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One year after Israel’s months-long siege pushed Gaza into widespread famine, a devastating new cut to United Nations food assistance has spread terror and uncertainty across the enclave’s 2.2 million residents, most of whom are already displaced from their destroyed homes. The World Food Programme (WFP) announced earlier this week that it will slash critical food aid by one third across Gaza, a reduction driven by crippling global funding shortages that will leave 500,000 vulnerable people completely cut off from life-sustaining support. For already displaced families surviving on the brink of collapse, the cuts have reawakened the trauma of last year’s famine and stoked urgent fears of a catastrophic return to mass hunger.

Last week, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham formally ruled out any potential coalition partnership with the UK Green Party, citing the party’s recent membership vote that passed a motion labelling Zionism as a form of racism, which Burnham framed as an antisemitic position. The passed motion frames Zionism, the ideological foundation for the establishment of the state of Israel, as rooted in colonialist practice and the assertion of Jewish ethnic supremacy over Palestinian communities, positioning the Green Party in explicit opposition to the ideology. Notably, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who identifies as an anti-Zionist Jew, abstained from the vote because a set of proposed amendments he supported failed to secure passage. In a sharp public rebuke posted to social media platform X, Polanski accused Burnham of being “a Prime Minister who arms a genocide and locks pensioners up for opposing it,” and charged him with engaging in “the dangerous & irresponsible blurring of challenging Israel & Antisemitism.”

The discourse around Zionism and Jewish identity is far more layered than mainstream narratives often present. For much of modern Jewish history, Zionism existed as a marginal, fringe ideology, only gaining widespread mainstream acceptance across Jewish communities and institutional bodies over the last 75 years. Critics point out that many staunch defenders of the state of Israel regularly conflate Jewish religious and cultural identity with Zionist political ideology, smearing all critics of Israeli state policy as antisemitic. This conflation, observers note, erases the legitimate Jewish identity of anti-Zionist figures such as Polanski, while also perpetuating the harmful antisemitic myth that all Jewish people hold a uniform, monolithic set of political priorities that are inherently aligned with supporting the state of Israel.

Demographic shifts are reshaping these perspectives rapidly. While the majority of British Jewish residents still identify as Zionists, younger generations are increasingly distancing themselves from that label. This trend is even more pronounced among Jewish communities in the United States, where recent surveys show only one in three American Jews identify as Zionist, with adults aged 18 to 34 representing the demographic most likely to describe themselves as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. A growing number of these younger Jewish people are rediscovering a long-forgotten legacy of Jewish anti-Zionist organising, reviving marginalised Jewish identities that many believe could once again emerge as a dominant force in global Jewish communal life.

When Zionism first emerged as a formal political movement in the 1880s and 1890s, it faced widespread, organised opposition from large swathes of European Jewish society, most notably from the Bundists. Founded in Eastern Europe in the final years of the 19th century, the Jewish Labour Bund was a socialist workers’ movement dedicated to upholding distinct Jewish cultural identity, defined as Diaspora Nationalism, while participating in broader internationalist class struggle to liberate all working people from capitalist exploitation. By the start of the 20th century, it had grown into the largest, most well-structured Jewish political party in Eastern Europe, boasting 34,000 registered members spread across 274 local branches.

Independent artist and author Molly Crabapple’s newly released book *Here Where We Live Is Our Country* traces her own family’s multigenerational Bundist history, earning widespread critical acclaim from Jewish and non-Jewish audiences eager to engage with this largely erased chapter of Jewish political life. “As American Jews turn away from Zionism, they are seeking these … liberatory, solidaristic and universalist histories which are so present in our story,” Crabapple shared in an interview with Middle East Eye. A core philosophical tenet of Bundism, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was the concept of “hereness” — or doikayt in its original Yiddish — which directly rejects the central Zionist claim that Jewish collective safety can only be guaranteed through the construction of an ethnostate thousands of miles away in historic Palestine. “Zionism has always been a movement that gave into antisemitic European logic,” Crabapple continued, noting that it capitulated to the “European ethnonationalist idea that Jews are foreigners who belong elsewhere.” Her book documents previously underreported historical records showing that Zionist leaders actively collaborated with Poland’s antisemitic ruling government in the late 1930s, with Polish state authorities arming, training and funding Zionist militias operating in Palestine, while also supplying weapons to youth militias on Polish soil that targeted and murdered Jewish civilians.

Even the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the historic British government document that laid the groundwork for establishing a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, was rooted in this exclusionary framing. Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary for whom the declaration is named, openly described Zionism as a “serious effort to mitigate the age-old miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a body [Jewish people] which is too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb.” At the time the declaration was drafted, Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the 1917 British Cabinet, was the sole official to vote against it, warning presciently that the document would “prove a rallying ground for antisemites in every country in the world.”

“For non-Zionist Eastern European Jews facing antisemitism in the 20th century, doikayt articulated a commitment to worldmaking in the places where Jews lived, called home, [and] belonged for centuries,” explained Miriam Chorley-Schulz, a University of Oregon Holocaust studies scholar. “Against Zionism’s settler-colonial solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, this commitment opposed Jewish ‘normalisation’ within racial capitalist structures through ethnostate-building in Palestine, insisting on fighting the material and ideological conditions of oppression here and now instead.” Eyshe Beirich, a translator currently working on an upcoming collection of Yiddish Bundist writings titled *We, Traitors*, added, “Opposition to Zionism was as obvious to the Bund as opposing fascism and any other nationalist violence: Jewish nationalism was just as ugly, just as contemptuous as any other.”

As committed socialists, Bundist organisers built cross-communal Jewish trade unions and coordinated mass demonstrations that drew tens of thousands of Jewish workers and students. In Russia, Bund members played a pivotal role in the early 20th century revolutions, and organised coordinated Jewish self-defence units to protect communities during the violent 1903 to 1906 pogroms. Bernard Goldstein, who led the Bund’s militia operations in interwar Poland, advocated for armed resistance against Nazi persecution and helped smuggle critical weapons supplies to Jewish fighters ahead of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Bundist organisations also established the first formal secular Yiddish school system, alongside a network of institutions that delivered “education, mutual aid, and organisational support to Jewish workers all over Poland,” according to Beirich, building a thriving cultural ecosystem that leading Jewish studies scholar Jack Jacobs termed a “Bundist counterculture.” Yiddish, the everyday European Jewish vernacular spoken by the vast majority of Jewish people at the time, was celebrated by the Bund as a secular Jewish language that preserved shared communal cultural heritage. For Bundist leaders, Beirich explained, “Yiddish carried the idioms and revolutionary spirit … of the Jewish working class, and it was incumbent on the Bund to support its development.” While a small number of Zionist figures supported Yiddish language education in interwar Poland, most mainstream Zionist political parties actively opposed the Bundist school system, and even collaborated with the antisemitic Polish state government to forcibly shut them down. Chorley-Schulz noted that “the Zionist movement eventually opted for an aggressive Hebrew revivalism – a nationalist monolingual project that deliberately suppressed languages spoken by diasporic Jews … as both a tool of negating the diaspora and nation-building in the settler colony.”

Both the Yiddish language and the Bundist movement itself were nearly eradicated during the Holocaust or lost to widespread cultural assimilation in the post-WWII era, with the language surviving only in isolated Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Today, however, a growing movement of activists and scholars is working to revive both the Bundist political tradition and the Yiddish language. Many Jewish refugees who fled Eastern Europe in the early 20th century settled in the United States, bringing their Bundist ideological commitments with them and helping to build the infrastructure of American Jewish socialism during the peak of the country’s labour organising movements in the 1880s. They joined forces with other immigrant communities to launch mutual aid organisations and create spaces to celebrate their distinct Jewish cultural heritage. Benjamin Balthauser’s book *Citizens of the Whole World* revisits this largely overlooked history of the American Jewish left. Balthauser notes that among American Jewish communities, there remains a “long memory of a Jewish fight against fascism, nationalism, racism.” “That was a Bundist idea: that we are proud of our Jewish heritage, of our Jewish identity, but also want to be in solidarity with the working class, with anti-colonial struggles around the world” — including the Palestinian anti-colonial movement. “This memory is coming back … a memory that is buried, but it’s a very shallow grave,” Balthauser observed, as growing numbers of American Jews are “remembering this older language, and also realising that this language is not that old.”

In his new book *Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History*, author Benjamin Moser documents the lives and work of Jewish anti-Zionist figures across centuries and continents who have been systematically sidelined and erased by mainstream efforts to conflate Judaism and Zionism. Moser argues that Jewish communities have historically occupied the social role that philosopher Hannah Arendt famously termed the “conscious pariah,” a status that made them frequent targets of European ruling elites during periods of social and economic crisis. Moser told MEE that the unifying thread connecting these disparate Jewish anti-Zionists across different eras and geographies is that “they are all pariahs, all resistors” who “don’t want to go along with the rationale of power and violence.” Arendt, one of the key figures profiled in Moser’s work, wrote extensively that Zionism functioned as a mechanism of “getting Jews to disengage from their own societies,” rather than encouraging them to see themselves as interconnected with other marginalised groups and the broader global working class. Reflecting on Theodor Herzl’s foundational Zionist text *The Jewish State*, Arendt wrote in 1946: “Only when we come to see ourselves as part and parcel of a world in which we, like everybody else, are engaged in a struggle against great and sometimes overwhelming odds, and yet with a chance of victory, however small, and with allies, however few… only then will we be able to rid the world of its nightmarish quality.” For contemporary anti-Zionist Jewish thinkers including Moser, the social role of the “conscious pariah” Arendt described is more urgently relevant today than at any point in recent history.

A roundup of commentary from Iranian state-aligned and independent media outlets this week reveals a range of sharp perspectives on domestic and regional geopolitical issues, spanning religious policy in neighboring Azerbaijan, Israeli alliance proposals, domestic unrest in a restive southeastern province, and swirling rumors over territorial sovereignty at a key Indian Ocean port.

First, multiple conservative Iranian publications have unified in criticizing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev over new regulations that ban hijab-wearing teachers and students from accessing public school campuses. Daily newspaper Farhikhtegan used the provocative headline “Roll out the red carpet for Baku’s girls” to call on Iranian government officials to take tangible action supporting barred female students, arguing that diplomatic condemnation of the education access ban must be paired with concrete measures to create alternative study opportunities for affected young women.

Javan, a daily newspaper funded directly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), framed the hijab restrictions not as a simple domestic policy matter rooted in Azerbaijan’s longstanding secular governance, but as a deliberate outcome of Baku’s growing geopolitical alignment with Israel and its deliberate distancing from majority-Muslim nations. The outlet noted that the crackdown on hijab-related protests reflects broader Aliyev administration anxieties over religious influence in public life, a shift that Baku sees as threatening its regional geopolitical positioning.

Going further than other outlets, Khorasan daily labeled the restrictions a pre-planned “Zionist plan” in an article titled “The Zionist project of Ilham”. The publication accused Aliyev’s government of seeking to forcibly reshape the collective identity of Azerbaijan’s religious population, arguing that the government’s overreaction to schoolgirls’ headscarves exposes its underlying weak legitimacy and hollow claims to a unified national identity.

Notably, this unified outcry from Iranian establishment media comes amid stark contrast to Iran’s own domestic hijab policies. During 2022 nationwide protests against Iran’s compulsory hijab regulations, Amnesty International recorded at least 377 protestors killed by Iranian security forces and the IRGC.

On a separate regional issue, Iranian press has turned widespread attention to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recently unveiled map of a restructured Middle East, which divides regional states into explicit friends and foes of Israel, and includes the United Arab Emirates as a core member of his proposed “Hexagon Alliance”. While Netanyahu named Iran and the Axis of Resistance as Israel’s primary adversaries, it was the UAE’s prominent placement in the alliance that drew the most fierce criticism in Iranian commentary.

Quds daily devoted a front-page article headlined “The United Israeli Emirates” to condemn any Middle Eastern state that has aligned itself with the Israeli government. The outlet dismissed Netanyahu’s alliance proposal as delusional, pointing out that none of the countries named in the plan have dared to publicly endorse it or formally declare their alignment with Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, mass circulation daily Hamshahri called Netanyahu’s map proof of what it describes as the UAE’s “greatest betrayal” of Iran and the broader Muslim world. The publication focused specifically on the UAE’s role in freezing Iranian assets held abroad, framing the move as an act of deliberate economic betrayal. Recalling decades of close economic ties, when the UAE’s currency exchange sector thrived on Iranian commerce, Hamshahri argued that the UAE now has emerged as a primary tool of economic pressure for both Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran, with a more prominent role in anti-Iran action than any other regional state.

Turning to domestic issues, a sharp rise in militant attacks in Iran’s poorest province, Sistan and Baluchestan, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan and is home to a large ethnic Baloch population, has prompted local media scrutiny of the root causes of the ongoing violence. Arman daily published a detailed investigation into the unrest, which has spiked dramatically over the past three months, bringing higher casualties for both government forces and armed actors on both sides after decades of low-level clashes in the region.

The daily identified deep, widespread systemic poverty as the core vulnerability that has allowed anti-establishment armed groups to expand their recruitment and operations in the province. The outlet noted that systemic inequality and a widespread sense of hopelessness among young people create fertile ground for extremist groups to recruit new members and frame their violence as justified. It added that limited access to healthcare, substandard housing, and poor integration into Iran’s national education system have all fueled widespread public discontent, creating the conditions for armed groups to grow their influence.

In its conclusion, Arman emphasized that the only long-term solution to the unrest is targeted investment to raise living standards, ensuring the province’s population receives equal access to opportunities in education, employment and public life that all Iranian citizens are entitled to.

Finally, Tehran officials have moved quickly to debunk rumors that Iran plans to transfer sovereign territory to Afghanistan, after a parliamentary proposal to allocate a parcel of land at the strategic southeastern port of Chabahar for Afghan trade and investment sparked public backlash over territorial integrity. Mohammad Mehdi Shahriari, a member of Iran’s parliamentary national security and foreign policy commission, clarified that the proposal involves a 100-hectare plot of land that would be leased to Afghanistan for a period of between two and five years, solely to streamline goods imports and transit for landlocked Afghanistan. All land would remain under full Iranian sovereignty, he confirmed.

Shahriari’s comments followed remarks from fellow MP Mohsen Zanganeh, who referenced an initial preliminary agreement to allocate Chabahar land for Afghan investment; Zanganeh’s description of the area as “a territory belonging to itself [Afghanistan]” triggered widespread public anger and concerns over territorial concessions. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei stated that reports of a full territorial handover are rooted in public misunderstanding, noting that no formal proposal for a land transfer has been submitted to the government. Chabahar Governor Alireza Noura also rejected all claims of planned land handover to foreign actors, confirming that all foreign investment in the port abides by Iranian law and requires formal government approval before moving forward.

This is a digest of Iranian press commentary, and has not been independently verified for accuracy by Middle East Eye.

Weeks after Iran extended an offer to mediate the escalating conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi movement, neither warring party has formally accepted the proposal, leaving regional observers warning that violence will likely continue to escalate in the absence of meaningful negotiations.

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed earlier this month that 11 days after Tehran made its mediation offer public on October 11, neither Riyadh nor the Houthis had formally responded to the overture. The current impasse stems from non-negotiable demands put forward by the Houthis, paired with deep-seated Saudi reluctance to engage Iran as a neutral broker amid shifting regional power dynamics.

Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree recently reaffirmed that the group will not halt its cross-border attacks on Saudi territory until two key conditions are met: an end to what the Houthis describe as a 12-year economic and financial blockade of Yemeni ports, and a full cessation of Saudi-led military operations against the group. Yemeni affairs analyst Mohammed Basha, writing for Middle East Eye, notes that Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners are highly unlikely to meet these demands, which include Houthi control over Yemeni airspace and maritime corridors, as well as billions of dollars in reconstruction compensation. “Such concessions would effectively reward the Houthis militarily, politically and financially without securing meaningful guarantees for lasting peace,” Basha argues.

Beyond the core Houthi demands, experts say the lack of progress toward negotiations is rooted in competing regional strategic priorities that stretch far beyond Yemen’s borders. For Saudi Arabia, accepting Iranian mediation carries major geopolitical risks. Riyadh has framed the Houthi movement as an Iranian proxy, and accepting Tehran’s good offices would implicitly legitimize Iran’s influence over the group — a narrative Riyadh has worked to counter amid the ongoing U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran. This posture was reinforced earlier this year when Riyadh joined Washington in joint air strikes on Iran-linked groups in Iraq, and later when it signed the Mecca security pact with Turkey and Pakistan to coordinate regional counter-Iran policy.

Saudi Arabia also already has established communication channels with the Houthis through Omani intermediaries, which have a long track record of facilitating backchannel talks. As Carnegie Endowment expert Alex Jalili notes, “Accepting Tehran as mediator could also reinforce the perception that Iran is the ultimate guarantor of Houthi behaviour, something Riyadh has little interest in legitimising.” Still, Saudi officials have clarified that Riyadh’s rejection of Iranian mediation does not mean a complete break in diplomatic contact: just last week, a senior Saudi public diplomacy official confirmed that Riyadh maintains direct bilateral communication with Tehran.

For the Houthis, the calculus is similarly rooted in military leverage rather than diplomatic opportunity. The group has demonstrated repeated ability to target critical Saudi infrastructure, disrupt Gulf energy exports, and bypass Saudi air defense systems. This military success has convinced Houthi leadership that continuing offensive operations will strengthen their hand in eventual negotiations, making them unwilling to enter talks mediated by Iran until they have secured maximum military gains. “That gives them considerable leverage, which they are unlikely to relinquish in exchange for marginal concessions,” Jalili explains.

For Iran, the mediation offer fits into a broader strategic balancing act. Tehran has long benefited from the leverage that Houthi control of northern Yemen provides, allowing it to put pressure on Saudi energy exports and regional security even as Tehran avoids direct conflict with Riyadh. At the same time, Iran does not want the current escalation to spiral into a full regional conflict that would undermine its broader diplomatic and regional goals. As Sina Toossi, senior non-resident fellow at the Centre for International Policy, puts it: “There is a fundamental tension here: Iran wants to preserve the leverage that the Houthis provide without allowing that leverage to produce an uncontrollable escalation.”

An uncontrolled escalation carries major risks for Iran. Riyadh has already accused Tehran of violating the 2023 Iran-Saudi rapprochement agreement by encouraging Houthi escalation. Worse, a wider regional spillover could draw in other actors: from Mecca Pact signatories Turkey and Pakistan launching offensive operations against the Houthis, to the UK expanding its role beyond defensive support for Saudi Arabia, to Iran-aligned groups in Iraq entering the fighting. Such a scenario could harden the stance of Gulf states toward Tehran and derail any prospects for renewed U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations.

Right now, the most likely outcome is continued intensification of fighting across key Yemeni frontlines including Taiz and Marib, with a fragile, temporary ceasefire the best case scenario even if indirect talks eventually resume. Experts warn that a durable, comprehensive peace settlement remains far out of reach as long as both sides prioritize military gains over negotiated compromise, and regional power struggles continue to overshadow local efforts to end Yemen’s nearly decade-long war.

The race to succeed António Guterres as United Nations Secretary-General, long gridlocked after months of stalled selection processes, gained a new high-stakes contender this week as the United Arab Emirates formally put forward its veteran former UN ambassador Lana Nusseibeh for the top global post. The surprise nomination upends long-held expectations about the race’s outcome and has sparked immediate backlash over the UAE’s controversial foreign policy actions, with critics warning that Nusseibeh’s ties to a government accused of enabling atrocities could undermine the UN’s core humanitarian mission.

The official nomination was submitted via letter by UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to the presidents of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, state-run news agency WAM confirmed Wednesday. In a campaign launch statement, Nusseibeh framed her candidacy as a call for more urgent multilateral action, saying, “I am standing to be Secretary-General because I believe this is a moment to act with greater urgency: to act earlier, bring people together across difference, and drive the work forward until it produces concrete results.” Nusseibeh, who most recently served as a minister of state at the UAE foreign ministry, has taken formal leave from her government post to pursue the candidacy. If elected, she would make history as the first woman to lead the United Nations, and only the second Arab national to hold the role, following Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali who served in the 1990s.

Nusseibeh’s entry into the race comes after six consecutive informal Security Council straw polls failed to produce a candidate with the required backing from all five permanent veto-wielding members – the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France. For months, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan has held the lead in most polling rounds, but she has failed to win universal support from the P5, collecting two “discourage” votes in the most recent October 16 ballot. Other leading candidates including Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett and Argentina’s Rafael Grossi also each drew two negative votes from permanent members, while Senegal’s Macky Sall dropped out of the race after the first colour-coded poll. Longstanding informal regional rotation practices had led most observers to expect the next secretary-general would come from the Latin America and Caribbean region, a convention Nusseibeh’s nomination directly upends.

Following the UAE’s official announcement, a planned seventh straw poll scheduled for Friday was postponed, likely until next week, to allow time for the new candidate to be processed and introduced to the full 193-member General Assembly, diplomatic sources told independent UN outlet PassBlue. Guterres’ current five-year term is set to end on December 31, leaving the Security Council with a tight timeline to reach a consensus candidate to put forward for General Assembly approval – a deadline that now looks increasingly uncertain to be met.

A seasoned multilateral diplomat with decades of UN experience, the 47-year-old Nusseibeh built her career in the UAE foreign service, starting as a UNESCO consultant and Gulf Research Centre analyst before founding the ministry’s policy planning department. She made history in 2013 as the UAE’s first female permanent representative to the United Nations, a post she held until 2024. During her 11-year tenure at the UN, she served as a vice-president of the General Assembly, president of the UN Women Executive Board, and twice held the rotating presidency of the Security Council. Born to a prominent Palestinian family with roots in Jerusalem, her grandfather Anwar Nusseibeh was a leading Palestinian political figure who held cabinet posts in Jordan’s government during its administration of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and later served as Jordan’s ambassador to the UK. Nusseibeh also holds a master’s degree in Israeli studies from SOAS University of London, where her former professor described her as “instrumental” in negotiating the 2020 Abraham Accords, the US-brokered normalization agreement between the UAE and Israel.

Despite her extensive diplomatic resume, Nusseibeh’s candidacy has drawn sharp, immediate criticism from human rights experts and UN watchdogs, centered on the UAE government’s foreign policy stances and actions. Most notably, critics point to Abu Dhabi’s documented support for two actors widely accused of genocide: Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, which has waged a brutal campaign against civilian communities in Darfur.

UN sanctions monitors have deemed credible widespread allegations that the UAE has supplied military aid to the RSF, a claim the UAE has repeatedly denied. However, multiple independent investigations from UN expert panels and human rights organizations have confirmed the RSF has committed genocide and systematic crimes against humanity against non-Arab communities in Darfur, with open source reporting from Middle East Eye and other outlets corroborating direct arms and logistical links between the UAE and the RSF.

“Nusseibeh is extremely intelligent,” international law expert Adil Haque wrote on social platform X. “She also currently works for a state that has spent the last few years supplying arms to the RSF in Sudan as they’ve massacred civilians.” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health which documents atrocities in Darfur, called Nusseibeh’s selection a potential “catastrophe” for UN humanitarian work across Sudan, Yemen and the broader Middle East. “She has a dual loyalty, conflict of interest, between the United Nations and a state which is credibly accused by the UN itself of directly aiding and abetting the massacre of El Fasher, which the UN itself has determined has the ‘hallmarks of genocide’,” Raymond told PassBlue. “Next week is the one year anniversary of El Fasher. The UN should not celebrate it by making a government official of the country that made the massacre militarily possible the SG of the United Nations.”

Criticism also extends to the UAE’s 2020 normalization deal with Israel, amid ongoing Israeli military actions in Gaza that the International Court of Justice has ruled carry plausible claims of genocide. Nusseibeh has defended the accords, saying in September 2025 amid Israeli plans to annex large parts of the occupied West Bank that the UAE saw normalization as a path to advancing Palestinian statehood, and called on Israel to suspend its annexation plans.

While Nusseibeh’s nomination faces steep headwinds from controversy, diplomatic analysts note it could still gain traction in the deadlocked race. No candidate has yet secured the endorsement of the incoming second Trump administration, and the UAE’s longstanding close diplomatic and economic ties to all five permanent Security Council members could give it an opening to build consensus behind its candidate, a path that supporters have already begun laying the groundwork for: multiple news outlets reported ahead of the official nomination that backers had begun privately sounding out UN member missions to gauge potential support for Nusseibeh.

Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical friction following the outbreak of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran in late February, Middle Eastern Gulf states have managed to push total oil exports above pre-conflict levels, using creative workarounds to blunt Iranian efforts to assert control over the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz, even as new threats of expanded military action loom from Washington and Tel Aviv.

New data from leading energy analytics firm Kpler shows that for the week ending October 18, Gulf crude and product exports hit 24.6 million barrels per day (bpd), topping the pre-war baseline of 23.3 million bpd. This export growth comes amid a sharp spike in Iranian targeting of commercial shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies normally pass.

According to updates from United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), at least 12 separate vessel attacks were recorded in the waterway last week alone. One of the most high-profile incidents saw a fully loaded UAE-owned container ship sink after sustaining damage from what is believed to be a projectile strike.

To avoid the rising risks of direct passage through the Strait, Gulf exporters have widely adopted ship-to-ship transfer operations. Under this model, smaller shuttle vessels load crude from Gulf ports, then carry the cargo out to giant very large crude carriers (VLCCs) waiting in international waters outside the Strait. Amid growing safety concerns and soaring insurance premiums that have pushed most private shipping owners away from the high-risk zone, many Gulf states are now deploying their own national tanker fleets to handle these transfers.

Top regional exporter Saudi Arabia has also diversified its export routes to reduce reliance on the Strait, ramping up shipments through the Red Sea. After Houthi forces in Yemen imposed an embargo on Saudi-flagged vessels using the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the kingdom shifted to an alternative pipeline corridor that runs through Egyptian territory to the Mediterranean coast, allowing it to continue accessing Asian markets without passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Kpler data confirms that direct shipments through the Strait of Hormuz still remain more than 30 percent lower than pre-war levels, a clear sign that Iranian actions continue to deter regular transits. But the success of alternative logistics routes has drastically reduced Tehran’s leverage over global oil supplies: as of September, 40 percent of all non-Iranian crude exported from Gulf states bypassed the Strait entirely, up from just 17 percent before the outbreak of conflict.

Regional governments are now moving to lock in these gains with permanent bypass infrastructure. In July, Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, signed a deal with Syria to rehabilitate an existing pipeline connecting Iraq’s northern oil fields directly to Syria’s Mediterranean export terminals. Middle East Eye first broke news of the project, which has received backing from the United States.

Even with overall exports now above pre-war levels, global energy markets have not seen a corresponding drop in prices. International benchmark Brent crude has remained stable around $109 per barrel, and prices for refined products – most notably diesel – have jumped sharply in recent weeks. Much of this upward pressure stems from skyrocketing shipping costs: the workaround logistics required to bypass Hormuz have increased demand for tanker tonnage and extended voyage lengths, tightening available vessel supply and pushing up freight rates.

The unexpected rebound in Gulf oil exports comes at a sensitive moment, as U.S. and Israeli officials openly discuss plans for a new round of military strikes against Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed this week his commitment to removing the Islamic Republic’s government, repeating claims that Tehran is moving forward with restarting its nuclear weapons program. Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump, in a public endorsement of Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s upcoming general election, said he looked to Netanyahu to help “finish the job” against Iran.