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Last Thursday, former U.S. President Donald Trump made a startling public remark, announcing he faced an imminent ‘big decision’ regarding Iran’s ruling regime: ‘Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not? Anything could happen with me.’ This is not the first time the president has issued such an open-ended threat against Tehran, but the comment arrives at a uniquely precarious moment for the Middle East. What Trump once expected to be a short, decisive conflict has now stretched into its seventh month, with growing risks that the fighting will spill across borders and destabilize the entire region.

In the days following Trump’s comment, the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen announced it had launched a coordinated missile and drone strike targeting ‘sensitive sites’ in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital. This escalation marks the first major test of the newly signed ‘Mecca Pact,’ a defense agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan that has already upended regional security alignments. For Trump, the stakes of mismanaging this crisis could not be higher: a failure to resolve the conflict threatens both his remaining term in office and the long-term global standing of the United States.

## Shrinking Options for the White House

A confluence of interconnected developments has left Trump with fewer paths forward than ever before. The ongoing conflict has sent global energy prices soaring, inflicting persistent economic pain on consumers across the United States and the rest of the world. Over the same weekend as the Houthi attack, Iran publicly laid out its latest non-negotiable conditions for ending direct hostilities with the U.S.: a full ceasefire across all regional fronts, the unconditional release of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets abroad, and an end to the U.S.-led naval blockade of Iranian territorial ports.

Washington has yet to issue an official response to Tehran’s terms. While accepting the conditions would open the door to a resumption of diplomatic negotiations, the odds of a negotiated deal that quickly reopens the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz remain exceedingly low. The conflict has extracted a devastating human and material toll on the Iranian people, thanks to relentless U.S. military and economic pressure. But that pressure has failed to force Iran’s Islamist government to back down: the regime has maintained aggressive defensive operations, struck U.S. military bases across the region, kept the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to commercial traffic, and continued to defy the U.S. blockade.

## The Conflict Spreads to New Fronts

What began as a direct U.S.-Iran standoff has steadily expanded across the Middle East. It first spilled into Lebanon, where Iran’s ally Hezbollah has engaged in sustained confrontation with Israel, leaving the country devastated and its civilian population displaced. Now, the fighting has intensified on a second front in Yemen.

Over the past two weeks, the Iran-backed Houthis, who have battled Yemen’s Saudi-backed internationally recognized Presidential Leadership Council for years, have seized key strategic territory across the country. The group already controls most of western Yemen, a stretch of southern territory, and the capital Sana’a. Its holdings border the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint on the Red Sea that carries roughly 10 to 12 percent of all global maritime trade. The Houthis have tightened their control over traffic through the strait, targeted commercial and military vessels linked to Saudi Arabia, and repeatedly struck Saudi oil infrastructure and critical economic facilities.

Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, up to 70 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports have been routed through a pipeline that carries crude from the Abqaiq oil fields in the country’s Eastern Province to the Red Sea port of Yanbu for global shipment. That key pipeline has now been damaged and shut down, with repairs expected to take several weeks. The disruption is already pushing global oil prices higher, with the potential to trigger ripple effects across the entire global economy.

## The Mecca Pact Faces Its First Major Challenge

Amid the growing chaos, long-time U.S. allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council – including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – have grown increasingly disillusioned with the Trump administration’s leadership. For years, these states have hosted U.S. military bases, but they have now concluded they can no longer rely on Washington as a reliable security partner.

For Saudi Arabia, the search for alternative security arrangements led to the launch of the Mecca Pact, which entered into force in August. The agreement partners the kingdom with two major Sunni-majority states: Turkey, a NATO member with the alliance’s second-largest standing military, and Pakistan, the only Muslim-majority nuclear weapons state. To date, no other Arab states have joined the pact, and while Iran has publicly welcomed the framework and reports indicate it has been invited to join, Tehran has denied receiving any formal invitation.

The Houthi attack on Riyadh has already put the new alliance to its first test of credibility. Both Turkey and Pakistan have issued statements affirming their commitment to defending Saudi territorial integrity, but neither has deployed military forces to the conflict yet. Analysts suggest the two countries are hesitant to act, given the Houthi offensive is not formal state aggression against Saudi Arabia. Even so, Turkey’s foreign minister recently indicated the country is prepared to meet any military support requests from Riyadh.

Both Ankara and Islamabad have also attempted to mediate the crisis, pressuring Tehran to rein in Houthi military operations. Both countries share borders with Iran and maintain constructive working relations with the regime: Ankara has long emphasized unity across the Muslim world, while Islamabad has a long history of acting as an intermediary between Tehran and Washington. These competing priorities make it difficult for either country to fully activate the Mecca Pact’s defense provisions.

## Uncertainty Looms Over Trump’s Next Move

For its part, the Trump administration has so far rejected Saudi requests to launch direct U.S. strikes against Houthi targets, a choice many analysts read as a sign the president has come to recognize the limits of American power projection in the region. Trump’s hesitation to open another active front of conflict has further eroded Riyadh’s confidence in U.S. reliability. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has signaled that Washington is open to mediating negotiations between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, while the Houthis have committed not to target U.S. commercial or military vessels in the Red Sea.

Trump has repeatedly stated he is eager to end the conflict and stabilize the Middle East, promising the war will be concluded immediately after November’s U.S. midterm elections. The president has offered no details on how he plans to achieve this goal, leaving observers to assume the outcome hinges on his pending decision on Iran. Hardliners within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps-dominated leadership show no sign of offering Trump an easy out, however: the regime has continued preparations for further escalation rather than de-escalation, even amid crippling economic and financial pressure at home.

The risk of further escalation remains high. Once midterm elections conclude, Trump could choose to ramp up military action against Iran – unless Democrats retain control of both chambers of Congress and move to block the move under the U.S. War Powers Act. At this juncture, there is no clear indication of where this escalating crisis will lead the Middle East and the broader global order.

This analysis was contributed by Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Australian National University, University of Western Australia, and Victoria University, and is republished under a Creative Commons license from The Conversation.

In the quiet small town of Ribolla in Italy’s Tuscany region, a grassroots movement led by local advocacy group Diritti in Palestina has ignited a widespread campaign against a planned agrivoltaic solar park, after investigators traced the project’s ultimate ownership to an Israeli firm with well-documented ties to Israel’s military and illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

The campaign launched in early September, after activists conducting routine scrutiny of the proposed development uncovered that the project was being fronted by a Milan-based special-purpose vehicle (SPV) called SPV Energy 3, a shell company with no registered employees and just €2,500 in share capital. This opaque corporate structure, designed to obscure ultimate ownership, led the team to dig deeper, revealing the firm is a subsidiary of Tel Aviv-based Shikun & Binui, a multinational conglomerate with operations spanning real estate, energy and global infrastructure development.

Shikun & Binui has ambitious plans to build five utility-scale solar plants across Tuscany, using a network of five separate SPVs registered in northern Italy to hide the company’s ultimate control of the projects. Land lease documents reviewed by Middle East Eye confirm SPV Energy 3 is the formal signatory for the Ribolla development, a structure legal experts say is intentionally designed to limit transparency.

“This suspicious lack of basic corporate substance prompted us to dig deeper, especially as we have seen a surge of Israeli investments into our region’s renewable energy sector in recent years,” explained 72-year-old Alessandra Bertero, co-founder of Diritti in Palestina, in an interview with Middle East Eye. After the project was first announced in May, Bertero and four fellow activists filed multiple freedom of information requests to map the firm’s operations, uncovering a pattern of Shikun & Binui operating across multiple European Union member states under different local branch and shell company names.

Critics of the project point to a long record of violations tied to the conglomerate: in September 2025, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights added Shikun & Binui to its official blacklist of companies operating illegally in Israel’s occupied West Bank and occupied Golan Heights. The firm’s roots stretch even further back, tracing to historic construction firm Solel Boneh, which collaborated with the Israeli military during the 1948 Nakba, the mass violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral land.

Beyond the occupation ties, the project has sparked fierce local pushback over its strategic location: Ribolla sits roughly 110 kilometers from the port of Livorno, a key transit hub for arms shipments headed to Israel, a detail that has amplified community concerns about the development’s broader implications.

Activists stress there is still time to block the project, as it has not yet received the required Single Energy Authorization, a permit that falls under the oversight of Tuscany’s regional government. If approved, the development would see 36,000 solar panels installed across agricultural land in the town.

Michela Arricale, a jurist providing legal support to the campaign, argues that allowing capital linked to Israeli occupation to move forward with the project would directly violate the principle of non-recognition laid out in the International Court of Justice’s landmark July 2024 advisory opinion on Israeli occupation. “We hope we can stop this project, set a legal precedent for communities across other affected regions, and deter similar harmful developments in the future,” Arricale said.

The controversy also comes amid growing broader criticism of agrivoltaics, a model marketed as a win-win for food production and renewable energy that installs panels high enough to allow crops and grazing to continue underneath. Promoted by European energy lobbies in Brussels as a green solution to land abandonment and climate change, agrivoltaics has expanded rapidly across the continent, but critics warn that poorly regulated projects often amount to greenwashing, delivering few of the promised environmental and social benefits.

Fabrizio Garbarino, president of Italy’s Rural Association, argues that agrivoltaic projects deployed by foreign multinationals to date have failed to deliver tangible benefits for local farmers or food production. “We have carried out dozens of on-the-ground tests, and none have resulted in meaningful benefits for farmers or viable edible crop production,” Garbarino told Middle East Eye. “This so-called green approach, masked as sustainability, reinforces a neocolonial mindset that exploits crisis-hit rural areas to meet the energy needs of multinational corporations with no connection to local farming – they get praised for their work, but only on paper.”

Italy’s regulatory landscape has opened the door to this wave of foreign investment: since 2021, permissive national land use rules and generous post-Covid green transition funding have created ample opportunities for international firms to acquire large swathes of Italian agricultural land. In 2023, retail giant Amazon and French energy firm ENGIE launched Europe’s largest agrivoltaics park in Sicily, but three years on, promises of community benefits have yet to materialize.

At the same time, Israel has positioned itself as a leading player in the global sustainability sector with EU backing and funding, while multiple reports have documented that the country’s green industry contributes to the system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The unfolding controversy in Tuscany has pushed farmers and campaigners to call for far greater transparency around land ownership and the beneficiaries of Italy’s green transition. “Israel has substantial economic resources, so its investment in profitable greenwashing projects across our country is not surprising,” Garbarino noted, adding that his team has reviewed dozens of contracts from local farmers approached by suspicious foreign investors, most of which use the same shell company structure as SPV Energy 3, with minimal share capital and no prior experience in energy or agriculture.

Giancarlo Innocenti, head of the retired workers’ association for one of Italy’s largest farming unions and former mayor of Roccastrada, the Tuscan district where the agrivoltaics projects are planned, has also traced a string of recent farmland acquisitions back to Israeli investors or their European front companies. “Recently, a local farmer reached out to me to mediate a conversation in English with an Israeli man who wanted to buy his land,” Innocenti recalled. He has documented a pattern where intermediaries target struggling farmers facing low crop yields and wildfire damage, snapping up land at cut-rate prices during bankruptcy auctions.

After 40 years working in agriculture across Tuscany’s rolling fertile hills, Innocenti draws a careful parallel between the gradual displacement of Italian farmers by foreign multinationals and the decades-long displacement of Palestinians by Israeli settlement expansion, while acknowledging the profound difference between the two contexts: Palestinians live under direct military occupation and face systematic ongoing land theft. “Our farmland, which is meant to feed our communities, is increasingly exploited for profit,” he said. “Farmers are being quietly, forcibly pushed out of our territories little by little to make room for multinationals, and our historic olive groves are falling to this process. But these protests are our attempt to defend and take back our land – it is impossible not to see this as a metaphor.”

The Ribolla campaign unfolds against a complex national political backdrop: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government lists Israel as one of its closest European allies, despite broad grassroots support for Palestinian rights across Italian civil society. The Ribolla project is not an isolated case, but a symptom of a much larger underreported trend of growing Israeli investment in Italy’s agricultural and renewable energy sectors, which is now drawing scrutiny across the country’s southern regions.

In Puglia, one of Italy’s most productive agricultural regions, foreign investors have targeted large tracts of land for both renewable energy and real estate developments. Across the Strait of Otranto in Albania, widespread public protests have already broken out against real estate projects backed by former US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in protected coastal areas, raising broader awareness of how foreign capital – including growing Israeli investment – is targeting vulnerable Mediterranean communities.

Similar tensions have erupted on the island of Sardinia, where the rapid expansion of large-scale renewable projects has prompted fierce pushback from farming communities and local authorities concerned about uncontrolled land use and irreversible damage to the island’s iconic landscape. Sicily, meanwhile, has become a major magnet for solar development after Amazon’s early investment and public comments from Elon Musk highlighting the island’s potential utility for large-scale energy production. Arricale, the campaign’s legal advisor, says she is currently monitoring two additional Israeli-linked SPVs buying land in western Sicily under local wine grape names Nerello and Nero d’Avola, which are planning large-scale projects with a combined total capacity of 126 megawatts.

Inspired by the mobilization in Ribolla, residents of the nearby town of Lavaiano have now launched their own campaign to stop a second 22-hectare Shikun & Binui agrivoltaics project, fronted by another shell company called SPV Energy E32. Tuscan regional councillor Lorenzo Falchi has even submitted a national parliamentary inquiry, pushing for the regional government to reject the Israeli-linked projects and set a formal precedent to block similar developments in the future.

Arricale argues that the controversy exposes the urgent need for clearer national legislation that classifies large agrivoltaics projects as infrastructure, rather than routine agricultural interventions, which would tighten scrutiny and prevent speculative, bad-faith investors from accessing land. “This is a battle that matters to all of us,” she said. “The energy transition is a critical challenge we must overcome, but not at the cost of accepting large-scale speculative projects that hurt working farmers forced to sell their land out of financial desperation – especially when that capital is tied to the illegal occupation of Palestine and violates international and humanitarian law.”

Bertero echoes this call, urging communities across Italy to increase scrutiny and mobilize to keep foreign speculative projects out of local agricultural land. “Most of the time these deals go through because no one is paying attention,” she said. “The problem is that citizens are not informed, especially in this current political climate, about what is happening right in their own backyards. Our land is the most precious thing we have, and just as Palestinians have shown us, it should not be sold for harmful, self-serving purposes.”

Middle East Eye, which first reported on this campaign, is an independent media outlet covering the Middle East, North Africa and global issues connected to the region. Requests for republishing this content can be submitted via the outlet’s official contact form.

Striking new timelapse footage has laid bare the relentless advance of a large typhoon as it churns directly toward Japan, bringing with it the threat of widespread disruption and dangerous downpours across the nation’s eastern coastal regions. The captured time-compressed video offers a vivid, big-picture view of the massive storm system’s scale and speed, showing how it has steadily closed the distance to Japan’s shoreline over recent hours. As of the latest updates, the typhoon is currently tracking along Japan’s eastern coast, and its passage has already begun to trigger heavy rainfall that is raising concerns about flash flooding and landslides in vulnerable areas. Beyond the precipitation, the storm’s strong winds and large storm surge are expected to bring major disruption to daily life: transportation networks including regional flights, train services, and ferry routes have already faced widespread cancellations and delays, while local authorities have issued evacuation advisories for tens of thousands of residents in high-risk zones. Weather forecasters are continuing to monitor the typhoon’s track and intensity closely, updating warnings as the system moves across the region, urging residents to stay alert to changing conditions and follow official guidance to stay safe.