作者： admin

One year ago, 28-year-old Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. When his death was announced, Reuters framed the killing around Israel’s unsubstantiated claim that Sharif was a Hamas leader, echoing a pattern that has played out for more than 200 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023. Now, a new initiative launched by activist collective Writers Against The War On Gaza (Wawog) aims to correct this erasure and distortion by centering the personal stories of slain Palestinian journalists, told by the colleagues who worked alongside them.

Named *The Living Record*, the oral history project launched Wednesday with intimate voice-note eulogies for 50 fallen Palestinian journalists, with dozens more profiles set to be added throughout the year. Eventually, the project’s organizers plan to expand the archive beyond Gaza to include journalists killed in southern Lebanon.

In an anonymous interview with Middle East Eye, a member of the New York War Crimes editorial collective — an initiative overseen by Wawog — described the project as a large-scale documentation of systemic failure. “This is a record of failure of mainstream media, of western media, of international institutions to protect individuals [as governed] by international law,” the collective member said.

Unlike the formal, depersonalized profiles that often characterize obituaries of Palestinian journalists in international media, *The Living Record* prioritizes intimate, unscripted storytelling. Colleagues who contributed to the project were encouraged to speak like they were talking to a friend, rather than performing for a skeptical global audience that often demands Palestinian journalists prove their objectivity before their work is deemed credible.

“Often when we spoke to these [Palestinian] journalists, there’s a tendency for them to speak in a very formal register because they’re accustomed to that being the only way that people would be willing to listen, whether on a live broadcast or in a formal interview where they’re anticipating a critique or a challenge — that they must present themselves as sort of indefatigable, impossible to move,” the collective member explained. “We didn’t want that.”

The result is a deeply moving collection of testimonies. Contributors range from grieving colleagues who are broken by loss but unshaken in their work, to speakers who address their fallen friends directly, letting audiences listen in on what feels like a private conversation. For many Palestinian journalists still working in Gaza, the expectation of becoming the next victim is a constant, unspoken part of daily life.

Disputes over the death toll of Palestinian journalists have underscored the gaps between local and international institutional accounting. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate puts the number of media workers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza at no less than 270. However, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whose figures are routinely cited as the official count by most mainstream media outlets in the U.S. and Canada, currently counts 209 dead Palestinian journalists after removing 20 names from its database earlier this year.

The removal came after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries that listed some of the deceased as combatants, prompting CPJ to launch a full review of its Gaza casualty database. CPJ has defended its actions, stating that it has not altered its longstanding methodology for counting journalist deaths that applies to all conflict zones globally. But Wawog organizers push back on the rigid classification, noting that modern journalism is increasingly porous, particularly amid the rise of the creator economy that has pushed thousands of journalists worldwide to leave legacy outlets for independent work. *The Living Record* lets contributors define who counts as a journalist, rather than enforcing external, rigid criteria.

Wawog, a collective of writers and creative professionals, formed in the weeks after Israel began its bombardment of Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel. The group has become a prominent critic of major U.S. media coverage of the war, holding repeated protests outside and inside the New York Times Manhattan headquarters and publishing a zine called *The New York War Crimes* that calls out what organizers see as the outlet’s longstanding hypocrisy in its coverage of Palestine.

Media analysts and human rights groups have repeatedly echoed this criticism, arguing that mainstream Western coverage has contributed to the erasure and distortion of alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Many observers have gone further, noting that coverage of what multiple United Nations officials and Holocaust scholars have labeled a genocide, as well as coverage of pro-Palestine student movements across the U.S., has not just been inaccurate, but amounts to near-journalistic malpractice.

Anas al-Sharif, the journalist whose death opened conversations about biased framing, is one of the profiles featured in the new archive. His killing in August 2025 followed a familiar pattern: just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected international condemnation of his plan to permanently occupy the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces targeted the media tent where Sharif and four colleagues were stationed outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, killing all five.

Before his death, Sharif — a father of two who had contributed footage that helped Reuters win a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography — posted a final video on X showing intense Israeli missile strikes on eastern and southern Gaza City, capturing the deafening sound of explosions close to his position. As it has done with dozens of other killed Palestinian journalists, the Israeli military claimed without presenting public evidence that Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell. Rights groups say these unsubstantiated accusations are a deliberate tactic to discredit reporting that documents Israeli abuses against Palestinian civilians.

Four months before he was killed, Sharif pre-wrote a social media message to be published if he was killed, a common precaution for journalists working in Gaza. “I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification — so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women,” he wrote.

He entrusted the future of Palestine to his audience: “I entrust you with Palestine — the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.” He closed with a plea: “I urge you not to let chains silence you.”

Towering over a palm-fringed artificial coastline just kilometers from Singapore’s bustling border, Malaysia’s Forest City cuts an uncanny, almost surreal figure: rows of identical, gleaming high-rise towers stretch across 14 square kilometers of reclaimed land, their empty windows catching the sun over silent, nearly deserted streets. When Chinese developer Country Garden first unveiled the $100 billion project in 2016, it was billed as a futuristic, eco-friendly dream paradise: a special financial zone designed to house 700,000 residents, complete with luxury hotels, a championship golf course, and a sprawling water park targeted at wealthy global investors. A decade on, however, less than 1% of that projected population calls the development home, turning Forest City into one of Southeast Asia’s most famous ghost towns – and, as a recent major police raid has revealed, an ideal hiding place for transnational scam syndicates.

In mid-July, Johor state police launched coordinated raids on two suspected scam operations spread across 32 separate properties in Forest City, arresting 335 suspects and seizing assets worth approximately 1 million Malaysian ringgit ($245,000), including 313 desktop computers, 1,557 mobile phones, 17 laptops, and 10 communications modems. According to official police statements, the two hubs – one spanning 27 apartments across five floors of a residential tower, the other occupying five standalone luxury bungalows – were run by cryptocurrency-focused criminal syndicates that ran global investment fraud and romance scams targeting victims in countries around the world. Of those arrested, 309 are Chinese nationals, 19 are Indonesian, three are Malaysian, and four are from Myanmar. Johor’s police chief Ab Rahaman Arsad confirmed that authorities are working alongside Interpol to track down the criminal network’s fugitive mastermind. The BBC has reached out to both Forest City management and Johor police for additional comment, but has not received a response as of publication.

For early investors like 56-year-old Jason Deng, who purchased five properties in Forest City after the 2016 launch, the raid only confirmed what residents have suspected for years. “In 2016, they sold this as a golden city, so beautiful and full of opportunity,” Deng explained. “I paid a huge amount of money for these units. If I’d known how it would turn out, I never would have bought so many.” What was marketed as a life-changing investment turned into a ghost town, where dust coats the countertops of empty apartments and streetlights burn for almost no one each night. But for criminal networks, this widespread vacancy is precisely the attraction.

Security experts and local residents warn that the July raid only uncovered the tip of the iceberg, and that Forest City’s infiltration by scam groups is a clear symptom of a rapidly growing, increasingly professionalized global transnational scam industry.

“Many of these modern organizations look more like multinational corporations than traditional street gangs or organized crime networks,” explained John Wojcik, a criminal analyst at TRM Labs, a firm that specializes in tracking crypto-facilitated financial crime. “They have dedicated recruitment teams, in-house IT departments, professional money-laundering specialists, and established, permanent infrastructure just like any legitimate business.”

Authorities and analysts agree the Forest City operations were largely established by criminals fleeing intensified crackdowns on scam hubs in neighboring Cambodia, which for years served as the global nerve center for this multi-billion-dollar criminal trade. For years, industrial scam compounds in Cambodia have relied on trafficked forced labor, with workers held under threat of torture and abuse to carry out fraud schemes. Since late 2023, however, the Cambodian government has drastically ramped up raids on these complexes, pushing an estimated 300,000 people connected to the scam industry out of the country in just a few months. Many of these criminal operators have relocated to more permissive, under-patrolled locations across Southeast Asia – and Forest City proved to be a perfect fit.

Unlike the notorious walled, heavily guarded scam compounds found in Cambodia’s Sihanoukville or along Myanmar’s border regions, the Forest City operations blended almost seamlessly into ordinary residential life, operating out of standard apartments and bungalows alongside unsuspecting local residents. The semi-abandoned nature of the development gave criminals the privacy they needed to operate without drawing unwanted attention.

“It’s an open secret here that scammers are operating out of condominiums and serviced apartments across Forest City,” said Kevin, a local property sales agent and tenant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from criminal groups. “This is a common problem across Johor and Kuala Lumpur, but it’s especially bad here – Forest City is very special.”

What makes Forest City unique, according to Kevin, Wojcik, and other observers, is its status as a failed mega-development turned ghost city. While official marketing materials still claim the development is home to 23,000 residents, Kevin estimates the actual population is less than 5,000. “That’s exactly why scammers chose this place,” he said. “They have total privacy here. Almost no one comes around to disturb them.”

The collapse of Forest City’s original vision did not happen by accident. The joint venture between Country Garden, one of China’s largest property developers, and Malaysian-linked firm Danga 88 was originally designed to attract wealthy Chinese buyers seeking second homes and investment properties offshore. But a perfect storm of overlapping crises – the global Covid-19 pandemic that shut down cross-border travel, China’s deepening property market crash, and new restrictions on overseas borrowing for Chinese citizens – gutted demand for the development and ground construction almost to a halt. Today, only 15 to 20% of the original proposed project has been completed, and the vast majority of finished units remain vacant.

That combination of modern, finished infrastructure, widespread vacancy, and a veneer of legitimate upscale development is exactly what criminal syndicates look for, Wojcik explained. “Forest City checks every box that organized crime looks for: it was marketed as a prestigious, master-planned luxury smart city that never lived up to that promise. It has modern infrastructure, hundreds of empty properties, and good international connectivity, all under the cover of legitimate economic activity that keeps criminal operations from being noticed.”

This model mirrors Shwe Kokko, the notorious scam hub 1,800 kilometers north on Myanmar’s border with Thailand, which was also marketed as a luxury resort destination and investment hub for wealthy Chinese buyers, but has since become a global center for fraud, money laundering, and human trafficking. Even today, despite its status as a mostly empty ghost town, Forest City continues to market itself as an up-and-coming center for tech innovation, tax-free business, and property investment – a marketing narrative that scam networks have turned into a perfect Trojan horse to hide their illicit activities.

“When syndicates embed themselves behind seemingly legitimate businesses in ordinary commercial developments, they don’t just become harder to detect and break up – they amass enormous power and influence from the massive profits they generate,” Wojcik said. That growing profit and influence has allowed the scam industry to professionalize at a rapid pace. While coercion and human trafficking still fuel much of the sector’s low-level labor, syndicates are increasingly recruiting experienced professional scammers with higher wages and better working conditions. Scam operators even post open job ads on Telegram, where experienced scammers share detailed resumes highlighting their fraud expertise to compete for open roles.

“It’s a clear sign the industry is maturing into a fully professionalized criminal enterprise, even as coercion and exploitation remain widespread,” Wojcik noted.

While the Forest City raid has drawn new attention to the issue, transnational scam operations have been active in Malaysia for years. Throughout 2022, Malaysian authorities carried out multiple raids on scam centers operating out of residential properties in Johor, Penang, and Kuala Lumpur, years before the global scale of the industry gained widespread international attention. Though these crackdowns have sent a clear message of zero tolerance, analysts warn that Malaysia remains a hub for influential criminal networks, and any large-scale re-emergence of the industry requires close monitoring.

For many Forest City residents, the presence of scammers has become just another part of daily life in the semi-ghost town. “It’s been an open secret for years – the only shocking thing is that the police actually followed through on raids,” Kevin said. He is convinced dozens more scam operations remain active in the development, but says most local workers and long-term residents prefer to stay out of the issue: “It’s not my business. I just work here for a paycheck.”

Other residents take a similar view, and some even report that Forest City is slowly beginning to grow out of its ghost town status. Phillip, a tech worker who relocated from Singapore to Forest City last year attracted by lower housing prices, said he was not surprised by the raid revelations. “Scammers could be my neighbors, they could run a syndicate down the hall – but at the end of the day, this kind of crime happens everywhere, no matter where you go,” he said. What did surprise him, he added, is that more and more people are moving to the development. “A lot of people lost a lot of money on this project, but over the last three months, I’ve seen more and more lights on in the condos at night. We went from one in 20 units occupied to maybe one in five. It’s slowly changing from a ghost town into a real place people want to live.”

In an exclusive revelation by Middle East Eye (MEE), the International Criminal Court (ICC) approved two confidential arrest warrants last September 2025 for senior Taliban figures, charging them with crimes against humanity through gender and political persecution. This historic development comes two months after the same three-judge panel publicly issued identical charges against Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and Afghanistan’s de facto chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani.

Unlike the two public warrants, the sealed documents cover newly uncovered evidence and identify additional alleged victims that were not included in the initial public filings. All four Taliban leaders are facing accusations related to crimes the group is alleged to have committed while acting as Afghanistan’s de facto governing authority between August 15, 2021, and at least January 20, 2025. MEE has chosen not to disclose the names of the two individuals named in the secret warrants to preserve the confidentiality of ongoing court proceedings.

This set of Taliban-related charges marks an unprecedented milestone in international law: it is the first time any international tribunal, including the ICC, has formally recognized LGBTQ+ individuals as victims of systematic persecution. The charge of gender-based persecution itself remains extremely rare in international legal practice, with no prior convictions ever secured. The ICC has only previously brought this charge once in the Al Hassan case, which never resulted in a conviction.

Court and prosecution insiders familiar with the proceedings told MEE that ICC leadership made the deliberate choice to keep the two additional warrants sealed out of explicit concern over anticipated pushback from the United States, which has a long history of opposing ICC investigations that target actors Washington considers strategically important. That concern proved well-founded: just one month after the public warrants for Akhundzada and Haqqani were released, the U.S. imposed targeted sanctions on then-ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, the lead official behind the investigation.

Multiple court staff members also reported widespread internal anxiety over potential personal sanctions, particularly for employees with family ties to the U.S., who feared penalties would block them from visiting loved ones. Some team members even declined to have their names associated with the warrant applications. Since April 2025, ICC judges have formally ordered the prosecutor’s office to keep all future arrest warrant requests confidential, a restriction that remains in place today. When reached for comment by MEE on multiple occasions, the ICC prosecutor’s office declined to provide any statement, referencing amended court rules that mandate secrecy for new court filings.

The warrants were first submitted to the court in January 2025, just weeks after Donald Trump’s second inauguration as U.S. president. The four applications were developed under the leadership of former prosecutor Karim Khan and deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan, who oversees the ICC’s Afghanistan investigation, with strategic guidance from special adviser Lisa Davis, the author of the court’s official policy on gender-based crimes. While it remains unconfirmed whether the two secret warrants were submitted on the same day as the public filings, Khan publicly noted during the January 23 announcement of the public warrants that additional applications would be coming “soon.” Insiders confirmed to MEE that the two confidential requests were already “almost ready” for submission on that date.

Since February 2025, the U.S. has levied retaliatory financial and visa sanctions against multiple ICC officials connected to both the Afghanistan and Palestine investigations, justifying the measures on the grounds that the court targets U.S. nationals and U.S. allies. Karim Khan became the first sanctioned official, and was controversially removed from office by ICC member states last month following an 18-month misconduct investigation. Eight additional ICC judges have also been sanctioned, including three members of the 2020 Appeals Chamber that originally authorized the full Afghanistan investigation: Kimberly Prost, Solomy Bossa, and Luz Ibanez.

Notably, the sanctions were imposed despite a 2021 decision by Khan to deprioritize the portion of the Afghanistan investigation focused on U.S. military and CIA personnel, as well as forces of the former Afghan government, to reallocate resources to investigating crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K). Even with this shift, successive U.S. administrations—including that of Joe Biden—have opposed the ICC’s prosecution of Taliban leaders for pragmatic geopolitical reasons. The primary factor is that the Taliban remains Afghanistan’s de facto ruling authority, requiring ongoing diplomatic engagement with its senior members. Washington also fears that increased pressure on the Taliban could lead to the collapse of its government, creating a power vacuum that would be filled by more extremist groups such as IS-K.

The ICC’s Afghanistan investigation has a long, complicated history stretching back to 2017, when then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda first requested judicial authorization to open an investigation into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan since 2003, spanning actions by Taliban, IS-K, Afghan government, and U.S. forces. The request was initially rejected by a pre-trial chamber in 2019, but the Appeals Chamber overturned that ruling in March 2020 and cleared the investigation to move forward. Bensouda was sanctioned by the U.S. government just months later for her efforts to bring U.S. nationals under the court’s jurisdiction.

The investigation was suspended later in 2020 following a request for deferral from the then-Afghan government, and did not resume work until late 2022, with that decision upheld on appeal in April 2023. In November 2024, six countries—Chile, Costa Rica, Spain, France, Luxembourg, and Mexico—jointly submitted a referral to the ICC, adding new allegations of systematic crimes against women and girls committed after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, and asking that these claims be integrated into the existing Afghanistan investigation. Just weeks later, in January 2025, Khan submitted the arrest warrant applications, arguing that the gender persecution allegations already fell within the scope of the 2020 investigation authorization.

Last week, MEE revealed that ICC judges have formally asked the prosecutor’s office to open a standalone investigation into Taliban gender persecution, separating this probe from the original Afghanistan war crimes investigation that originally included claims against U.S. nationals. If the prosecutor’s office moves forward with this separation, it is widely expected to spark questions over whether the court is seeking to de-escalate tensions with Washington by explicitly signaling it will no longer pursue allegations against U.S. forces and their Afghan allies. Karim Khan’s two deputies, both of whom are currently under U.S. sanctions, will lead the office until a new permanent prosecutor is selected.

Tensions have spiked on the Korean Peninsula after North Korea carried out its second ballistic missile launch in less than a week, in a move widely interpreted as a direct protest against the upcoming joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States. Pyongyang has long framed such drills as a preparation for an invasion of its territory.

According to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the missile was launched from the eastern coastal city of Wonsan at approximately 6 a.m. local time on Wednesday, and traveled more than 700 kilometers (435 miles) before impacting. Japan’s Defense Ministry also confirmed the detection of the launch, noting that the weapon landed in waters outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago.

This string of rapid-fire tests aligns with a years-long pattern of North Korean weapons development, a campaign that has continued Pyongyang’s refusal to re-enter denuclearization talks with Washington and Seoul. Regional security analysts have long observed that North Korea consistently leverages joint military exercises conducted by its rivals as a justification to advance its own weapons testing program.

The latest launch comes just two days after Seoul and Washington formally announced that their annual large-scale military drills, dubbed Ulchi Freedom Shield, would begin on August 17. The exercises are designed to strengthen allied readiness to counter North Korean aggression, a mission that both South Korea and the U.S. stress is purely defensive in nature. This has not softened Pyongyang’s opposition, however: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un labeled 2023’s Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises clear evidence of an intention to “ignite a war” against his country, promising that North Korea would respond with “proactive and overwhelming” countermeasures to any perceived provocation. This year’s tests mark a continuation of that long-standing retaliatory pattern.

This latest test follows an initial short-range ballistic missile launch detected by South Korea, the U.S. and Japan on August 6, which was the first North Korean ballistic missile test activity since late June. North Korea has not yet issued an official confirmation of either launch, a common practice where the regime typically confirms weapons tests the following day.

In response to the launch, South Korea’s military has announced it maintains full readiness to repel any further provocation from Pyongyang, in close coordination with the United States. South Korea’s National Security Council formally labeled the launches “acts of provocation” and called for an immediate halt to Pyongyang’s test activities. In Japan, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters that Tokyo delivered a formal strong protest to North Korea via its diplomatic mission in Beijing, emphasizing that “It’s a serious problem that affects the safety of the Japanese people.”

North Korea’s weapons tests are explicitly banned under multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions, but Pyongyang has dramatically expanded its testing of ballistic and other advanced weapons since high-stakes denuclearization diplomacy between Kim Jong Un and former U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed in 2019. Regional experts widely assess that Kim is pursuing the expansion of his nuclear and missile arsenals to gain greater leverage to force the U.S. to concede to demands such as the lifting of harsh international economic sanctions that have crippled North Korea’s economy.

In recent years, Kim has also significantly expanded North Korea’s diplomatic and military alignment with Moscow, with open reporting indicating Pyongyang has supplied troops and ammunition to support Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has also moved to strengthen long-standing ties with China, North Korea’s primary economic partner and traditional diplomatic ally, a shift that culminated in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s June visit to Pyongyang, the first such visit by a Chinese head of state in seven years.