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What began as a homesick graduate student’s quiet quest to reconnect with his long-unseen home has evolved into a powerful act of cultural preservation and political resistance, born from the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza.

In 2022, Naim Aburaddi, a Gaza-born PhD candidate in media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, had not set foot in his native enclave for seven years, blocked from returning by Israel’s decades-long military siege. Cut off from the places that shaped him, Aburaddi, a scholar of media representation, turned to emerging technology to bridge the distance. He shipped a 360-degree camera to Gaza, where a local journalist friend guided it through the spaces Aburaddi ached to revisit: bustling Gaza City souks, crowded public squares, a 1,000-year-old Turkish bathhouse, and the beloved Mediterranean shoreline. After six months of slow transit through blocked borders, the camera captured footage that allowed Aburaddi to step back into Gaza — if only virtually, bypassing Israel’s total control over the enclave’s entry and exit. When the footage arrived, Aburaddi wept.

Joined by Ahlam Muhtaseb, a media studies professor at California State University San Bernardino, and the research team at X-Real Lab, the small personal project quickly expanded. Between July 2022 and July 2023, the team hired Gaza-based videographer Ahmad Hasaballah to capture thousands of additional 360-degree clips, building an immersive extended reality (XR) experience that would allow displaced Palestinians across the West Bank and around the world to reconnect with a home many had never been able to visit. For generations of Palestinians displaced during the 1948 Nakba, who have been barred from returning to their ancestral lands, and for audiences around the world who only know Gaza through media narratives focused exclusively on conflict, the experience offered something unprecedented: an unfiltered, first-person look at everyday Palestinian life, on Palestinian terms.

Then, on October 7, 2023, everything changed. Following the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel that killed around 1,200 people, Israel launched a full-scale military offensive on Gaza that has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. Multiple human rights organizations, leading genocide scholars, and United Nations officials have formally concluded that Israel is committing genocide in the besieged enclave. One by one, the ordinary, beloved sites captured in the project’s pre-war footage began to be destroyed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations. Hasaballah fled to southern Gaza for safety, and the team’s 360-degree camera was buried under rubble after an Israeli attack. Hasaballah’s father was killed in the same strike.

Stunned by the scale of destruction that had erased much of the life they had documented, Aburaddi and Muhtaseb paused the project for months. Only in early 2024 did they realize the archive they held was something far more precious than they had ever imagined: the largest existing collection of 360-degree footage of pre-genocide Gaza, a time capsule of Palestinian daily life and cultural heritage that had survived an campaign intent on erasing it.

“We had wanted to show the culture and the history. We never thought in our wildest dreams, in nightmares, that we were capturing history, and that everything we were creating and we were capturing was going to be like a memory,” Aburaddi told Middle East Eye.

Aburaddi named the project *The Phoenix of Gaza XR*, a name he says honors the resilience of Gaza’s people: “The people in Gaza, again, will be like a phoenix that will rise from under the rubble and they will rebuild Gaza again.”

Since early 2026, the immersive exhibit has toured universities and community spaces across the United States, inviting visitors to don VR headsets and step into Gaza as it existed before the 2023 war. Visitors can stand on the side of a street in a Gaza refugee camp as a skateboarder zooms past, wander the halls of the 1,500-year-old Church of Saint Porphyrius, admire the architecture of the Great Omari Mosque, or wander the stone alleys of Gaza City’s historic markets. They can stand beside children wading in the Mediterranean, listen to the hum of daily traffic, watch farmers harvest figs, grapes, and dates, or sit in a car winding along the beachfront Al-Rashid Street. Where the team captured 360-degree still photography instead of video, visitors can observe two elderly men reading the Quran in a mosque courtyard, as a young boy prepares for prayer at a nearby water fountain.

By mid-October 2023, just weeks after the war began, many of these iconic sites were already destroyed or severely damaged. The Church of Saint Porphyrius, which had sheltered hundreds of Palestinians fleeing Israeli airstrikes, was bombed by the Israeli military on October 19, 2023, killing 18 civilians and destroying much of the historic structure. Today, many of the ordinary people captured in the pre-war footage are missing, dead, or displaced.

Unlike traditional news footage that separates audiences from the reality of life in Gaza, the immersive sensory experience of the XR exhibit forces visitors to confront the contrast between the vibrant, ordinary life that existed before October 2023 and the total devastation that followed. “It made me wonder how and what it would be like if we were in that situation,” a 19-year-old Hunter College student who visited the exhibit told Middle East Eye.

The project expanded further months into the war, when the team recovered the buried 360-degree camera from rubble and asked local Gaza journalist Yahya Sobeih to revisit the same sites the team had documented a year earlier, capturing the destruction left by Israeli attacks. Princeton University’s IDA B Wells Data Lab joined to support the expanded work, and the exhibit now offers visitors the option to compare the pre-war sites with their current state, walking among the rubble and debris that remain. Shardi Marji, a New York-based activist who has helped organize tour stops for the exhibit, called it a transformative work of art that compels action: “You are transported to the place to bear witness to what was destroyed,” she said.

For Ali Bashar, a 26-year-old New York visitor who said he had become desensitized to endless war footage from Gaza, the immersive experience was impossible to look away from. “I felt I could watch it over and over and still learn or see something new,” he said.

Leading experts on genocide emphasize that the crime of genocide is defined not only by mass death, but by the intentional effort to erase a people’s history, culture, and connection to their land. In an October 2024 report titled *Genocide as Colonial Erasure*, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese noted that Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been marked by multiple forms of targeted erasure: domicide, the destruction of homes; urbicide, the destruction of urban spaces; scholasticide, the destruction of educational institutions; medicide, the destruction of healthcare systems; cultural genocide, the destruction of cultural heritage; and ecocide, the destruction of Gaza’s natural environment. “As Israeli leaders promised, Gaza has been made unfit for human life,” Albanese wrote. *The Phoenix of Gaza XR* lays bare the scale of this intentional erasure.

Muhtaseb, speaking to a crowd of more than 100 visitors at Hunter College in April 2026, explained that the project’s purpose has shifted from its original goal to now act as deliberate resistance to erasure. Originally, it was designed to counter one-dimensional media narratives that only frame Gaza as a site of conflict, erasing the ordinary joy, culture, and humanity of its people. Today, it is a bulwark against the total erasure of that life. Muhtaseb paused, overcome with emotion, as she told the crowd that Sobeih, the journalist who captured the post-attack footage, was assassinated by Israeli forces in May 2025. The 32-year-old had been sitting in a restaurant celebrating the birth of his daughter Sana when he was killed. He is one of roughly 270 journalists killed in Gaza since the war began. After his death, his wife Amal, a professional photographer, insisted on joining the project to carry on his work.

For Aburaddi, the project is the fulfillment of the goal that led him to study media in the first place: challenging harmful stereotypes about his home. Raised in a one-room tent in a Gaza refugee camp, he grew up watching international media misrepresent his people and their homeland. After leaving Gaza for journalism studies in Turkey in 2014, he focused his academic work on Palestinian media representation. Today, beyond its role as public education and resistance, the project has practical value for legal and reconstruction efforts: the 360-degree archive is already being consulted by Amnesty International for war crimes investigations, and the team is collaborating with urban designers at Brown University and computer engineers at Boston University to build 3D models of destroyed historic sites to support future reconstruction of Gaza.

Since the project launched in 2022, it has been presented to audiences in Uganda, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and more than 50 colleges and community spaces across the United States. After completing a tour of East Coast US universities in mid-April 2026, with stops at Hunter College, Brown University, and MIT, a special screening was held at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Fisk Planetarium later that month. The exhibit is set to travel to South Africa in June 2026, with future stops planned in Japan and Spain.

“Here we are preserving these memories. We are preserving them in virtual reality, in immersive media, where Israel cannot attack them, and a lot of people across the world can visit and access, and we are preserving this for the next generation,” Aburaddi said. “They were able to attack the locations, they were able to kill a lot of people, but they couldn’t kill the memory.”

The United Arab Emirates’ planned departure from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries next month is far more than a simple energy policy shift. Analysts and regional diplomats frame the move as both a direct challenge to Saudi Arabia’s longstanding dominance of the cartel and a calculated geopolitical gesture to the United States, underscoring how the ongoing war on Iran has deepened historical divides in the Gulf rather than uniting regional powers against a common foe.

On its face, the split stems from years of simmering disagreement between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over OPEC production quotas. For decades, Riyadh has championed supply caps to keep global oil prices elevated, a strategy aligned with its economic priorities: as a nation of 35 million people with more than double the UAE’s proven oil reserves, it relies on sustained high per-barrel prices to fund domestic spending and infrastructure.

The UAE, by contrast, has long pushed for looser production rules. With just 1 million citizens sharing the country’s oil revenue, and massive investments in expanded extraction infrastructure that have left it with OPEC’s largest spare production capacity relative to current output, the Emirates has opted for a volume-focused strategy. Many of its economic planners argue that leaving oil in the ground carries growing long-term risk, as the global energy transition could erode the value of fossil fuel reserves over the next decade.

“The UAE is the OPEC country with the largest amount of spare capacity compared to production,” explained Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst and head of research at Global Risk Management. “You can argue that this is the right economic calculus because what’s inside the ground might not have the same value that it will in five or ten years.”

Yet while these policy divides stretch back years, experts note that a major shift had already occurred before the outbreak of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Once famous for warning oil traders they would be “ouching like hell” if they bet against its supply-cut commitments, Saudi Arabia has recently pivoted to a strategy of recapturing global market share, backing massive production increases that aligned it much closer to the UAE’s position. That makes the timing of the exit a clear signal that geopolitics, not just energy economics, are driving the decision.

“The policy differences between the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been there for a long time, but Saudi Arabia has pivoted to taking back market share, and the war has actually made their old argument less salient. This exit is much more political,” said Greg Priddy, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest.

In recent months, the UAE has steadily deepened its security and diplomatic alignment with the U.S. and Israel, even as other regional powers have taken more cautious stances on the Iran war. Earlier this month, Axios reported that Israel deployed an Iron Dome air defense system and supporting technicians to the UAE amid repeated Iranian drone and missile attacks on the Gulf state. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which has supported the U.S. war effort while backing Pakistani-mediated talks to de-escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran, the UAE has lobbied aggressively behind the scenes and in public for the U.S. to continue military operations, and has worked to block diplomatic outreach that could bring an end to the conflict.

Leaving OPEC now, as the Trump administration weighs whether to pursue a negotiated deal with Iran or escalate military action, aligns directly with a longstanding Trump administration criticism of the cartel as an anti-competitive body that “rips off” global consumers. Analysts have even raised the possibility that the exit is part of a broader trilateral bargain between the UAE, U.S. and Israel.

“It is possible that this break could also be the result of some sort of ‘deal’ between the UAE and Israel and the US, wherein they helped defend the UAE from Iran in exchange for delivering a major blow to Opec, which Trump has long sought,” Ellen Wald, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and leading expert on Gulf energy politics, wrote in a recent public post. Wald added that she would not be surprised to see a formal U.S.-UAE defense agreement announced in the near future.

The move also fits into the UAE’s preparations for prolonged regional volatility. Recent reporting confirms that UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Abu Dhabi is prepared for the war to last up to nine months, and the country has already approached the Trump administration to request a currency swap line to protect access to U.S. dollars in the event that its foreign reserves are depleted amid sustained conflict.

Beyond alignment with the U.S., the exit is widely viewed as a major escalation of the UAE’s long-running regional rivalry with Saudi Arabia, which has dominated OPEC’s agenda since the cartel’s founding 65 years ago. As the two largest Gulf powers, both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi harbor ambitions to project regional influence, and their competing interests have already spilled into multiple conflicts: Saudi Arabia launched strikes against UAE-backed forces in Yemen just before the Iran war began, and the two states back opposing factions in Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Most recently, Middle East Eye revealed that Saudi-paid weapons shipments from Pakistan began arriving in eastern Libya in March to support commander Khalifa Haftar, in a bid to pull his faction away from the UAE’s sphere of influence.

While many hoped the Iranian attacks on Gulf states would push the two rivals back into a united bloc, the war has instead accelerated their competition, and the UAE’s exit from OPEC creates an irreversible shift in the regional balance of power.

UAE Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei has framed the move as a long-planned objective that was simply timed correctly amid the current chaos, noting that “the timing in our view is right because it has a minimum impact on all of the producers.” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University who has followed the UAE’s debate over leaving OPEC for years, agreed that the war created a unique opening for the dramatic move.

“They finally did it, probably because of the war. Everything is up in the air, and there is an opportunity to make dramatic decisions,” Haykel said. “In practical terms, the Emiratis have very considerable spare capacity. If they want to play the role of market regulator like the Saudis have, they can do it. This empowers them in a big way.”

Energy analysts largely agree the timing is strategically shrewd. Competing blockades of the Strait of Hormuz by the U.S. and Iran have all but halted traditional Gulf oil shipping, cutting the UAE’s exports from a pre-war 3.5 million barrels per day to roughly 1.9 million barrels per day, all of which are now exported via the Fujairah pipeline that bypasses the Strait. That means any additional spare capacity the UAE brings online will not immediately flood the global market, avoiding a sudden price crash that would trigger widespread backlash. Even after the war ends, analysts note that major supply disruptions from the conflict have left global oil inventories depleted enough to absorb higher UAE exports without major disruption.

In the longer term, however, experts warn the departure of OPEC’s third-largest producer could spell the end of the 65-year-old energy alliance. “This is a big blow to OPEC,” Rasmussen said. “We could be writing its obituary.”

This report draws on independent analysis from Middle East Eye, a publication specializing in coverage of the Middle East and North Africa.

For 75-year-old Thai fisherman Sukjai Yana, each morning on the Mekong River brings the same grim routine. Perched on the bow of his weathered long-tail fishing boat in Chiang Saen, a generations-old fishing hub in northern Thailand, he pulls in his net to sort a meager catch of small fish, his disappointment growing as he wonders whether buyers will even take his contaminated-looking haul. Some days, he earns nothing at all.

Yana is far from alone in this crisis. He is one of an estimated 70 million people across mainland Southeast Asia who depend on the nearly 5,000-kilometer Mekong River, a waterway that has sustained communities and ecosystems for millennia. Today, a surging global demand for rare earth minerals has sparked an unregulated mining boom that is poisoning the Mekong and its tributaries, putting millions of lives, livelihoods, and even global food supplies at risk.

The epicenter of this boom is war-torn Myanmar, but operations have rapidly spread east into Laos, sending toxic runoff from mining sites downstream through Thailand, toward Cambodia and Vietnam. While the Mekong has long struggled with cumulative pressures—from plastic pollution and upstream hydropower dams to destructive riverbank sand mining—environmental experts warn that mining-related toxic contamination could prove an existential threat to the entire river basin.

## A Growing Danger to Public Health and Food Systems
Rare earth mining works by stripping away riverbank rock and flushing soil with harsh chemicals to extract the sought-after minerals, leaving behind a trail of waste laced with dangerous heavy metals: arsenic, mercury, lead, and cadmium. These toxins seep into tributaries and flow into the main Mekong, accumulating in fish and irrigating farmland across the region. Exposure to these elements raises the risk of cancer, organ failure, cognitive impairment, and developmental harm, with children and pregnant women facing the most severe consequences.

Thailand is currently bearing the brunt of the contamination, with toxins already threatening its $10 billion-plus annual export market for rice, fruits, and vegetables that feed consumers from U.S. grocery stores to Japanese kitchens and Malaysian dinner tables. In the hilly Thai village of Tha Ton, 63-year-old farmer Lah Boonruang points to the full range of toxin-exposed crops he grows—rice, garlic, corn, onions, mangoes, and bananas—all irrigated with water from the Kok River, a Mekong tributary that flows out of Myanmar carrying heavy metal pollution. “If we can’t export, a farmer is the first to die,” he said, echoing widespread fear across agricultural communities.

For Thailand’s 63-year-old Lahu ethnic elder Sela Lipo, the contamination has severed a centuries-old cultural tie to the river. Famed as skilled fisherpeople, the Lahu have been officially warned to avoid using river water for drinking, fishing, or irrigation. “The Lahu’s way of life is always with a river,” Lipo explained. “The contaminated river has cut off our lifeline.”

Thai environmental leaders warn that the contamination could unravel the country’s most iconic agricultural industry. “Our worry is that toxins accumulate in the rice we export. This would make our rice farming industry, which is our culture, collapse,” said Niwat Roykaew, founder of The Mekong School, an environmental institute based in Chiang Khong, northern Thailand. Thai scientists have already recorded elevated heavy metal levels in other key Mekong tributaries, including the Sai and Ruak rivers.

## Limited, Local Action Amid Cross-Border Barriers
Addressing the crisis has proven extraordinarily difficult. Thailand’s government has acknowledged it has little political or diplomatic leverage to shut down unregulated mining operations across its borders in conflict-riven Myanmar and Laos. Domestic action is also constrained by limited scientific expertise, incomplete data, and insufficient funding, according to Aweera Pakkamart of Thailand’s Pollution Control Department.

Currently, most of the work to track and address contamination falls to local governments, public universities, and regional bodies such as the Mekong River Commission, which focus primarily on monitoring heavy metal levels and educating at-risk communities about the dangers they face.
Warakorn Maneechuket, a researcher at Thailand’s Naresuan University, has confirmed that recent samples of water, fish, and sediment from Mekong tributaries contain dangerously high concentrations of mining-related heavy metals. Dissecting a catfish caught from the Kok River in her lab, she points to clear signs of toxic exposure: tumor-like growths, discolored scales, and abnormal eye pigmentation.

To expand monitoring and raise public awareness, Naresuan University researcher Tanapon Phenrat has helped develop a custom smartphone app that trains local fishers to identify and upload photos of suspicious, contaminated fish. The app builds a crowdsourced citizen science database that researchers hope will help quantify the full scale and spread of contamination across northern Thailand. “Each and every sample is very important,” Phenrat noted.

## The Global Demand Driving a Local Disaster
The unregulated mining boom flooding the Mekong with toxins is fueled by exponentially growing global demand for rare earth elements, materials that are foundational to nearly all modern technology. From smartphones and electric vehicle batteries to military hardware including F-35 fighter jets, submarines, missiles, and radar systems, rare earths are a critical input for both civilian and defense industries. While the elements themselves are geologically common, costly mining and complex refining processes have left global supply chains heavily concentrated, making new sources highly sought after.

Researchers at the U.S.-based Stimson Center used satellite imagery analysis to identify nearly 800 unregulated and suspected rare earth mining sites along Mekong tributaries in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Regan Kwan, a Stimson Center researcher tracking the expansion, explained that Myanmar’s ongoing civil war has driven a geographic diversification of mining operations, with new sites popping up along 26 different river stretches across Laos. Most of Myanmar’s rare earth output is exported to China, with more than $4.2 billion in heavy rare earths shipped between 2017 and 2024, a majority of that trade occurring after the 2021 military takeover of Myanmar.

At the same time, the U.S. has prioritized securing new independent supplies of critical rare earth minerals for its own defense stockpiles, which have been drawn down by military commitments in the Middle East and support for Ukraine. This global competition for new sources has created a race to extract that has bypassed all environmental regulations and cross-border cooperation, leaving the Mekong to pay the price.

Brian Eyler, another Stimson Center expert on the Mekong, called the toxic runoff crisis one of the most devastating events to hit the river basin in modern history. Only 20th century conflicts including the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge genocide caused more widespread harm, Eyler noted, adding that mining contamination ranks a close second. He described the crisis as an “atomic bomb” for the Mekong basin, far more damaging than other well-documented threats such as large upstream dams—and it is still growing, with no signs of slowing down.