Global Pulse

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  • After the frontlines: Palmyra’s fight for cultural and economic revival

    After the frontlines: Palmyra’s fight for cultural and economic revival

    Nestled in Syria’s central desert, the ancient city of Palmyra has borne the full weight of more than a decade of civil conflict, its story woven together from centuries of cultural heritage and years of unspeakable brutality. When the Islamic State (IS) seized control of the city in 2015, Syria had already been torn apart by years of war. In the decade that followed, shifting control between IS and the Assad government, compounded by Russian military intervention, left layer upon layer of destruction: violence displaced tens of thousands, transformed ancient landscapes, and scarred a community that had thrived here for millennia.

    It took 30 days for Palmyra’s residents to grasp the full brutality of the IS occupation. Within days of capturing the city, the militant group brought 20 local men to the iconic Roman Amphitheatre, one of Syria’s most revered cultural landmarks, and publicly executed them under the group’s black flag, turning a monument to ancient civilization into a stage for terror. The victims’ bodies were hung in the streets of modern Palmyra by their wrists, left to decompose in the desert heat for seven days.

    Once IS consolidated its control, its attention turned to Palmyra’s 2,000-year-old ancient ruins. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, Palmyra has long stood as a symbol of the cultural and religious pluralism that once defined the Middle East. Its network of polytheistic temples, shrines, and artifacts predates the rise of Islam, making it a prime target for IS’s extremist iconoclastic ideology. In propaganda spectacles broadcast around the world, militants destroyed many of the site’s most recognizable landmarks, while looting hundreds of smaller artifacts to sell on the global antiquities black market for funding.

    “They even burnt 2,000 year-old mummies because they weren’t Muslim,” explained Khalid, a Palmyran tour guide who lived through the occupation, his voice heavy with bitter irony. The famed Arch of Triumph was reduced to two standing columns; the central sanctuary of the Temple of Bel was completely leveled, only its outer enclosure wall remaining recognizable. Stone carvings of human figures were systematically chiseled away, their faces erased in line with the group’s extremist beliefs.

    The damage was not limited to the ancient ruins. Palmyra’s millennia-old oasis, the source of water that turned the city into a prosperous Silk Road trading hub thousands of years ago, has also been transformed. Ahmad, a local resident who began working with tourists at the age of nine, remembers a tree-lined road where families would sit outside their homes inviting visitors in for tea. Today, that road sits exposed to the unforgiving desert sun, flanked by cleared rubble and scorched earth, a testament to successive waves of destruction.

    Modern Palmyra fared no better than its ancient ruins. Homes and public buildings were systematically destroyed and looted during repeated military campaigns. “When I came back, the house was mined and everything had been stolen by regime forces, even the copper pipes,” members of the Saleh family told Middle East Eye.

    Today, the scars of war have become an inescapable part of Palmyra’s identity, drawing a new breed of traveler alongside those who come for its ancient history. UNESCO has developed a formal recovery roadmap for the city, including conservation work for the ruins, improved visitor infrastructure, and livelihood support programs, building on earlier emergency safeguarding efforts. But many local residents and officials say a wide gap remains between international plans and on-the-ground reality. While global frameworks for reconstruction exist, tangible, visible support remains scarce, leaving most of the rebuilding work to the residents who have chosen to return.

    “Palmyra is the hero, it’s the icon of Syria,” said Rami Nawaya, founder of Syrian Guides. “Now, it’s taken on another dimension, attracting the adventurers who are interested in the cultural dimension but also the conflict.” For local leaders working to revive the city’s once-thriving tourism industry, the top priority is not rebuilding the ancient ruins themselves, but restoring the basic infrastructure that allows visitors to experience the site and allows residents to return permanently: reopening hotels, restaurants and guesthouses, repairing roads, and restoring basic services.

    For Palmyrans, tourism is one of the only viable paths to restoring the local economy. Before the war, the industry made up nearly half of the city’s total economic output, supporting thousands of jobs. After the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, visitor numbers began to slowly climb, but renewed regional instability following U.S. and Israeli military campaigns against Iran disrupted travel routes and derailed that early momentum.

    Still, small signs of recovery are starting to emerge. In early June, the Silk Road Lodge welcomed its first guests, becoming one of the first new tourist facilities to open in Palmyra since the fall of the Assad government. Its owner, Radwan Abdullatif, returned to Syria after receiving asylum in Japan, helped by tourists he had met during his earlier work in Palmyra. “If we don’t fix Syria, other people won’t fix it for us. I advise everyone to come and fix the country, and Palmyra, hand by hand, so that the tourists will see, and come again,” Abdullatif said. He added that what local business owners need most from the government is not direct funding, but streamlined bureaucratic processes and easier access to permits to open and operate businesses.

    Local organizations are also working to rebuild sustainable livelihoods for residents. The Caravan Foundation runs the Noor al-Badia women’s cooperative, which has trained 70 local women who lost their homes and family members during the war to make traditional handicrafts and textiles, providing many of them with their only source of household income. The cooperative’s success, however, depends entirely on tourist traffic to its tented shop at Bedouin Corner, a traditional camp and restaurant located beside the ancient ruins.

    Outside of Syria, the country’s gradual reopening to travel has sparked debate over “dark tourism” and the ethics of visiting a post-conflict society. But for Palmyra’s residents rebuilding their lives, attracting any visitor matters far more than debating their motivations. “There are many tourists who entered Syria with the intention of visiting war zones, but ended up having meals with locals, visiting workshops, being introduced to other facets of the country,” Nawaya explained. The destruction cannot be erased or ignored, but it does not have to be the only story Palmyra tells.

    In the absence of coverage from mainstream international media outlets that still label Syria a high-risk destination, independent travel creators and influencers have become one of the most powerful tools for promoting the country. Nick Maddock, a travel YouTuber who spent six months traveling across almost all of Syria’s governorates, says independent creators hold unique influence because audiences trust their perspectives more than official government tourism campaigns. “That trust goes a really long way in breaking down misconceptions in a way that many local folks cannot,” he said.

    One largely overlooked part of Palmyra’s ongoing recovery is the fate of its long-time Bedouin communities, who have roamed the surrounding desert for generations. For these groups, reconstruction starts with making the desert landscape safe again, after years of conflict left it littered with landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). Their struggle mirrors that of many rural communities across Syria outside of the major population centers of Aleppo and Damascus: with limited state capacity and most international funding focused on urban areas where larger numbers of people are returning, rural recovery depends entirely on local residents’ limited resources: personal savings, remittances from relatives abroad, their own labor, and the constant risk to their own safety.

    Repeated shifts in control of Palmyra made demining work particularly complex. Each faction that controlled the city used different tactics to lay explosive hazards, resulting in overlapping layers of contamination across large swathes of land. “This can result in overlapping contamination, including conventional landmines, IEDs, UXO, and abandoned munitions,” explained Mouiad Alnofaly, deputy programme manager at HALO, a leading international mine action organization working in Syria. “Each hazard presents different technical challenges and requires different clearance methodologies. Before any meaningful restoration, tourism or wider redevelopment can take place, explosive hazards must first be identified and removed.” The organization is currently seeking funding to expand its demining operations to Palmyra in the coming months.

    Until that work is complete, local residents have no choice but to live with the daily risk of explosive devices. Local officials estimate that around 200 people have been killed or injured by mines and UXO in the Palmyra area since the end of major combat. “When people returned to the city, the houses were full of mines because they were used as weapon stores. Some looked like stones,” said Zahir al-Salim, deputy director of Palmyra. While the main archaeological site and primary access roads have been cleared and declared safe, large areas of agricultural land and the open desert remain dangerous. For Bedouins, whose traditional lifestyle depends on free movement across the desert, this contamination has been devastating, killing not only residents (including children playing in open areas) but also dozens of camels, a critical source of income and transport for the community.

    Despite all it has endured, Palmyra endures. Every Friday evening at sunset, groups of local residents gather beside the ancient ruins: motorbikes pull up carrying families and water pipes for shisha, people spread blankets on the ground to shelter from the wind, and young men gather on the steps of the Roman Amphitheatre—once the stage for mass executions—to smoke and watch the sun set over the desert. Palmyra survived the IS occupation, survived a decade of war. Whether it can once again become a thriving home for its people depends on two critical things: sustained international support to clear explosives and rebuild infrastructure, and the return of tourists who can turn Palmyra’s ancient heritage into a living, sustainable livelihood for the community that calls it home.

  • US blocks long-term renewal of North American trade deal

    US blocks long-term renewal of North American trade deal

    Six years after the landmark U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) replaced the decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to reshape regional trade rules, a senior U.S. administration official has confirmed that Washington will not renew the trilateral pact in its current form. This decision blocks the deal from accessing the automatic 16-year extension outlined in the agreement’s original founding terms.

    Under the USMCA’s official framework, all three member nations must unanimously approve an extension to lock in another 16-year term. If no unanimous agreement is reached, the agreement is set on an irreversible 10-year countdown to potential termination, bringing the earliest possible expiration date for the pact to 2036. Without a long-term extension confirmed, the three nations will now be required to hold annual negotiation meetings to revisit the terms of the deal.

    The U.S. official emphasized that the administration deliberately chose against rubber-stamping an automatic renewal to force action on long-standing unresolved issues that Washington has prioritized. For months, U.S. trade negotiators have repeatedly raised concerns about three core sticking points: inconsistent enforcement of automotive rules of origin, insufficient access for U.S. exports to Canada’s dairy market, and loopholes that allow non-member nations like China to exploit the regional trade bloc by shipping goods through member countries.

    The USMCA currently underpins roughly $2 trillion in annual cross-border trade across North America, touching every major sector from agriculture to automotive manufacturing. While the deal remains fully in effect for the time being, the lack of a finalized long-term commitment has injected fresh economic uncertainty across the continent, a risk that business advocacy groups have repeatedly warned against. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has long noted that both manufacturing and agricultural sectors on both sides of the border depend on stable, predictable cross-border trade rules to plan long-term investments and supply chains.

    The decision has split domestic U.S. industry groups, however. Domestic steel trade associations including the American Iron and Steel Institute and the Steel Manufacturers Association have publicly welcomed the shift, arguing that mandatory annual reviews give U.S. negotiators ongoing leverage to revise and fix problematic provisions of the deal that do not serve American industrial interests.

    Originally negotiated during the first presidential term of Donald Trump, the USMCA entered into force in July 2020 as a major update to NAFTA, which had governed North American trade since 1994. The updated pact introduced new regulations for digital trade, strengthened protections for worker rights, and tightened rules for regional automotive manufacturing, requiring a larger share of vehicle parts to be produced within North America to qualify for tariff-free access. If the current terms are not revised and reapproved by all three members within the next decade, the landmark trade agreement will expire, reshaping the economic integration of the North American continent.

  • Israel is carrying out ‘reproductive genocide’ against Palestinians

    Israel is carrying out ‘reproductive genocide’ against Palestinians

    A groundbreaking 188-page report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, backed by the global advocacy group Progressive International, has leveled explosive allegations that Israel has enacted decades of systemic reproductive genocide against the Palestinian people, a campaign that has intensified to catastrophic levels since the outbreak of full-scale conflict in Gaza in October 2023. The report argues that this deliberate strategy targets Palestinian women, children, and communal life by destroying critical medical infrastructure, causing widespread environmental harm that triggers infertility, and directly killing civilians to erode the possibility of sustained Palestinian existence. The findings align with a separate recent conclusion from the United Nations’ top independent investigative body for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which confirmed Israeli forces have intentionally targeted Palestinian children as a core component of their Gaza military campaign.

    The UN commission’s investigation mapped the full scope of harm inflicted on Palestinian children: from targeted sniper attacks and drone strikes, to systematic torture of detained minors, widespread reproductive violence, and the deliberate leveling of schools and hospitals. Since the start of the campaign in October 2023, more than 21,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces, with an additional 5,160 children estimated to remain trapped and dead under the rubble of destroyed buildings. As of October 2024, at least 15,000 children in Gaza have lost their mothers, leaving them orphaned in a war zone. One particularly devastating case documented by the UN involved the Israeli military cutting power to al-Nasr paediatric hospital, leading to the deaths of four newborn infants. Their decomposing bodies were later found still connected to non-functional life support machines.

    When the full-scale assault on Gaza began, UN officials estimated 50,000 pregnant women were residing in the enclave, with 5,500 births occurring each month. The report details that Israel’s military blockade and attacks have eliminated almost all access to emergency obstetric care, creating a public health catastrophe that has pushed miscarriage rates up by more than 300 percent. Widespread malnutrition, widespread anaemia, and a total lack of prenatal supplements have drastically increased the risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and fatal maternal hemorrhaging during labor. With Israel blocking entry of clean water, menstrual hygiene products, and basic reproductive health supplies into Gaza, the Palestinian Feminist Collective found that many women have been forced to use homemade sanitary pads or take continuous birth control pills to stop their periods entirely.

    Compiled from research conducted between December 2025 and April 2026, the report draws from a vast array of sources: survivor and witness testimonies, declassified Israeli archival documents, Palestinian oral histories, peer-reviewed academic research, documentary evidence, independent media reporting, human rights documentation, and official UN reports and statements. In Gaza, the vast majority of hospitals have been destroyed or damaged by bombing, leaving facilities without fuel, electricity, anesthesia, or sterile surgical equipment. This has forced pregnant women to deliver babies in overcrowded emergency shelters, damaged private homes, or even on rubble-strewn city streets. International medics who have worked in Gaza have described the unspeakable horror of performing major surgeries, including emergency Caesarean sections, without any form of anesthesia. Even after giving birth, new mothers cannot access basic supplies considered universal across most of the world: diapers, adequate nutrition, clean water, or infant formula.

    The report argues that Israel’s military campaign has systematically targeted the core infrastructure that enables Palestinian life, specifically reproductive healthcare systems, to make sustained Palestinian survival impossible. Israeli forces have destroyed maternity wards and in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics across Gaza. The report adds that the Israeli military’s use of toxic weaponry including white phosphorus has created long-term, intergenerational risks to Palestinian fertility, extending the harm of the campaign to future generations. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women now serve as the sole breadwinners and caregivers for their families, after being widowed by the conflict or left to raise children alone while their partners are held in Israeli political prisons. Thousands more have been forcibly separated from their families through systematic expulsions and mass incarcerations. “Palestinian mothers in Gaza have been left to shoulder the impossible task of giving life and caring for their children despite the widespread starvation, displacement, and disease,” the report states.

    To illustrate the systemic nature of the violence, the report highlights the stories of two Gaza women, Rania Abu Anza and Jomana Arafa, whose cases are described as only the tip of the iceberg of harm. Abu Anza spent 10 years pursuing IVF treatment before finally giving birth to twin boys, Naeim and Wissam. In March 2024, an Israeli air strike killed both infants and their father, destroying the family Abu Anza had spent a decade building. Just two days after Arafa gave birth to her own twins, she, her newborns, and her mother were killed while seeking shelter in an area Israel had officially designated a “safe humanitarian zone.” Arafa’s husband survived only because he had left to retrieve the twins’ official birth certificates.

    The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has independently confirmed that Israeli forces have systematically targeted reproductive healthcare infrastructure, all but eliminating maternity services, prenatal care, fertility clinics, and neonatal intensive care units across Gaza. For the first time in Gaza’s history, a full-scale famine has broken out in the enclave, driven by Israel’s severe restrictions on food entry. The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report also traces this reproductive violence to long-standing ideological roots in Israeli policy, noting that as early as 1995, Israeli geographer Arnon Soffer warned that “the most serious threat Israel faces is the wombs of Arab women,” framing Palestinian birth rates as an existential threat to Israeli national security. Golda Meir, who served as Israeli prime minister from 1969 to 1974, once remarked that her worst nightmares stemmed from the knowledge that “another Palestinian child will be born.”

    Responding to the report, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, called the document a damning indictment of the entire system of Israeli occupation. “It is an indictment of a system that has transformed Palestinian life – bodies, homes, families, reproductive existence, and even the dead – into instruments of control and domination,” Albanese said. “It is time to understand that the crimes against the Palestinians – including the sexualised and gender-based violence meticulously researched and exposed in this report – is not a total sum of isolated abuses, but a system of domination, oppression and erasure.” This reporting is originally from independent outlet Middle East Eye, which provides unfiltered coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.

  • Mexico’s legendary rescue brigade heads to Venezuela as earthquakes death toll tops 2,200

    Mexico’s legendary rescue brigade heads to Venezuela as earthquakes death toll tops 2,200

    MEXICO CITY – At Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport, a 39-year-old man clad head-to-toe in vivid orange gear carefully loads 12 cardboard boxes onto a luggage cart. He is no ordinary passenger, and these boxes hold far more than personal belongings: inside are dozens of body bags, preparation for a grim, life-saving mission to one of the worst natural disasters Venezuela has faced in modern history.

    That man is Germán Bello, a volunteer with Brigada Internacional de Rescate Topos Azteca, Mexico’s most celebrated civilian search-and-rescue nonprofit. Born from the rubble of the catastrophic 1985 Mexico City earthquake that killed thousands, the independent organization has built a global reputation for rapid deployment to disaster zones across the world, answering calls no matter the risk.

    Nearly a full week has passed since two powerful earthquakes tore through Venezuela’s Caribbean coastline, leaving a trail of death and destruction. By Wednesday, official government reports put the confirmed death toll above 2,200, with more than 11,000 people injured across the hardest-hit region of La Guaira. As rescue teams from around the world continue to comb through the wreckage of collapsed apartment blocks and family homes, the slim window to find trapped survivors is rapidly closing, and the operation has increasingly shifted toward recovery of the deceased.
    Bello, an electrical engineer who owns a small auto repair shop, declines to say when he will return to Mexico. Along with standard rescue equipment, he carries the body bags to handle the grim aftermath of the quakes. Within the brigade, he goes by the nickname “La Secre” – short for secretary – as he serves as the close second-in-command to the group’s founder, 80-year-old veteran rescuer Héctor “El Chino” Méndez, who is already on the ground in La Guaira leading search efforts for any remaining survivors. Méndez first cut his teeth in disaster response organizing spontaneous civilian rescue efforts after the 1985 Mexico City quake, and has led Topos missions across six continents for nearly 40 years.

    “The hardest part is telling someone that their loved one has died,” Bello shared ahead of his departure, a sentiment that underscores the emotional weight of the work rescuers take on.

    For Topos volunteers, emotional discipline is non-negotiable. In a disaster zone, a single lapse in focus can mean the difference between life and death, both for trapped victims and the rescuers themselves. Merry Valencia, a 14-year veteran of the brigade, recited the group’s core code of conduct to explain the mindset: “There is no hunger, no heat, no sleep. There is no fear.”

    Once teams arrive on site and assess the structural stability of collapsed buildings, they split into small groups assigned to different sections of the debris field. They crawl through narrow gaps and empty spaces beneath pancaked concrete floors – a dangerous work style that earned the group their name “Topos”, Spanish for moles. To detect signs of life, they rely on thermal imaging cameras, sensitive listening devices, and years of honed instinct. Working with simple tools like shovels and hand hammers, they remove rubble inch by inch, taking extreme care to avoid triggering secondary collapses that could bury anyone still trapped.

    One of the group’s most iconic contributions to global search-and-rescue practice is the silence protocol, a technique first developed during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that is now used by rescue teams worldwide. As a Mexican Army rescuer demonstrated while searching a collapsed La Guaira building Saturday, after announcing the team’s presence and asking any trapped people to make noise, the rescuer raises a clenched fist. The signal spreads instantly across the entire search area: every rescuer, soldier, volunteer and journalist stops talking immediately. For several seconds, the only sound is the wind over the rubble. Rescuers then wait, holding their breath, listening for any sign of life through microphones, pressed against concrete, or scanning with cameras for the faintest movement or tap.

    Back at the Mexico City airport, the human cost of the disaster came into sharp focus as Bello prepared to leave. A young Venezuelan engineer living in Mexico, Diego Bejarano, recognized Bello’s gear and approached to ask if he was part of the rescue mission. When Bello confirmed he was heading to the disaster zone where Bejarano’s entire family lives in Caracas, Bejarano broke down in tears.
    Bello pulled him into a tight hug, a small moment of connection that he says fuels his years of volunteer work. After Bejarano left, Bello wiped tears from his own eyes and explained what keeps him returning to disaster zones again and again: “That’s my reward. Being able to give someone a little hope.”

  • ‘Board of Peace’ to launch ‘Hamas-free’ camps as Israel tightens grip on Gaza

    ‘Board of Peace’ to launch ‘Hamas-free’ camps as Israel tightens grip on Gaza

    A controversial proposal to establish so-called “Hamas-free humanitarian zones” in the Gaza Strip, led by a U.S.-backed initiative led by former U.S. President Donald Trump, has emerged in recent Israeli media reports, as the Israeli military continues to consolidate its hold over more than two-thirds of the besieged territory.

    According to reporting from Israeli national newspaper Israel Hayom, the first of these controlled humanitarian zones is scheduled to open within the next several weeks at Tel Sultan, a location situated on the outskirts of Rafah in southern Gaza. The site is intended to house Palestinian civilians who have been vetted and confirmed to have no weapon holdings or organizational ties to Hamas, the report says.

    Security and order within the designated zones will be maintained by a newly assembled multinational contingent called the International Stabilisation Force (ISF). The force will be outfitted exclusively with non-lethal weaponry, operating out of Israel’s Amitai Camp located near the Gaza border and falling under the direct command of Trump’s Board of Peace – the body launched in January this year at the former U.S. president’s explicit order to advance a negotiated settlement for the Gaza conflict.

    While the plan promises basic humanitarian support including temporary shelter and aid deliveries to residents of the zones, Board of Peace officials have made a firm commitment to ban the import of concrete into Gaza, a restriction that will heavily limit infrastructure reconstruction amid widespread destruction across the territory. The board is also moving forward with plans to develop large-scale logistics warehouses to support the management of the humanitarian shelters, with site scouting already underway in communities adjacent to Gaza’s border fence, per the report.

    Parallel to these humanitarian planning efforts, the Israeli military is continuing its incremental expansion of territorial control beyond the so-called “Yellow Line”, an existing boundary that was meant to serve as a temporary holding area for Israeli forces during the first phase of an earlier ceasefire agreement. Under the terms of that deal, Israel was required to withdraw from the area during the second phase of the agreement, but Israel has refused to relinquish control, as the second phase has never been implemented. Today, this expanded buffer zone controlled by Israel encompasses approximately 70 percent of Gaza’s total land area.

    An unnamed senior Israeli official speaking to Israel Hayom outlined the country’s current strategic approach: “We are manoeuvring within the American constraints, increasing the pace of targeted killings while remaining below the threshold of international criticism – and this will continue as long as Hamas is unwilling to disarm.”

    In a recent public update posted to the social platform X, the Board of Peace confirmed that the first batch of tactical vehicles has already arrived at the ISF’s base in the Logistics Support Area codenamed Endurance, alongside photographs documenting the delivery.

    Reaction to the plan from Hamas has been cautiously measured. Hazem Qassem, a spokesperson for the group, said Hamas holds out hope that the initiative will mark “the beginning of implementing the tasks assigned to them”, including separating Palestinian communities in Gaza from Israeli military forces and working to put a stop to ongoing Israeli violations against Palestinian civilians. “We call on the Board of Peace to begin the actual implementation of the provisions of the plan to end the war on Gaza,” Qassem added.

    The plan for a concentrated humanitarian enclave near Rafah is not a new proposal. As far back as July of last year, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz first announced plans to corral the entire population of Gaza into a consolidated “humanitarian city” near Rafah, where all residents would undergo mandatory security screenings and be barred from leaving the designated area. Earlier satellite imagery analysis conducted by research group Forensic Architecture and reported by Drop Site News in January of this year already revealed that Israeli forces had carried out large-scale land clearing and ground compaction work in the Tel Sultan area of Rafah, a level of preparatory construction activity unmatched anywhere else east of the Yellow Line.

  • Ukrainian charged in Germany over Nord Stream blasts

    Ukrainian charged in Germany over Nord Stream blasts

    Nearly two years after mysterious explosions crippled three of the four Nord Stream natural gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea, German law enforcement has formally brought criminal charges against a Ukrainian national accused of masterminding the sabotage attack.

    German media reports identify the suspect only as Serhii K, in compliance with the country’s strict privacy regulations. Prosecutors allege he organized and led the coordinated operation to destroy the multi-billion-dollar energy infrastructure, which was built to carry Russian natural gas to consumers across Western Europe. According to Germany’s public broadcaster DW, the suspect is accused of directing a cell of six additional accomplices in the plot, and faces charges including sabotage of civilian energy infrastructure, unauthorized detonation of explosives, and large-scale property destruction.

    The accused is the same individual taken into custody by Italian law enforcement in summer 2023 and extradited to Germany last November. He has repeatedly denied any connection to the 2022 blasts, and his Berlin-based legal representation at Menaker law firm confirmed to Reuters that the indictment was officially served to the defendant on Wednesday. Neither the legal team nor federal prosecutors have released further details on the specific charges contained in the court document. Federal prosecutors later confirmed the pending charges to AFP, offering no additional comment on the ongoing investigation.

    A second Ukrainian suspect was arrested just one month after Serhii K’s extradition, detained at his residence near Warsaw, Poland’s capital, under a separate German arrest warrant. That suspect has not been publicly charged as of this reporting.

    The Nord Stream pipeline network was one of the largest subsea energy projects in European history, spanning 1,200 kilometers across the Baltic seabed from the Russian coast to northeastern Germany. While Nord Stream 2 was never brought online after Berlin froze its approval process just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Nord Stream 1 had supplied consistent volumes of Russian natural gas to Western Europe for years before Russia shut down operations months before the blasts, citing technical maintenance issues. On September 26, 2022, multiple underwater explosions ripped through three of the four lines, leaving the entire network inoperable and releasing what has been recorded as one of the largest single methane emission events in human history, causing significant environmental harm to the Baltic Sea ecosystem.

    For nearly two years, the perpetrators of the attack have remained unconfirmed, leaving a cloud of geopolitical uncertainty hanging over transatlantic and European relations. Western governments initially pointed suspicion toward Russia, while Moscow has repeatedly accused the United States and United Kingdom of orchestrating the sabotage. To date, no conclusive evidence has emerged linking any state actor to the attack.

    The charges have introduced unexpected friction between Germany and Ukraine, a key diplomatic and military alliance for Berlin amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. Germany is the single largest contributor of military aid to Kyiv from European nations, and many within Ukraine view the destruction of Nord Stream as a major strategic blow to Russia’s energy export revenue, which funds its war machine. Many ordinary Ukrainians have expressed confusion over why German authorities are moving forward with the prosecution of a Ukrainian citizen for an attack that materially weakened Moscow’s war capacity.

  • Starmer’s legacy: Labour has a mountain to climb to recover its Muslim voters

    Starmer’s legacy: Labour has a mountain to climb to recover its Muslim voters

    In October 2023, as Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza, Keir Starmer — then leader of the UK opposition — faced a pivotal question during a live interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari. When asked about Israel’s deliberate use of starvation as a tool of conflict against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Starmer’s response would reshape the future of the Labour Party: he stated he believed Israel held a legitimate “right” to cut off electricity and water supplies to Gaza’s civilian population, a move widely classified as a war crime under international humanitarian law. What Starmer did not anticipate in that moment was the lasting damage his words would inflict on Labour’s standing with its core supporters, particularly the UK’s Muslim community.

    Historically, Labour has positioned itself as more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and more open to Palestinian advocacy than the ruling Conservative Party. So Starmer’s remarks triggered an immediate wave of backlash from voices both inside and outside the party. Within just a few weeks, more than 150 Muslim Labour councillors penned an open letter to party leadership, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The plea was brushed aside, and the first cracks in the long-standing alliance between the Muslim community and Labour quickly grew into a major political rupture.

    Though Labour had held a consistent lead in national opinion polls since December 2021, translating to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election that delivered a majority government, the election exposed deep, costly rifts within the party. Starmer’s government took power with the lowest popular vote share for any UK ruling party in modern history, and the party lost multiple parliamentary constituencies with large Muslim populations. One of the most high-profile losses was the newly created Dewsbury and Batley constituency in West Yorkshire, a seat where 43% of the population identifies as Muslim.

    Warning signs of this backlash had already emerged in the May 2024 local elections, when thousands of disaffected Labour voters threw their support behind independent candidates across the country. This trend held strong in the most recent round of 2026 local elections, particularly in the Kirklees metropolitan borough that covers Dewsbury and Batley. Yusra Hussain, a local councillor who defected from Labour to run as an independent, and who won a full term in Batley West alongside two other independent candidates, summed up the sentiment of many defectors: “I did not leave because my values changed. I left because I believe the party’s direction has changed.”

    To understand Labour’s current unrest, observers say it is impossible to separate the Gaza backlash from the broader ideological shift the party has undergone over the past decade. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour advanced a clear platform of radical left-wing policies centered on renationalization of key industries, massive public investment, and expanded social rights. It was on this platform of Corbyn’s “10 pledges” that Starmer won the 2020 Labour leadership contest — but within months of taking power, Starmer abandoned each pledge one by one, steering the party sharply to the right, further even than the centrist New Labour government of Tony Blair.

    This ideological shift left Labour vulnerable in marginal seats with large Muslim populations. In the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election, for example, then-incumbent Labour candidate Tracy Brabin — now Mayor of West Yorkshire — saw her majority whittled down to just 323 votes, after prominent Palestine advocate George Galloway ran as a spoiler candidate and drew thousands of left-leaning pro-Palestine voters away from Labour. That same lack of a coherent, progressive appeal, paired with the party’s hard turn toward pro-Israel policy, cost Starmer the newly created Dewsbury and Batley seat in 2024.

    Iqbal Mohamed, the independent MP who now holds the Dewsbury and Batley seat, explained the coalition that brought him to power: “What united so many voters was a firm belief that this country is — in a myriad of ways — failing the vast majority of people, their basic needs and their human rights, be that at home or abroad. Along with the abandonment of traditional centre-left viewpoints, moving the party towards a pro-Israel ideology was a devastating shift in this constituency.”

    This electoral backlash is not limited to West Yorkshire. Independents also claimed key seats from Labour in Blackburn and Birmingham Perry Barr, both constituencies with even larger British Asian populations than Dewsbury and Batley. Political analysts note that Starmer’s abandonment of the party’s longstanding pro-Palestine position has proven even more disruptive to Labour’s voter base than his broader shift to the right. For decades, successive Labour leaders had backed Palestinian statehood: Ed Miliband oversaw a parliamentary vote in 2014 where the party voted in favor of recognizing Palestinian statehood, and Corbyn remained a consistent advocate for Palestinian rights throughout his leadership. Though Starmer eventually relented and recognized Palestinian statehood late last year alongside Canada and France, political analysts say the damage to Labour’s reputation among core supporters was already irreversible.

    Post-election polling from 2026 confirms that the backlash extends far beyond the Muslim community. More than half of Labour’s former voters — across demographic groups — now cite the party’s inaction on the Gaza conflict as a key reason they switched their support to the Greens, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Liberal Democrats, or independent candidates. Beyond the Gaza issue, Labour has also lost much of its historic left-wing base after the ousting of Jeremy Corbyn, who has since reemerged as a prominent independent left voice. Many political analysts compare this sustained net loss of support to the collapse of other traditional center-left parties across Western Europe in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

    The Green Party has emerged as the primary beneficiary of this exodus, with a 2026 YouGov poll finding that more than one in five former Labour voters have now switched their allegiance to the Greens. The party’s new viability was on full display in the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester, where the Greens came within a hair’s breadth of taking the seat from Labour.

    In Dewsbury and Batley, the impact of this political realignment is impossible to miss. The most recent Kirklees Council elections returned a minority administration led by the right-wing Reform UK party, whose incoming leader drew widespread public mockery for demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of basic parliamentary procedure. The council remains deadlocked without a permanent leader, with a new vote scheduled for later this month to break the impasse. Across the 16 wards covering Batley and Dewsbury, voters elected 11 pro-Palestine independent councillors and five Reform candidates — and not a single Labour candidate won a seat.

    Mohamed, the independent MP for the area, argues that the result makes clear voters have rejected the UK’s longstanding two-party system entirely. “They deserted en masse a Labour Party that has for too long treated residents with contempt, taken their vote for granted, and aided and abetted the Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people,” he said.

    The original analysis, published by Middle East Eye editor and journalist Joe Gill in a 2026 opinion video, challenges Starmer’s core narrative that he rescued a party left morally, financially, and politically bankrupt by Corbyn. For analysts, the path to repairing Labour’s broken trust with voters will require decisive action to shift the party’s direction on both domestic and foreign policy — a change that has not yet materialized under Starmer’s leadership.

  • Greek politician’s mother dies of wounds after arson attack

    Greek politician’s mother dies of wounds after arson attack

    In a shocking series of coordinated attacks targeting senior members of Greece’s ruling New Democracy party in the northern city of Thessaloniki, a 72-year-old woman has become the first fatality after succumbing to severe burn injuries sustained in an early Wednesday incendiary assault.

    Vagia Nestora, mother of New Democracy parliamentary candidate Afroditi Nestora, was caught in the blast and fire that tore through the apartment building where her daughter resides. Hospital officials confirmed that Nestora arrived at the medical facility in critical condition with burns covering nearly 80% of her total body surface. Despite aggressive, round-the-clock intensive care intervention, she developed multiple organ failure and passed away shortly after admission.

    Her daughter Afroditi, who is running as a party candidate in upcoming elections, also suffered second-degree burns and severe smoke inhalation, and remains hospitalized in stable condition as of the latest updates. Afroditi’s father, who lives with the family and has pre-existing chronic health conditions, alongside two other residents of the multi-story building, were also admitted for observation after experiencing respiratory distress from smoke exposure.

    Authorities confirm the attack on the Nestora family’s building was one of three synchronized improvised incendiary attacks that unfolded within 17 minutes across Thessaloniki. The first explosion was recorded at 4:18 a.m. local time, followed by two more blasts at 4:23 a.m. and 4:35 a.m. respectively. The two additional attacks targeted the private residences of Zisis Ioakeimovits, chair of New Democracy’s Thessaloniki regional administrative committee, and Savvas Anastasiadis, a former New Democracy member of parliament. No injuries were reported in these two incidents, though minor property damage was recorded at both locations.

    Investigators say the attackers placed homemade petrol-based incendiary devices outside the targeted apartment buildings. At the Nestora residence, the blast completely destroyed two parked passenger cars, damaged multiple nearby motorcycles, and caused significant structural damage to the building’s ground floor and entryway.

    Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis traveled directly to Thessaloniki’s main hospital immediately after the attacks to meet with victims’ families and oversee the initial law enforcement response. Speaking to reporters shortly before Vagia Nestora’s death was announced, Mitsotakis condemned the attackers in strong terms, rejecting any attempt to frame the violence as a legitimate form of political or social protest. “Those who carry out these attacks under the guise of social struggle are nothing more than criminals, and they will be treated as such,” the prime minister said. He added that violence has no place in a functioning democratic society, and vowed that all those responsible would be apprehended and held fully accountable under Greek law.

    The Greek Counter-Terrorism Service has taken over lead investigative responsibility for the case, and is currently working to confirm whether the three attacks were fully coordinated by a single group or network. Investigators are reviewing hundreds of hours of closed-circuit television footage from nearby businesses and public spaces to identify suspects, and have not yet announced any arrests in connection with the assaults. As of Thursday morning, no domestic or extremist group has issued a claim of responsibility for the attacks.

  • How Israeli president’s advisor worked to set up Reform Friends of Israel group

    How Israeli president’s advisor worked to set up Reform Friends of Israel group

    Calls for greater transparency over foreign lobbying in British politics have reignited after a heated parliamentary debate last week, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK facing fresh scrutiny over its undisclosed links to Israeli lobbying networks. The Westminster Hall debate was convened to discuss a public petition calling for a formal public inquiry into pro-Israel influence over UK politics and democratic institutions. During the debate, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice delivered a fierce rejection of the petition, labeling its core motivation fundamentally antisemitic and calling for it to be thrown out entirely.

    What has thrown Tice’s comments into question, however, is the record of official trips that senior Reform figures have taken to Israel, all funded by pro-Israel groups tied to the Israeli government. Just six months before the debate, in September 2024, Tice himself traveled to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli ministers, with the trip fully financed by Reform Friends of Israel (RFI), a little-known pro-Israel lobby group founded to coordinate ties between the party and the Israeli government. A separate trip by a delegation of senior Reform party figures in November 2024, which included a stop in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, was funded directly by the Israeli foreign ministry, investigative journalism outlet Declassified UK revealed this week.

    Against this backdrop, questions are mounting over the leadership, funding and objectives of RFI, a group that has never publicly disclosed its donor list. The founding driving force behind RFI is British-born political strategist Jason Pearlman, a figure with deep decades-long ties to both British politics and Israeli official circles. Until December 2024, Pearlman served as international media advisor to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, and he continued to work to secure funding for RFI while holding that official Israeli government role. When Pearlman departed his post with Herzog, the Israeli president praised him for guiding the presidency through some of Israel’s most challenging periods with the global press.

    Pearlman has since confirmed he has stepped back from his role leading RFI, telling Middle East Eye in a recent interview that he left the group after relocating to Israel for personal reasons, and that he was honored to have helped launch the organization. He has repeatedly refused to name the group’s financial backers, though he denied claims that RFI has ever received funding from the Israeli government or any other foreign state, and claimed there was never any overlap between his work for the Israeli presidency and his work setting up RFI.

    Pearlman’s long career in pro-Israel advocacy stretches back decades. Raised in Sunderland, northeast England, Pearlman has deep family roots in the global Zionist movement, with a great-grandmother who famously sat alongside Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, at the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress. After working as media director for the Board of Deputies of British Jews and later in the public affairs department of the Israeli embassy in London, he relocated to Israel in 2006, taking up a role as foreign press liaison for the Israeli government press office a year later. He returned to the UK in 2010 to serve as deputy director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a Westminster-based neoconservative think tank with a long record of strongly pro-Israel advocacy.

    HJS’s current director, Alan Mendoza, is another key figure connected to both Reform UK and pro-Israel lobbying circles in the UK. Mendoza serves as a senior foreign affairs advisor to Reform leader Nigel Farage, and also holds the role of president of the UK branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization that has faced widespread international criticism for its role in facilitating the displacement of Palestinian people. JNF UK has donated £1 million ($1.36 million) to what has been described as “Israel’s largest militia”, and counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who faces an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes from the International Criminal Court—as an honorary patron. A former Westminster Conservative councillor, Mendoza defected to Reform UK last year and lost his council seat in the May 2025 UK local elections.

    Under Mendoza’s leadership, HJS has exerted significant influence over counter-terrorism policy during successive Conservative UK governments, while maintaining an unapologetically pro-Israel stance. The think tank has faced harsh criticism even from former insiders: co-founder Matthew Jamison later denounced it as a “monstrous animal” and a “deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation”, while former member Marko Atilla Hoare described it as an “abrasively right-wing forum with an anti-Muslim tinge” that publishes superficial, polemical content from aspiring commentators. Last year, Mendoza publicly opposed the UK government’s plan to allow family dependants of Palestinian students from Gaza to enter the UK, telling TalkTV that “we don’t know what they believe. We don’t know what their tendencies are. We don’t know whether they mean us well or ill.”

    Efforts by Israeli lobbying groups to court Reform UK have ramped up significantly since the second half of 2024. Pearlman previously told Declassified UK that he attended a dinner with Farage and key potential donors while still working for President Herzog, to discuss seed funding for RFI. While he would not name RFI’s current backers, he acknowledged that he expects many donors are overlapping with the groups that fund the long-established pro-Israel lobby groups Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Pearlman is an open, vocal defender of Israeli military actions in Gaza, having written a op-ed for UK outlet LBC earlier this year supporting the US-Israeli attack on Iran and criticizing the current Labour government for failing to offer stronger backing for the strike. He has also repeatedly denied that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in Gaza.

    During his September 2024 funded trip to Israel, Tice met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, and later wrote that with the current Labour government openly declaring pro-Palestinian positions from the prime minister down, it falls to other parties in UK parliament to stand with Israel as an ally. He added that during the trip he visited an Israeli border crossing into Gaza, and claimed that widespread reports of famine in Gaza pushed by the United Nations were false, saying his own observations and conversations with what he called “credible top people” convinced him the famine claims were untrue.

    Tice’s labeling of the transparency petition as antisemitic during last week’s debate has drawn sharp pushback from the petition’s creator, Andy Kalil. The debate saw most participating MPs who are affiliated with pro-Israel groups echo Tice’s claim that the petition was antisemitic, while a small number of MPs who supported the call for an inquiry raised detailed questions about lobbying and transparency that went unanswered. Kalil has since submitted a formal complaint to Deputy Speaker Nusrat Ghani, obtained by Middle East Eye, arguing that the repeated labeling of the petition, its 118,000 public signatories, and supporting MPs as antisemitic amounts to an sustained attack on a legitimate call for greater transparency and accountability, rather than a serious engagement with the substantive issues raised. Kalil added that the debate failed to address core questions about foreign lobbying, political donations, publicly funded parliamentary trips, and foreign influence, and has called for the debate to be rerun.

    Newly unearthed Israeli government data obtained by Berlin-based journalist Yossi Bartel confirms that the Israeli foreign ministry paid more than £50,000 to a Jerusalem-based events firm called Conexión Israel to organize the November 2024 trip for the Reform UK delegation. The delegation included then-Reform chairman David Bull, Lancashire County Council leader Stephen Atkinson, London Assembly member Alex Wilson, and party board member Gawain Towler. During the trip, the group visited sites of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, including the site of the Nova music festival massacre. After the trip, Bull called it “life changing”, and said the group had discussed issues including visa overstayers and asylum seekers with the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. Towler said in a statement after the trip that Israel’s fight is “in many ways, our fight” as a shared struggle for “enlightenment ideals, international norms, democracy and the rest.”

    In addition to its deepening ties with pro-Israel lobbying networks, Reform UK has also built formal connections with the United Arab Emirates, with Farage meeting senior Emirati ministers earlier this year. Abu Dhabi has reportedly found common ground with Reform over their shared opposition to political Islam, and last September Farage pledged that a Reform government would ban the Muslim Brotherhood, following the lead of multiple Gulf states.

    Middle East Eye, which first reported on many of these connections, provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions. Requests for comment from Reform UK have not yet received a response.

  • Nigeria to seek compensation for property abandoned by citizens fleeing South Africa

    Nigeria to seek compensation for property abandoned by citizens fleeing South Africa

    A spreading wave of anti-undocumented migrant sentiment in South Africa has triggered a mass exodus of thousands of African foreign nationals, with Nigeria formally preparing to seek diplomatic redress and financial compensation for its affected citizens.

    Recent weeks have seen South Africa swept by organized protests led by anti-migrant groups, which called on the national government to tighten border controls and crack down on unauthorized migration. Demonstrators issued a 30 June deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave the country, and staged widespread marches that drew thousands of participants on 30 June. While most of the protests remained largely peaceful, isolated outbreaks of targeted violence against foreign residents have sparked widespread panic across migrant communities. South African law enforcement officials confirmed that roughly 900 people have been taken into custody, with most arrests linked to immigration violations and looting connected to the unrest.

    By official estimates, approximately 25,000 African migrants have fled South Africa since the unrest began. For Nigeria alone, more than 600 citizens have already been repatriated on government-organized flights, with hundreds more still waiting for evacuation near the Nigerian High Commission in Pretoria, the South African capital.

    Nigerian officials have confirmed they will pursue compensation through diplomatic channels with South Africa, with discussions planned between the two countries’ top leadership. “We have not severed ties with South Africa, we are still engaging them at the highest level, we will sort those details using our usual diplomatic channels,” Kimiebi Imomotimi Ebienfa, spokesperson for Nigeria’s foreign ministry, told the BBC. Acting Nigerian High Commissioner Alexander Ajayi told local South African media that authorities have already started the process of cataloging abandoned assets, including businesses, vehicles and both movable and immovable property left behind by fleeing Nigerians. All claims will be fully verified before a formal compensation demand is submitted, Ebienfa added.

    One of the evacuees waiting for repatriation, 32-year-old Nigerian trader Oghodero Erejor Wilson, shared his experience of abandoning nearly a decade of life built in South Africa. Wilson, who ran a successful clothing shop in Centurion, Gauteng province, told the BBC he closed his business and fled to Pretoria after threats left him fearing for his personal safety. His residency permit expired in 2021, and he was unable to renew it, leaving him in an undocumented status. Wilson estimates he lost roughly 16,000 rand ($975) worth of inventory and abandoned all his personal belongings, including his clothing and furniture. He told reporters he holds little hope of receiving compensation, saying: “If South Africa government can compensate it, it will be nice, but I know they won’t.” Wilson is scheduled to board the next repatriation flight to Nigeria on Friday.

    South African authorities have stated that all repatriated Nigerian citizens were in the country illegally, a claim Nigerian officials have publicly disputed. The BBC has requested comment from the South African government on Nigeria’s upcoming compensation demand, and no response had been issued at the time of reporting.