in June. A rolling green valley called Wadi al-Hujeir blocks direct sightlines to Israeli military positions on the other side of the border, but little else shields residents from the constant threat of violence. A large plastic bin marked with an Arabic warning of “enemy” territory beyond is the only barrier between the village outskirts and roads now closed to all travel.

Against all advice, roughly 228 families have returned to Ghandouriyeh in recent months, even though the village has no access to running water or electricity. Village mayor Mohammed Ali Nader told Middle East Eye that most returnees have no other option: they cannot afford to rent housing elsewhere, forcing them to cram into damaged, partially standing homes and share space with neighbors who have also lost everything. While Nader confirmed the village has not suffered a direct strike in months, residents live in a permanent state of high alert—a chronic stress that medical experts say is fueling a growing, underreported mental health crisis across the region.

MSF, which operates daily mobile medical units across hard-to-reach parts of south Lebanon, has become a critical lifeline for communities cut off from regular healthcare access. Almas Al Andary, a 33-year-old MSF counselor and clinical psychologist working out of the Ghandouriyeh clinic, says the conflict has triggered new mental health disorders among people who never experienced symptoms before. “We definitely see a lot of people having acute stress disorders. And these symptoms we can’t formally diagnose because the crisis is still ongoing,” Al Andary explained. Intense, persistent responses to daily triggers—including the constant buzzing of Israeli drones that hover over the village nearly every day—are the most common complaints: widespread tension, hypervigilance, crippling fear, and constant anxiety about the next strike.

MSF’s internal records reflect the scale of the growing need: since the war resumed on March 2, the organization’s counselors have conducted 1,326 individual mental health sessions across southern Lebanon, and requests for psychological support have climbed steadily month over month. On the day of Middle East Eye’s visit to Ghandouriyeh, the persistent hum of an Israeli drone hung over the village. Only three patients came to the clinic that day—an unusually low number, which Al Andary attributed to overnight air strikes that sent most residents fleeing to the relative safety of the valley overnight. Of the three patients that did show up, two were first-time visitors seeking mental health support.

The crisis extends far beyond Ghandouriyeh. Earlier this year, Embrace, a leading Lebanese mental health non-profit that runs the country’s National Lifeline, reported that call volume during the 2026 conflict was 55 percent higher than during the 2024 cross-border war. Despite this surge, little public data exists to document the full scope of mental health harm in southern Lebanon under the fragile, nominally ceasefire conditions. On the ground, frontline medics say the reality is stark. Farah Kerbaj, a community health educator, told Middle East Eye that widespread sleep disorders are rampant, forcing many residents to rely on sleep and mental health medications just to get through the day. Reem Farhat, an MSF midwife working in the region, added that most patients she sees are in a state of constant agitation, their nerves frayed by months of uncertainty.

Stigma around mental health treatment and the chaos of tracking care for displaced families have only compounded the crisis, medics say. For Ghandouriyeh, the most urgent immediate need is access to clean water—without it, residents cannot grow crops to feed their families, the mayor says. But even the most basic calm remains out of reach: most families keep their bags packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, a constant state of readiness that aligns with the hypervigilance Al Andary documents in her patients.

“We’re fed up, honestly. We’re fed up with wars; we’ve had enough wars,” said Mohammed Gannem, a local resident who returned to Ghandouriyeh with his family in June, relieved to find his home still standing but still unable to sleep through the night. Gannem says he is particularly worried about the impact of constant conflict on his two young daughters; his youngest, nearly two years old, now flinches in terror at the sound of incoming shelling, a fear she never had before this year’s war.

Medics say the steady rise in demand for mental health support has two overlapping causes: a growing willingness among Lebanese people to seek help for mental health struggles, as historical stigma slowly fades, and a parallel rise in desperation as the ceasefire holds in name only. Israel continues to carry out strikes beyond the Yellow Line in Nabatieh, Tyre, and other southern districts, which have claimed dozens of lives since the June truce. The Lebanese Army confirmed last week it has ramped up operations in southern non-occupied areas amid growing signs of escalating tensions.

Georges Jreij, an MSF counselor based at another mobile clinic in Beirut’s southern suburbs, says mental health distress often rises in waves following the outbreak of conflict, with a predictable surge around the six-month mark— a threshold the war will hit this month. “It’s usually the time it takes for the brain to really realise the situation, to be able to think about the stuff that people are going through,” Jreij explained. “And the central nervous system sort of calms down in these periods, so other sides of the brain are reactivated.”

As the MSF clinic’s day in Ghandouriyeh drew to a close, a brief, unexpected sound cut through the constant drone buzz: the playful jingle of a pale pink ice cream van, its windscreen cracked from past strikes, slowly winding past the piles of ruined homes. For a moment, the sound offered a faint, fleeting echo of normal life in the hilltop village. But as the jingle faded into the distance, the menacing buzz of surveillance drones returned, a constant reminder that for the residents of south Lebanon, the crisis is far from over.