分类： politics

A controversial decision by Israeli defense officials to refuse Greece access to the core source code for its newly purchased $3.5 billion multi-layered air defense system has ignited new questions about military technological sovereignty and future Israeli arms exports across the Middle East and Mediterranean.

The multi-billion dollar weapons deal, signed between Athens and Tel Aviv in August of this year, stands as the largest arms export agreement in Israel’s history. Under the terms of the original deal, Israel is set to deliver a full layered air defense array designed to counter a sweeping spectrum of modern aerial threats, ranging from small hostile drones to both short-range and long-range ballistic missiles. The system integrates multiple interconnected components: advanced sensors, precision radar arrays, interceptor missiles, launch infrastructure, and a central command-and-control backbone that orchestrates all defensive operations.

In comments published by Greek national newspaper *Kathimerini*, Moshe Patel, head of the Israel Missile Defence Organisation, confirmed that Greece would not receive the proprietary source code for the system’s command-and-control infrastructure. “No. Because the ‘source code’ was not included in the licence to use the agreement,” Patel stated directly when asked about Athens’ potential access. Without access to this core code, Greek defense engineers and technical teams would be locked out of independent upgrades, routine maintenance, and system modifications, forcing the country to remain reliant on Israeli expertise for all long-term management of its primary air defense network.

Shortly after Patel’s comments sparked backlash in Greece, Israel’s Ministry of Defense issued a clarifying statement, announcing that it would collaborate with Greek counterparts to develop a separate, customized “Greek source code” for the system. This tailored code, the ministry explained, will grant Athens full command-and-control access aligned with its unique operational requirements, and will remain under permanent exclusive Greek sovereignty. “The Greek source code developed under the programme, together with any modifications and additions to it, will remain under exclusive Greek control and be tailored to Greek operational requirements,” the ministry’s statement read.

Even with this compromise, Israel’s initial reluctance to share the original proprietary code has raised broader concerns among the global community of potential Israeli defense clients, particularly the Gulf states that have recently expanded defense cooperation with Tel Aviv. Industry analysts note that the decision underscores a long-standing norm among major military exporters: retaining exclusive technological control over cutting-edge hardware to maintain strategic leverage over buyer nations. The most prominent global example of this practice is widely discussed in defense circles: the United States’ F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighter jet, which many defense analysts speculate includes a hidden “kill switch” that allows Washington to disable the aircraft remotely. While U.S. defense officials have repeatedly denied the existence of such a feature, the F-35’s core functionality remains entirely dependent on proprietary American software and data infrastructure.

According to a serving U.S. official who spoke to independent outlet Middle East Eye, Israel is already planning to dramatically scale up its global exports of advanced air defense systems, with the United Arab Emirates identified as its next high-priority target customer. Tel Aviv has framed the Greek deal as a landmark milestone for its defense export industry: Israeli defense officials note this is the first time the country has offered a complete, integrated defense array capable of countering the full scope of modern aerial threats, from ballistic missiles to rogue UAVs.

The ongoing debate over source code access highlights the delicate balance between global arms trade commerce and national sovereignty, as client nations increasingly demand full independent control over critical defense infrastructure while exporting nations guard their proprietary technological advantages.

US artificial intelligence developer Anthropic has uncovered a troubling attempt by a threat actor cell based in northern Yemen to exploit its Claude AI platform to advance weapons development, including critical guidance, control, and navigation systems for ballistic missiles. The company detailed the incident in a Thursday report outlining actions it has taken to block unauthorized misuse of its AI technology across multiple countries.

Northern Yemen is the primary stronghold of the Houthi movement, which has controlled Yemen’s capital Sanaa since 2014 and just concluded a major military breakthrough this week. The group’s rapid offensive forced the retreat of forces aligned with Saudi Arabia and the internationally recognized Yemeni government headquartered in Aden, leaving the Houthis in control of large stretches of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline adjacent to the Arabian Gulf. This territorial gain includes key strategic islands and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a critical global shipping chokepoint that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and borders three nations: Eritrea, Djibouti, and Yemen.

According to Anthropic’s report, the Yemeni cell was running three distinct weapons development initiatives when it turned to Claude for assistance. The programs included a guided rocket outfitted with an off-the-shelf phone-grade flight computer equipped with final-phase homing guidance technology, a multi-stage ballistic missile with an intended range exceeding 2,000 kilometers, and a flexible multi-variant missile platform that included a configuration for a hypersonic glide vehicle.

The threat actors leveraged Claude’s capabilities to develop critical software for these weapons projects, work that would normally require the expertise and labor of a full team of specialized engineers. Anthropic confirmed that while there is no conclusive evidence the group successfully deployed a fully operational weapon based on the AI-assisted work, the actors did carry out a test firing of the guided rocket. That field test ended in failure, and within hours of the unsuccessful attempt, the actors returned to the Claude platform to ask for help troubleshooting what went wrong.

As soon as the illicit activity was flagged and confirmed, Anthropic moved quickly to ban all accounts linked to the threat cell, cutting off their access to the AI system.

Public reporting has long documented that the Houthi movement receives arms supplies and military training from Iran, and a previous investigation by Middle East Eye also exposed additional military support from Russia. Despite this foreign backing, the Houthis have prioritized building up a domestic military industry to strengthen their independent defense and intelligence capabilities, a priority that has only grown amid years of ongoing conflict in Yemen.

Since Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza in 2023, the Houthis have launched a sustained campaign of attacks on commercial shipping transiting the Red Sea, which the group says is an act of solidarity with Palestinians under siege in Gaza. A prior Middle East Eye report detailed how the group has used openly available commercial shipping data to target vessels linked to Israel and the United States for these attacks, marking a new pattern of asymmetric leveraging of accessible commercial and digital tools to advance military goals.

Leading artificial intelligence firm Anthropic has announced the discovery and disruption of a coordinated, UAE-directed influence operation that exploited its Claude AI assistant to shape global discourse on two high-stakes regional issues: the status of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ongoing conflict in Sudan. The details of this covert campaign are laid out in the company’s September 2024 intelligence threat report, marking one of the first documented cases of a state-aligned actor abusing commercial generative AI to advance covert geopolitical goals.

According to Anthropic’s investigation, the operation was run by a single actor working on behalf of United Arab Emirates government officials, with high confidence linking the work to senior Emirati decision-makers. The core mission laid out in the operation’s internal guiding documents, which the actor fed directly into Claude across hundreds of work sessions, was to execute a coordinated transatlantic and regional campaign aimed at dismantling the global Muslim Brotherhood movement. Beyond that, the operation also sought to manipulate global public opinion regarding the UAE’s well-documented involvement in Sudan’s two-year civil war.

The UAE has publicly long denied any role in the Sudan conflict, but multiple independent investigations from Middle East Eye, international human rights groups, and United Nations researchers have confirmed that Abu Dhabi provides extensive military and political backing to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Sudanese paramilitary group that has been widely accused of perpetrating genocide and mass atrocities in the Darfur region. The influence operation’s secondary goal was specifically designed to undermine international efforts to hold the UAE accountable for its support for the RSF at the UN.

To carry out this campaign, the actor leveraged Claude’s generative capabilities to build an extensive infrastructure of deceptive content and networks. At its core, the operation built a network of roughly 300 inauthentic influencer accounts across major social media platforms, all designed to amplify the operation’s narratives to broader audiences. The actor also used Claude to create a fake non-governmental organization that stole the identity of a legitimate, existing Swiss human rights group, publishing state-aligned “human rights reports” under the stolen organization’s legitimacy.

One of the operation’s most high-stakes plans targeted the UN Human Rights Council’s 62nd session. Claude was used to ghost-write official testimonies that were intended to be delivered by two speakers at the session, with explicit instructions built into the content that the UAE could not be mentioned in any critical context. Beyond institutional targeting, the actor used Claude to conduct open-source research and build detailed personal profiles of 18 members of the European Parliament and prominent international journalists who cover Middle East affairs. The operation also compiled dedicated counter-accountability dossiers targeting UN Special Rapporteurs who had previously published criticism of the UAE’s conduct in Sudan. All of the generated content, from cloned identity documents to profiled target lists, was prepared for direct delivery to senior UAE government officials, Anthropic confirmed.

The actor operated a custom private AI persona codenamed “Deadshot” on their own private infrastructure to coordinate the campaign, embedding a master mission file that instructed Claude to reiterate the operation’s core goals across all work sessions. The standardized workflow mixed real-world event data and the actor’s pre-written political doctrine, then used Claude to refine the content into official-looking intelligence reports, testimonies, and dossiers. The UAE-linked actor also directly funded the social media network created to amplify the operation’s content to wider global audiences.

To date, Anthropic notes that it has not been able to confirm whether any of the prepared testimonies or compiled targeting dossiers successfully reached their intended audiences at the UN or within the UAE government. The UAE has not yet issued a public response to Anthropic’s findings, and continues to maintain its official position that it has no involvement in the Sudan conflict. The disclosure shines a new light on the growing risk of state actors misusing commercial generative AI tools to conduct covert geopolitical influence operations, undermining multilateral accountability efforts and manipulating global public discourse.

In a significant clarification of its new Middle East policy, the British government has confirmed that its sweeping sanctions targeting illegal Israeli settlements will cover communities in the occupied Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, in addition to those in the occupied West Bank, multiple government sources confirmed to Middle East Eye Thursday evening.

The announcement comes two days after London formally declared Israel’s long-running occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and unveiled the landmark package of restrictions, but left open a key ambiguity: whether settlements in the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, would be included in the measures. The lack of initial clarity prompted advocacy groups focused on international law to push for the UK to extend the ban to all illegally occupied territory.

Located at the intersection of Israel, Syria and southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights holds enormous strategic significance, with high elevation that allows forces stationed there to monitor activity across much of the northern Middle East. Israel captured the territory in 1967 and unilaterally annexed it just a few years later, a move that has never received formal recognition from the broader international community. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of the 1967 war, explicitly calls on Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights and all other occupied territories captured during the conflict, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers reside in the Golan, alongside an estimated 26,000 native Syrian Druze inhabitants who retain their Syrian national identity.

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband laid out the scope of the new policy when he announced it earlier this week, stating that the British public does not support enabling illegal occupation by allowing settlement-produced goods to be sold in UK retail spaces. “I do not believe the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets, so I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories,” Miliband said Tuesday.

The new framework will operate as a comprehensive sanctions regime, with narrow carve-outs for religious activities that require cross-border access. Beyond the import ban on settlement goods, the UK will target specific companies and private individuals that provide key support for settlement expansion, including construction services, infrastructure financing, and real estate development for new settlement communities. “To those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this: you will face the full force of UK sanctions,” Miliband added. “Settlements are illegal. They should not be promoted in our country.”

The UK’s policy shift is not an isolated action: 11 other nations, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, joined London in a joint statement released Tuesday. The signatory countries confirmed they intend to implement their own national restrictions on trade with illegal settlements, support broader European Union-level trade restrictions, or are actively evaluating such measures in line with their own domestic legislative and regulatory processes.

Israel has already responded with punitive measures of its own. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced that Israel would implement reciprocal sanctions, including closing the British consulate in East Jerusalem and banning entry to 11 sitting British members of parliament.

Positioned directly across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait from Yemen, Eritrea—an East African nation with 700 miles of strategic Red Sea coastline—has publicly stated that the years-long conflict in Yemen can never be resolved through military means, and that no foreign power will ever succeed in bringing the Yemeni people under control.

In an exclusive interview with Middle East Eye conducted from Eritrea’s capital Asmara, Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh emphasized that Yemen must be given an opportunity to build lasting peace, noting that military action will not deliver the stability the region desperately needs.

Saleh’s comments come amid a dramatic shift in regional power dynamics: a rapid, sweeping Houthi offensive along Yemen’s Red Sea coast has left the group in full control of all Yemeni coastal territory opposite Eritrea and Djibouti, including a number of strategically vital islands in the strait. This territorial gain has upended long-standing calculations around Red Sea navigation and regional security.

One of the most pressing open questions for global trade and regional governance centers on how freedom of navigation through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, connecting the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean via the Red Sea—will be managed moving forward. Saleh noted that all coastal states bordering the waterway should have a voice in determining its future governance, but that the current fragmented political landscape in Yemen creates a major barrier to collective action. Today, Yemen lacks a single cohesive, unified central government that can exercise full control over its territory, a reality Saleh made clear complicates every decision related to the strait. “Yemen is non-existent. The official government has no control. There is no ‘Yemen’,” he told MEE in the interview.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has been a major global shipping and trade route for millennia, and it remains one of the most heavily used maritime corridors for global commerce today. With that strategic importance comes intense global interest, and Eritrea — which sits just 20 nautical miles from Yemen at the strait’s narrowest point alongside Djibouti — recognizes its unique responsibility, Saleh said. “Eritrea is in a very strategic position. We have a responsibility to safeguard the Red Sea to be a safe passage for all,” he stated.

Regional diplomats have outlined two core strategic implications of the Houthi advance: First, control of the strait gives Iran greater diplomatic and military leverage over the United States and Gulf Arab states. Second, the territorial gain puts commercial transiting vessels within range of basic Houthi artillery, putting the group in a position to demand tolls for passage through the waterway. Prior to the offensive, MEE reporting indicates the Houthis already demanded fees from Saudi Arabia for transit.

With the Houthis now controlling the Arabian Peninsula side of the strait, Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline has grown even more critical to global shipping networks. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations can claim up to 12 nautical miles of territorial water, and while international law enshrines the right of free transit through international straits, some legal experts note that littoral states retain the right to charge legitimate fees for services like pilotage, infrastructure maintenance, and environmental protection.

When asked whether Eritrea planned to follow recent discussions of transit tolls in other strategic waterways like the Strait of Hormuz, Saleh pushed back on assumptions. “This is a new idea, a new concept. Because Iran raised it [in the Strait of Hormuz] doesn’t mean Eritrea will ask,” he said. That said, Saleh reaffirmed the need for collective dialogue between all coastal states to formalize rules that protect free passage for all vessels. “[But] there should be a discussion among littoral states and a decision how to ensure free passage. If Yemen is non-existent, we can’t speak with it now about these issues,” he added.

Another senior Eritrean official, who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity, echoed the foreign ministry’s stance on Yemen and expanded on Eritrea’s view of broader regional tensions. The official noted that Eritrea understands the security of the Red Sea is inherently tied to the ongoing escalating confrontation between the United States, Israel and Iran. “The Bab el-Mandeb and Strait of Hormuz are together,” the official said, framing the two strategic chokepoints as interconnected nodes in a single regional security architecture. Echoing Saleh’s comments on foreign intervention, the official added that no external power—whether from inside the Middle East or beyond—will ever be able to subdue the Yemeni people through military force.

A growing political firestorm has erupted in the United Kingdom over the primary sponsorship of the British Museum’s newly opened Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, after revelations that the Belarus-born billionaire backing the show with an estimated £5 million donation has ties to an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Opposition figures are now demanding the newly seated Labour government make good on its recent pledges to crack down on activity enabling illegal settlements by launching a formal probe into the sponsorship.

Zack Polanski, leader of the UK Green Party, was the first to publicly call for the investigation, following reporting by independent outlet Middle East Eye that exposed Igor Tulchinsky’s November 2025 unveiling of a therapeutic yurt at a new community resilience center in Efrat. The settlement, which is home to roughly 12,000 Israeli settlers, was constructed on land seized from four Palestinian villages and is currently subject to UK sanctions over its illegal status under international law.

Tulchinsky was named as the primary funder of the yurt project, which serves the Gush Etzion bloc of illegal Israeli settlements located 12 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem. He opened the facility alongside Efrat mayor Dovi Shefler, and publicly dedicated the space to “Israel’s brave warriors and their families,” according to on-the-ground reports.

This is not the first controversy over billionaire access and donations tied to pro-Israel causes at the British Museum in recent weeks. Just last month, The Guardian revealed the museum granted a private pre-opening view of the Bayeux Tapestry to Peter Thiel, the U.S. billionaire founder of Palantir, a defense technology firm that supplies cutting-edge artificial intelligence and data analysis tools to the Israeli military.

Polanski framed the call for investigation as a test of the Labour government’s commitment to its new policy on Israeli settlements. “If the Labour government wants to get beyond symbolism and new rhetoric, it must investigate whether this is a breach of the sanctions it announced this week,” he told Middle East Eye. He added that the revelation of Tulchinsky’s sponsorship follows close on the heels of the Thiel controversy, noting “we now learn of the sponsorship of another billionaire who’s been involved in supporting what the Labour government has itself now finally described as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.”

Just days before the exhibition opened to the public on Thursday, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband made a landmark policy announcement: his government formally recognizes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory as illegal, and confirms that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is underway in the occupied West Bank. Miliband announced sweeping new sanctions on all Israeli settlements, alongside a full ban on arms licenses and any exports that “materially contribute to the occupation.” He explicitly warned that any individual or entity funding or facilitating illegal settlements would face the full consequences of UK sanctions, stating “settlements are illegal. They should not be promoted in our country.”

Tulchinsky was not shy about his ties to Israel and support for its military, even before the revelations of his settlement project. In a March 2025 interview with the *Jerusalem Post*, he confirmed he has provided financial support to the Israeli military since the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks and the outbreak of the Gaza war, and noted he makes regular visits to the country. More recently, Middle East Eye revealed this week that Tulchinsky runs an Israel-based defense technology venture capital fund headed by a recently retired Israeli army commander who has championed the use of remote-controlled combat vehicles in Gaza. One international rights group has labeled these vehicles a “direct tool for committing genocide,” linking them to the destruction of entire residential neighborhoods and irreplaceable cultural heritage sites in Gaza and Lebanon.

Tulchinsky attended the exhibition’s official opening reception last week alongside high-profile UK and French figures, including King Charles III, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (corrected per original context: Andy Burnham as referenced in original) and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. A portrait of Tulchinsky painted by prominent artist Jonathan Yeo is set to hang in the British Museum for the full run of the exhibition, with Yeo describing Tulchinsky as an extraordinary person and brilliant mind who was a privilege to paint.

Neither Downing Street, the Foreign Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the British Museum, nor Tulchinsky’s investment firm WorldQuant have issued formal responses to repeated requests for comment on the controversy. The DCMS noted that while the British Museum receives public funding through the department, it operates independently of government, and all sponsorship decisions are the responsibility of its board of trustees. The Efrat Development Foundation has confirmed Tulchinsky is a donor to the community center project, but said he contributed through an unnamed third-party organization and declined to share further details about the scope or nature of his support.

The sponsorship controversy adds to a series of ongoing challenges facing the British Museum, which has already faced calls from cross-party MPs for an investigation into the alleged removal of references to Palestine from several of its public galleries. Kim Johnson, a Labour MP and leading parliamentary campaigner for stronger UK action on Israeli violations of international law, warned that a clear pattern of problematic decision-making is emerging at the institution. “First, Palestine is scrubbed from displays following political pressure. Now we learn the British Museum has accepted significant funding from someone reported to have funded a settlement project in the illegally occupied West Bank,” Johnson said. “The British Museum should be preserving history, not allowing political interests or money to shape whose history is told – or whose actions are legitimised. Is this really who our national cultural institutions should be taking money from?”

In response to earlier claims about removed references to Palestine, the British Museum released a statement denying any intentional removal, noting that it continues to use the term Palestine across a range of historic and contemporary gallery displays. To date, no further response has been issued to address the latest calls for an investigation into Tulchinsky’s sponsorship.