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For months, Saudi Arabia managed to avoid direct fallout from the escalating regional conflict triggered by the war against Iran, even as smaller neighboring nations became engulfed in rising tensions. The kingdom’s state-owned oil giant, Saudi Aramco, even posted record-breaking profits over the summer, leveraging its strategic East-West Pipeline to route crude exports away from the high-risk Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian-aligned forces had targeted commercial shipping. That safe position has now collapsed entirely.

The critical East-West Pipeline is now out of commission following a drone strike carried out by Iran-aligned militias based in Iraq. Simultaneously, Houthi forces in Yemen have unleashed a wave of missile and drone attacks targeting population centers across Saudi Arabia, including an incident where a Houthi drone was intercepted over Mecca—Islam’s holiest site, whose stewardship forms a core pillar of legitimacy for the ruling House of Saud. The Houthis have denied intentionally targeting the city. These concurrent attacks have left Saudi Arabia fighting on two separate, high-stakes fronts.

On one front, the kingdom’s allied Yemeni forces are scrambling to repel a sweeping Houthi ground offensive across Yemen, while on the home front, Saudi Arabia defends its own territory against non-stop aerial attacks. The timing of the Houthi blitz could not be worse for Riyadh: global stockpiles of the U.S.-made interceptor missiles that form the backbone of the kingdom’s air defense network are running critically low.

Long reliant on the U.S. security umbrella it accepted after World War II, Saudi Arabia now finds Washington unwilling to step up. U.S. President Donald Trump recently confirmed that Houthi representatives had contacted the U.S. to state they have no interest in conflict with America, and Reuters has reported that U.S. officials held secret talks with Houthi delegates mediated by Oman, a major development that sidelines Saudi interests.

In response to shifting U.S. commitments and regional instability sparked by the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, Saudi Arabia moved to expand its own security alliances, most notably through the Mecca Pact with Turkey and Pakistan. But like the U.S., these new partners have shown zero willingness to enter direct conflict with the Houthis, a movement that has already proven its ability to sustain heavy battlefield losses and continue fighting. Today, neither Turkey nor Pakistan have deployed any support to Saudi Arabia, leaving the kingdom isolated.

“Saudi Arabia is in a huge bind right now. They are pretty alone,” explained Neil Quilliam, a Gulf research expert at London-based Chatham House, in an interview with Middle East Eye. “The U.S. isn’t there. The Mecca Pact states haven’t showed up. They have few cards to play.”

The Houthi advance along Yemen’s Red Sea coast has already placed the strategically vital Bab el-Mandeb Strait firmly under the group’s control. This waterway is the primary chokepoint for Saudi oil shipments bound for Asian markets. Combined with the disabling of the East-West Pipeline, which fed crude to European markets through the Red Sea, the Houthi advances now threaten both major Saudi export routes. The group is currently advancing on two key Yemeni inland cities, Taiz and Marib; if these fall, the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized Yemeni government faces collapse.

On the ground, Saudi Arabia—which refuses to deploy its own ground troops into Yemen—has no reliable local partners to back. The National Resistance Forces, a militia previously funded by the United Arab Emirates that held the Red Sea coastline, disintegrated almost immediately during the Houthi advance. The only Yemeni faction with proven combat capability is the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which is committed to restoring an independent state in southern Yemen. The UAE’s open support for the STC earlier this year sparked a major rift between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, and the STC’s demands for major concessions in exchange for fighting the Houthis run directly counter to Saudi Arabia’s core regional interests.

“The UAE knows how to fight in Yemen, but they want concessions to come back in. Saudi Arabia views those demands as anathema to its national interest,” a anonymous diplomat familiar with bilateral talks between the two nations told Middle East Eye.

The economic damage of the recent attacks is already tangible: Saudi Arabia was forced to cancel multiple crude oil shipments to Europe this week, and all loading operations at Yanbu, the Red Sea terminal that serves as the endpoint of the disabled East-West Pipeline, have been suspended. More broadly, the escalating conflict threatens to derail Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s flagship Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil dependence. The kingdom is set to host a major global investment conference next month, where it hopes to attract billions in foreign investment for new projects including AI data centers and tourism infrastructure.

Saudi and allied Yemeni forces have launched limited retaliatory strikes against Houthi targets, but Riyadh has not committed to the large-scale intervention it launched at the start of the Yemen civil war a decade ago. The kingdom spent years working to extricate itself from that protracted conflict, and a 2022 ceasefire between the Houthis and Saudi-aligned forces reduced open fighting. However, Saudi Arabia has maintained a strict blockade on Houthi-controlled Yemeni ports and airports throughout the de facto truce.

“A return to full-scale ground war offers little that eight years of campaigning failed to deliver,” noted Hesham Alghannam, director general of the Strategic Studies and National Security Programmes at Riyadh’s Naif Arab University for Security Sciences. Western officials based in Riyadh confirm that Saudi leadership has no appetite to re-enter the Yemeni quagmire, mindful of the damage it caused to Saudi Arabia’s international reputation and arms supply chains.

Analysts widely agree that Saudi Arabia’s hesitation to deploy its own powerful air force to halt the Houthi advance stemmed directly from Riyadh’s reluctance to act without explicit U.S. backing. That indecision, experts say, allowed the Houthis to seize vast swathes of territory in a matter of weeks.

The dual attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and regional influence do not exist in a vacuum: the Houthis are a core member of Iran’s “axis of resistance” aligned against U.S. and Gulf interests in the region. While the movement maintains it retains operational independence, Middle East Eye confirmed earlier this summer that Iran has supplied the Houthis with new military equipment and advisory support to ramp up their campaign. This offensive comes as Iran was set to hold talks with Gulf states this week to de-escalate tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, leaving Saudi Arabia as the last major Gulf oil exporter operating at full capacity—now vulnerable on two maritime fronts.

The current frozen conflict in Yemen dates back to the 2022 UN-brokered ceasefire, which called for lifting the Saudi blockade on Houthi-held territory in exchange for political negotiations. Those talks never gained meaningful momentum, and the Houthis have grown increasingly frustrated under the ongoing economic isolation. Regional diplomats say the current offensive is driven in part by the Houthi goal of imposing shipping tolls in the Red Sea, mirroring the leverage Iran already holds in the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis have publicly stated their blockade of Saudi shipping will only end when their own ports and airports are allowed to operate without restrictions.

Military analysts say Saudi Arabia has a range of escalation options available, from calibrated air strikes to a full return to large-scale intervention. The most expedient short-term option would be to pay financial concessions to the Houthis in exchange for a new truce, but experts say that outcome is politically untenable for Riyadh.

“It would look like complete capitulation. Saudi Arabia sees itself as an emerging middle power. They can’t afford to lose face and just give in to Houthi terms,” Quilliam said.

This leaves Saudi Arabia with the path of gradually increasing military pressure, though the kingdom is determined to avoid being dragged back into a years-long ground war that would derail its economic transformation plans. Many Saudi security experts argue for a measured approach: incremental military action to raise the cost of Houthi attacks, paired with negotiations that offer the Houthi leadership a face-saving political resolution.

Other analysts argue a return to large-scale air campaign, modeled on the 2015 Decisive Storm offensive, is the most likely outcome, particularly as no genuine Yemeni political dialogue appears possible in the near term. One key proposal being discussed is an effort to internationalize control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, to draw greater support from the U.S., European nations, and other Arab partners for Saudi Arabia’s campaign.

In the end, the future of the conflict and Saudi Arabia’s next move will depend largely on whether its key international and regional allies choose to step in—and for now, that support remains missing in action.

For Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, the ceasefire that was meant to halt large-scale violence and bring a measure of stability last October has failed to deliver on its promises. Instead, repeated Israeli violations of the US-brokered agreement have left millions trapped in a cycle of constant fear, displacement, and hunger that mirrors the worst days of active conflict. The personal toll of this ongoing crisis is vividly captured in the accounts of two Gaza residents, whose stories lay bare the human cost of unrelenting pressure on civilian communities.

It was just an ordinary evening in early September when Om Siraj al-Muzeini, a widowed mother originally from Gaza City’s eastern Shujaiya neighbourhood, was making soup for her sick child inside her tent in western Gaza City’s al-Abbas block. Suddenly, panicked shouts cut through the quiet of the displacement camp: residents were running between shelters, asking one another frantic questions about how much time they had left to leave. The sound was all too familiar, and Muzeini quietly prayed her worst fears would not be confirmed. They were. A displaced neighbour soon brought word of a mandatory evacuation order for the entire block. With seconds to spare and no time to sort through her few belongings, she grabbed her sick son and fled the tent, with no clear destination in mind.

“I ran with my son to nowhere. I couldn’t decide where to go. I wasn’t prepared for this, especially since the last evacuation order in my area was issued before the ceasefire,” Muzeini told Middle East Eye in an interview. “The entire neighbourhood fled, including long-term residents and people displaced in tents. Some went to relatives’ homes. I waited with my son in another neighbourhood until the threatened area was bombed.” Shortly after the evacuation order was issued on September 8, an Israeli fighter jet carried out an airstrike on a local building.

This forced evacuation was not an isolated incident. It is one of dozens of similar expulsion orders the Israeli military has issued across the war-ravaged Gaza Strip in recent weeks, with multiple additional orders for different areas released the same day as al-Abbas block’s evacuation. Under the terms of the October 2024 ceasefire, these mass displacement orders were supposed to end, alongside daily offensive operations, while allowing critical humanitarian aid to flow freely into the enclave. Instead, Israel has breached the agreement repeatedly, conducting near-daily attacks and maintaining strict restrictions on the entry of life-saving aid. Now, nearly a year after the current phase of conflict began, Gaza residents say systematic violence against civilians continues, even as global media attention has faded.

Evacuation orders have become a key tool of this ongoing pressure, worsening a displacement and shelter crisis created by Israel’s widespread destruction of residential infrastructure over the course of the war. These orders typically give residents no clear timeline for when, or if, they will be able to return to their homes. Civilians often have only minutes or hours to pack and flee, with no warning of how long the evacuation will last. Even areas that receive no advance warning are regularly targeted by airstrikes, leaving civilians dead and injured with no chance to escape.

“The evacuation orders are meant simply to disrupt our lives and keep us in a constant state of insecurity, even during the ceasefire,” Muzeini said. She has already lost one family member to post-ceasefire violence: “My sister was killed in an Israeli strike near her tent in eastern Deir al-Balah during the ceasefire. So there is really no purpose to these evacuation orders other than keeping the state of war going. Honestly, I feel like we are reliving the war all over again.”

Just five days before al-Abbas block’s evacuation, on September 3, Israeli forces carried out a sudden incursion past their self-declared “yellow line” boundary into the area around Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, forcing a full-scale evacuation amid heavy gunfire. The attack left at least two Palestinians dead, including one child, and dozens more wounded. Official data from Gaza’s Palestinian Ministry of Health underscores the scale of ongoing bloodshed: since the ceasefire took effect, 1,381 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, an average of roughly four civilian deaths per day, with an additional 4,757 wounded.

For Ahmed Jendiya, a 31-year-old resident of eastern Gaza City who lost his home to Israeli bombing in the first year of conflict and now lives with his family in a tent on the rubble of his former property, the bombardment is only one of three ongoing horrors facing Gaza’s population. “The other two sides are still ongoing: the constant incursions and forced displacement, and the starvation that continues to haunt us every day,” Jendiya explained.

Two months ago, Jendiya packed an emergency evacuation bag, bracing for the day when Israeli forces would extend the “yellow line” into his neighbourhood. The unilateral military boundary, established and marked by Israeli forces inside Gaza immediately after the US-brokered ceasefire, creates a de facto no-go zone that bars Palestinian access to large swathes of northern, southern, and eastern Gaza, with civilian intruders met with lethal force. Since the ceasefire was signed, the line has steadily pushed westward into populated civilian neighbourhoods, and now covers roughly 70 percent of the entire Gaza Strip. Each new expansion is marked by the placement of yellow concrete blocks directly in residential areas. When Jendiya and other displaced residents returned to the area from the south after the ceasefire, the yellow line sat roughly one kilometer from his tent. Today, it is just 200 meters away.

“Every night, it feels like the war has returned. The Israeli occupation forces open intense fire towards our areas, and we barely survive the bullets. The entire area turns into a battlefield, and all we can do is lie on the ground and cover our children’s heads,” he said. The creeping expansion of the yellow line has completely shifted daily life for local residents: where evening community discussions once centered on hopes of rebuilding destroyed homes after the ceasefire, conversations now revolve solely around where people will flee when the boundary reaches their blocks.

“Every evening, the men in the neighbourhood gather to chat and discuss daily matters. In the first weeks of the ceasefire, our conversations revolved around whether our homes would be rebuilt, and whether we would rebuild them ourselves,” Jendiya said. “For the past six months, our discussions have turned to asking each other whether we have somewhere to go and when we should decide to leave. These are the same discussions we used to have during the genocide before the ceasefire, exactly the same.”

For Jendiya, the greater fear is not displacement itself—it is the return of mass starvation that already devastated Gaza before the ceasefire. Even with the partial reopening of border crossings for aid and goods after the truce, 1.4 million Gazans—64 percent of the enclave’s total population—still face crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system. Before the ceasefire, Gaza’s Ministry of Health recorded at least 453 deaths from severe malnutrition, including 150 children. Hundreds more continue to struggle with malnutrition-related chronic health conditions months after the truce took effect.

Over the past months, Israeli authorities have repeatedly alternated between banning and permitting basic food items, leaving residents in a state of perpetual uncertainty. “Whenever we eat something today, we fear we may not find it tomorrow,” Jendiya said. “Most of the farmland has already been destroyed and there is no livestock left. We are completely dependent on aid and goods permitted by the occupation. We know that if the borders are closed again, we will fall into starvation even faster this time.”

A highly confidential gathering of top military commanders from the United States, Israel, and multiple Arab nations took place in Germany last week to coordinate strategy around the ongoing Israel-US military campaign against Iran, details of which have been disclosed by anonymous Israeli sources to journalists. The exclusive report, published by Axios and written by Barak Ravid — a former Israeli intelligence officer who now works as a political and security correspondent — reveals that the closed-door “private retreat” was arranged personally by Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom).

According to two unnamed Israeli officials interviewed by Ravid, the meeting included the highest-ranking military chiefs of staff from eight nations: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt. This gathering marks the first formal collective meeting of these military leaders since the Israel-US war against Iran began more than six months ago.

While none of the participating regional nations have issued any public confirmation of the meeting, Centcom has released an official, albeit vague, acknowledgment of the event. In a short public statement, the command confirmed it “hosted senior military leaders from eight nations during a scheduled conference in Germany” and added that attendees “discussed opportunities for enhancing security cooperation in the Middle East.”

Beyond the broad public confirmation, leaked details from the closed-door sessions indicate that Admiral Cooper used the meeting to deliver a key reassurance to regional partner nations. Despite repeated large-scale Iranian strikes on U.S. military installations across the Middle East that have caused extensive damage, Cooper stated that Washington has no intention of withdrawing its military forces from the region.

Verified open-source satellite analysis conducted by *The Washington Post* has confirmed that Iranian attacks have left their mark on at least 15 separate U.S. military sites spread across the region, including bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan. Hundreds of structures and pieces of military hardware have been destroyed or damaged, with many bases rendered functionally unusable. The most severe impact has been felt at the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, where extensive damage forced Centcom to reroute all regional logistics operations to alternate sites.

In addition to addressing force posture, Cooper also outlined U.S. plans to increase commercial and military ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil and gas trade that has become a major flashpoint in tensions with Iran.

For his part, Israeli Chief of Staff General Eyal Zamir used the gathering to give attendees a full briefing on ongoing Israeli military operations across the Middle East, per one Israeli official quoted in the Axios report. A key structural change also followed the meeting: Israel was officially transferred from the U.S. European Command’s area of responsibility to Centcom, a shift that opens the door to far more direct military cooperation between Israel and the participating Arab states under the U.S. military command structure.

Not all regional and security observers view the new alignment and Admiral Cooper’s leadership positively, however. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London who specializes in Middle East security, noted that there is widespread underlying distrust of Cooper among Gulf Arab governments. Krieg argued that regional capitals see Cooper as excessively aligned with Israel, overly hawkish toward Iran, and prone to pushing military operational options that carry high risks of strategic disaster for the region.

A long-running campaign targeting international humanitarian medical organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) has escalated dramatically, with British pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) formally calling on the British government to designate the Gaza-operating charity as a terrorist organization.

The push from UKLFI is rooted in a recent report claiming unproven links between MSF employees and Palestinian militant groups, allegations that MSF has forcefully and repeatedly rejected. The core of the claims centers on Fadi Jihad Mohammed al-Wadiya, a physiotherapist on MSF’s payroll who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on June 25, 2024. Israeli officials immediately asserted al-Wadiya was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an armed Palestinian group.

MSF pushed back on the claim within months of the strike, stating in February that it had found no evidence of any military affiliation by al-Wadiya before his death at the hands of Israeli forces. In an official statement responding to UKLFI’s latest demand last week, the charity doubled down on its denial. “MSF unequivocally refutes the allegations made by the Israeli authorities that we knowingly hired people with ‘ties to terrorism’,” the organization said. “MSF would never knowingly employ anyone involved in military activities, which contradicts our core values and ethics.”

MSF further noted that Israeli authorities have only made claims of militant links against its staff after those employees have already been killed, with no advance warning or evidence shared while they were alive. “If Israeli authorities had reliable information about any MSF staff involvement in military activity, they never shared it with us before their deaths,” the statement added. The charity also confirmed it has been the target of a sustained disinformation campaign for months, and strongly condemned the deliberate spread of false accusations against its team.

The tensions come amid a string of recent attacks on MSF operations in Gaza: just this week, an Israeli airstrike damaged an MSF-owned bus carrying 10 humanitarian workers in Gaza City, adding to a long list of incidents that have threatened aid workers delivering critical care to the besieged enclave.

Financial records show MSF’s UK branch raised £11.3 million in 2023 specifically for its humanitarian work in occupied Palestine. In defending its demand for a ban, a UKLFI spokesperson argued that British donors deserve full transparency and rigorous vetting for any funds sent to Hamas-controlled Gaza. “The evidence we have assembled raises serious questions about people employed by MSF, the organisations with which it works and whether adequate safeguards have been put in place to ensure that charitable resources cannot be exploited by terrorist organisations,” the spokesperson said.

The UK’s Charity Commission confirmed last week it is now actively reviewing the concerns raised by UKLFI to determine what action, if any, it will take next. The current allegations are not new: they can be traced back to claims from the Israeli government earlier this year that two MSF employees held ties to Hamas and PIJ, another accusation MSF has emphatically denied. In February, Israel moved to ban MSF from operating in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank after the organization refused to turn over a full list of its Palestinian and international staff. MSF said it could not share the data because it could not secure guaranteed assurances that the information would be protected and not misused.

This is part of a broader pattern: the Israeli government has repeatedly accused international and local aid groups operating in Gaza of ties to Hamas in recent years. Earlier this year, Israel imposed bans on dozens of aid groups working in the enclave, a move that human rights organizations have warned has severely restricted already fragile humanitarian access to Gaza, where more than two million people face widespread food insecurity and collapsing medical infrastructure.

Founded in 2011, UKLFI has established itself as a leading British advocacy group focused on pressuring and discrediting UK-based individuals and organizations that criticize Israeli government policy, as well as humanitarian groups that provide aid to Palestinians. The group is prominently featured in the European Legal Support Centre’s Britain Index of Repression, a database that documents what the center calls systematic repression of pro-Palestine solidarity activism across the United Kingdom. UKLFI is listed 128 times in the database, and the center found that the group has contributed to a “chilling environment” that pushes people and organizations to pull back from or alter fully lawful pro-Palestine activity out of fear of legal action. The center’s analysis also shows UKLFI frequently acts as an initiating or escalating actor against pro-Palestinian solidarity work, often using formal complaint letters, legal threats, and public pressure to push schools, universities, employers, and public institutions to launch disciplinary investigations or cancel planned events related to Palestine.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has made a landmark call for the international arrest of 87 senior Iranian officials, accusing them of direct involvement in crimes against humanity carried out during the brutal state crackdown on the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The demand is anchored in a sprawling 1,000-plus-page investigative report, titled *Architects of Atrocities: State Machinery Orchestrating Crimes Against Humanity in Iran’s 2022 Woman Life Freedom Uprising*, which lays bare the full scale of systematic repression deployed by Tehran to crush the mass anti-government movement. The 2022 nationwide protests were ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in morality police custody shortly after being arrested for allegedly violating the country’s strict mandatory hijab regulations. In the months of unrest and state-led retaliation that followed, hundreds of protesters and bystanders lost their lives.

After years of meticulous evidence-gathering, Amnesty’s investigation has verified the deaths of 377 civilians caught up in the crackdown, 56 of whom were children. Disproportionately, the victims came from Iran’s marginalized Kurdish and Baloch ethnic minority communities, groups that have long faced systemic discrimination under the Islamic Republic. “Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity, against protesters demanding dignity, human rights and fundamental political change,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, told reporters at the report’s official launch press conference on Wednesday.

Callamard detailed the full scope of state abuses, confirming that Iranian security and political institutions carried out deliberate crimes against humanity including extrajudicial murder, widespread torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary mass imprisonment, sexual violence including rape, and targeted persecution on the basis of political belief, gender identity, ethnicity, and religion—all in a coordinated campaign to annihilate the uprising. The rights group is pushing for two key international actions to deliver accountability: first, it calls on the United Nations General Assembly to create a dedicated international criminal justice mechanism that can investigate crimes, prosecute perpetrators, and deter future repressive crackdowns on dissent. Second, it demands the UN Security Council refer the entire situation in Iran to the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor for formal investigation.

Joining Callamard at the press conference was Mahsa Piraei, an Iranian activist whose mother was shot and killed by security forces during protests in the western city of Kermanshah. Piraei emphasized that accountability cannot stop at low-level officers who carried out violence, arguing that blame extends all the way up Iran’s chain of command. “The person who fired the shot that killed my mother must be held accountable, but it must not stop there,” she said. “My mother was not killed by the actions of just one person – she was killed by a system.”

In a striking rebuke of outside military intervention, Callamard also warned that ongoing unlawful military attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel are severely undermining global efforts to secure justice for victims of the 2022 crackdown, and called for an immediate enduring ceasefire across Iranian territory. Since the US-Israeli military campaign launched in February, at least 3,600 Iranians—including both senior government officials and civilian non-combatants—have been killed. The US has publicly justified its military assault by pointing to a separate January 2025 crackdown on anti-government demonstrations, where Iranian security forces killed thousands of protesters within days.

But rights groups have documented that the US-Israeli war has also killed and wounded Iranian dissidents and opponents of the Islamic Republic, including political prisoners held in jails located in strategically targeted areas. In response to the external invasion, the Iranian government has also sharply ramped up internal repression against domestic dissent. Six of the 87 officials named in Amnesty’s report have already been killed in targeted strikes during the war, while other senior figures implicated in the 2022 crackdown—including Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps chief Ahmad Vahidi—have received promotions within the Iranian government.

Callamard made clear that Amnesty opposes both the targeted killing of Iranian officials and the efforts by Washington and Tel Aviv to instrumentalize documented human rights abuses in Iran to justify their full-scale military assault. “No matter how complex the panorama is…we want to insist that international law should guide the path of action right now,” she said. “A principled response required rejecting both unlawful military attacks and impunity for crimes against humanity.”

Perched on a strategic hilltop just outside Israel’s self-declared Yellow Line in south Lebanon, the small village of Ghandouriyeh bears the brutal, visible scars of months of cross-border conflict. Most of its residential buildings stand as hollowed rubble or flattened heaps of concrete, the result of Israeli strikes earlier this year that turned once-lived-in homes into uninhabitable wreckage. It is here that 66-year-old Mariam Ismail Ballout waited on August 28 at the entrance of a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) mobile medical clinic, desperate to collect medication and escape the chaos that has upended her life.

“All our houses are ruined, all our houses are on the ground, demolished,” Ballout told Middle East Eye, her voice cracking before tears overtook her. She lost everything when her home burned to the ground: no refrigerator, no washing machine, no access to gas for cooking—every basic necessity of daily life gone overnight.

Ghandouriyeh sits just south of Froun, one of Lebanon’s designated “pilot zones” in the Nabatieh governorate, a region that has remained on edge despite a US-brokered ceasefire announced in June. A rolling green valley called Wadi al-Hujeir blocks direct sightlines to Israeli military positions on the other side of the border, but little else shields residents from the constant threat of violence. A large plastic bin marked with an Arabic warning of “enemy” territory beyond is the only barrier between the village outskirts and roads now closed to all travel.

Against all advice, roughly 228 families have returned to Ghandouriyeh in recent months, even though the village has no access to running water or electricity. Village mayor Mohammed Ali Nader told Middle East Eye that most returnees have no other option: they cannot afford to rent housing elsewhere, forcing them to cram into damaged, partially standing homes and share space with neighbors who have also lost everything. While Nader confirmed the village has not suffered a direct strike in months, residents live in a permanent state of high alert—a chronic stress that medical experts say is fueling a growing, underreported mental health crisis across the region.

MSF, which operates daily mobile medical units across hard-to-reach parts of south Lebanon, has become a critical lifeline for communities cut off from regular healthcare access. Almas Al Andary, a 33-year-old MSF counselor and clinical psychologist working out of the Ghandouriyeh clinic, says the conflict has triggered new mental health disorders among people who never experienced symptoms before. “We definitely see a lot of people having acute stress disorders. And these symptoms we can’t formally diagnose because the crisis is still ongoing,” Al Andary explained. Intense, persistent responses to daily triggers—including the constant buzzing of Israeli drones that hover over the village nearly every day—are the most common complaints: widespread tension, hypervigilance, crippling fear, and constant anxiety about the next strike.

MSF’s internal records reflect the scale of the growing need: since the war resumed on March 2, the organization’s counselors have conducted 1,326 individual mental health sessions across southern Lebanon, and requests for psychological support have climbed steadily month over month. On the day of Middle East Eye’s visit to Ghandouriyeh, the persistent hum of an Israeli drone hung over the village. Only three patients came to the clinic that day—an unusually low number, which Al Andary attributed to overnight air strikes that sent most residents fleeing to the relative safety of the valley overnight. Of the three patients that did show up, two were first-time visitors seeking mental health support.

The crisis extends far beyond Ghandouriyeh. Earlier this year, Embrace, a leading Lebanese mental health non-profit that runs the country’s National Lifeline, reported that call volume during the 2026 conflict was 55 percent higher than during the 2024 cross-border war. Despite this surge, little public data exists to document the full scope of mental health harm in southern Lebanon under the fragile, nominally ceasefire conditions. On the ground, frontline medics say the reality is stark. Farah Kerbaj, a community health educator, told Middle East Eye that widespread sleep disorders are rampant, forcing many residents to rely on sleep and mental health medications just to get through the day. Reem Farhat, an MSF midwife working in the region, added that most patients she sees are in a state of constant agitation, their nerves frayed by months of uncertainty.

Stigma around mental health treatment and the chaos of tracking care for displaced families have only compounded the crisis, medics say. For Ghandouriyeh, the most urgent immediate need is access to clean water—without it, residents cannot grow crops to feed their families, the mayor says. But even the most basic calm remains out of reach: most families keep their bags packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, a constant state of readiness that aligns with the hypervigilance Al Andary documents in her patients.

“We’re fed up, honestly. We’re fed up with wars; we’ve had enough wars,” said Mohammed Gannem, a local resident who returned to Ghandouriyeh with his family in June, relieved to find his home still standing but still unable to sleep through the night. Gannem says he is particularly worried about the impact of constant conflict on his two young daughters; his youngest, nearly two years old, now flinches in terror at the sound of incoming shelling, a fear she never had before this year’s war.

Medics say the steady rise in demand for mental health support has two overlapping causes: a growing willingness among Lebanese people to seek help for mental health struggles, as historical stigma slowly fades, and a parallel rise in desperation as the ceasefire holds in name only. Israel continues to carry out strikes beyond the Yellow Line in Nabatieh, Tyre, and other southern districts, which have claimed dozens of lives since the June truce. The Lebanese Army confirmed last week it has ramped up operations in southern non-occupied areas amid growing signs of escalating tensions.

Georges Jreij, an MSF counselor based at another mobile clinic in Beirut’s southern suburbs, says mental health distress often rises in waves following the outbreak of conflict, with a predictable surge around the six-month mark— a threshold the war will hit this month. “It’s usually the time it takes for the brain to really realise the situation, to be able to think about the stuff that people are going through,” Jreij explained. “And the central nervous system sort of calms down in these periods, so other sides of the brain are reactivated.”

As the MSF clinic’s day in Ghandouriyeh drew to a close, a brief, unexpected sound cut through the constant drone buzz: the playful jingle of a pale pink ice cream van, its windscreen cracked from past strikes, slowly winding past the piles of ruined homes. For a moment, the sound offered a faint, fleeting echo of normal life in the hilltop village. But as the jingle faded into the distance, the menacing buzz of surveillance drones returned, a constant reminder that for the residents of south Lebanon, the crisis is far from over.

In the early hours of Wednesday, a six-story residential building that had sustained previous damage from Israeli military strikes in western Gaza City collapsed suddenly, leaving at least 14 people dead and dozens more — including many children — trapped under tons of rubble. The catastrophe unfolded while most residents inside were asleep, according to local emergency officials.

The building, located on al-Sinaa Street, was home to more than 10 extended families totaling approximately 80 people, a large share of whom were children. As of Wednesday afternoon, Gaza’s Civil Defence, the territory’s official emergency and rescue agency, confirmed that 14 bodies had been recovered from the site, including five children, while 10 injured survivors have been pulled out and transported to local medical facilities.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defence, told reporters that rescue teams can still hear the cries of trapped people calling for help from beneath the debris, and crews are working around the clock to reach them. Abdullah al-Majdalawi, the agency’s director of public relations and media, added that operations have continued nonstop since the collapse was reported at roughly 3:10 a.m. local time. “Every victim we have pulled from beneath the rubble appears to have been sleeping on a mattress. They were asleep when the building collapsed,” Majdalawi explained to Middle East Eye in an on-site interview.

Critical equipment shortages have severely hampered rescue efforts, however. Years of Israeli military operations have destroyed the vast majority of Gaza’s heavy rescue machinery, leaving crews without the tools needed to clear large sections of reinforced concrete quickly. “We lack even the most basic tools,” Majdalawi said. “In the first moments after the collapse, we had to ask neighbours and displaced people nearby to bring hammers, shovels and other tools because of the severe shortage of equipment.”

Witnesses who live in the surrounding area described the collapse as sudden and devastating. Talal al-Harazin, a 53-year-old displaced Palestinian who lives in a makeshift tent near the building, said the sudden collapse felt like an earthquake. “It took less than 10 seconds for the entire building to come down,” he recalled. Al-Harazin added that the building had been visibly unstable for weeks: it had already sunk roughly three floors after an earlier Israeli strike, and debris fell from its damaged facade daily. “Unfortunately, we expected it to collapse. People had warned them, but they said, ‘Where can we live?’” he said. “Just yesterday, stones fell from it, and we said it could collapse. And that same night, it collapsed.”

Sabreen Nassir, a 33-year-old displaced woman who also lives in a nearby encampment, said two of her daughters’ close friends remain trapped under the rubble. “My daughters are standing here, watching and waiting for their friends to be pulled out,” Nassir said, noting her family has lived near the building for seven months as displaced people.

This disaster is not an isolated incident, according to Civil Defence officials. An estimated 2,000 damaged buildings across the Gaza Strip are currently at high risk of sudden collapse after sustaining damage from Israeli strikes, and the vast majority of these structures remain occupied because residents have no alternative shelter. “This is a recurring situation. Buildings at risk of collapse are becoming graves for their residents. The only difference is the timing,” Majdalawi warned. “Dozens of homes have collapsed, and dozens of people have been killed in this way.”

Officials are also sounding the alarm about growing risks as the winter season approaches. Without a massive influx of temporary shelter units and reconstruction materials, far more deadly disasters are on the horizon, Majdalawi said. “We are now on the verge of a real disaster as winter approaches. If mobile homes, caravans and reconstruction materials are not brought into Gaza, we will see more of these disasters.”

The ongoing shelter crisis in Gaza stems from the widespread destruction of housing during Israel’s military campaign that began in 2023. UN data estimates that roughly 90 percent of all housing units across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, leaving nearly all of the territory’s 2.2 million residents internally displaced. A report released last month by the Shelter Cluster, led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, found that 1.98 million Palestinians — 94 percent of Gaza’s total population — require urgent shelter assistance and basic household supplies.

A US-mediated ceasefire agreement reached in October last year was meant to end hostilities, open Gaza’s borders to large-scale humanitarian aid including construction and shelter materials, and launch formal reconstruction efforts. But Israel has repeatedly violated the terms of the truce, carrying out near-daily military operations across the territory, restricting access for reconstruction teams, and blocking the entry of most critical aid supplies, including materials needed to repair or replace damaged housing.

Tensions between the United States and Iran have settled into a dangerous stalemate in the Persian Gulf, with escalating tit-for-tat threats to maritime traffic that have now spread to a little-discussed but globally critical piece of infrastructure: the region’s network of undersea communications cables.

The long-running standoff has already reshaped activity in the Gulf: the U.S. Navy enforces a blockade blocking commercial vessels from entering or exiting Iranian ports, while Tehran has responded by threatening the freedom of navigation for all shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies transit daily. Most recently, Iran has announced plans to establish a new restricted military zone extending from the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf proper, though concrete details of the zone’s boundaries and rules remain undisclosed.

What has flown largely under the public radar, however, is the sprawling web of undersea fiber-optic cables crisscrossing the Gulf that connect the Middle East to the rest of the global digital economy. On August 16, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian authorities are actively considering targeted strikes against this critical undersea infrastructure (CUI). In the Gulf’s shallow waters, this threat is not a hypothetical risk—it is a credible danger that threatens Gulf economies and reverberates across the entire globe.

These largely unseen cables form the backbone of the world’s connected economy, carrying more than 95% of all international data traffic. Their function far outpaces basic consumer internet access and phone calls: they underpin trillions of dollars in daily global financial transactions, secure government communications, and support the data-heavy operations of the global technology sector. As demand for artificial intelligence has skyrocketed in recent years, tech giants including Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions of dollars into expanding subsea cable networks to connect their sprawling global data center ecosystems, making these infrastructure assets more strategically important than ever.

For Gulf Cooperation Council states, this threat hits particularly close to home. Many of these nations have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to developing domestic AI sectors as part of sweeping plans to diversify their economies away from reliance on fossil fuel exports. Disruption to the Gulf’s undersea cables would not just interrupt internet service—it would directly undermine a core pillar of their long-term economic transformation goals.

Four major cable networks currently route traffic through the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, making the region an irreplaceable global digital chokepoint. These include the Fibre in Gulf system, which connects Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; the Falcon Network, which links 12 nations across the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa; the Asia-Africa-Europe1 (AEE1) network, which connects Southeast Asia to Europe via Gulf landing points in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE; and Gulf Bridge International, which connects eight regional states and extends onward to India and Europe. What was once purely a strategic chokepoint for oil and gas trade has now taken on new importance as a bottleneck for global digital connectivity.

Two unique geographic and operational factors make the Gulf’s CUI uniquely vulnerable to attack. First, the entire region has extremely shallow waters: the Persian Gulf has an average depth of just 50 meters, with a maximum depth of less than 100 meters. This means attacking the cables does not require the advanced deep-sea capabilities maintained by specialized state units like Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research (GUGI), the Kremlin’s underwater sabotage and espionage force.

Off-the-shelf, commercially available technology common to the region’s massive oil and gas industry can easily be repurposed for offensive operations. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) capable of operating at thousands of meters below sea level are widespread in the offshore energy sector, and the number of similarly capable autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating in the region has grown dramatically in recent years. Iran has already publicly unveiled its own domestically built mine-clearing ROV, and defense analysts assume it holds additional unpublicized underwater capabilities. The shallow depth also means the entire cable network is well within the operating range of conventional military divers. Even less sophisticated tactics, such as a commercial ship “accidentally” dragging its anchor across a cable route—an incident that has already occurred in the Baltic Sea—could cause major outages.

The feasibility of an attack is not in question, and the threat has already had tangible consequences. Multiple planned new cable projects and expansion projects have been put on indefinite hold, after project owners and contractors concluded they cannot safely carry out installation work in the current high-risk environment. This disruption to infrastructure investment already highlights how geopolitical tension is reshaping the development of the global digital network.

John Aitken, a senior research fellow at RAND Europe and the author of the analysis, notes that Iran has almost certainly mapped the entire regional cable network and trained specialized teams to access the cables, which lie well within diver operating depths across most of the Gulf. Beyond publicly acknowledged ROVs for mine clearance, Iran’s mature offshore oil industry gives it access to a wide range of underwater assets that can be adapted for offensive operations.

The core open question remains: how far is Iran willing to go? A widespread attack on the regional cable network would cause massive disruptions to trade and digital communications across the Middle East, with immediate spillover effects for the global economy. If Tehran sought to avoid sweeping global condemnation, any attack would likely be limited and targeted. But given Iran’s increasing economic and diplomatic isolation, analysts say the regime may judge the risk acceptable to achieve its strategic goals.

This uncertainty around potential Iranian action has sparked new discussion about the need for updated deterrence frameworks for undersea infrastructure, a domain that has largely been overlooked in traditional security planning. Aitken argues the threat represents an extension of the Nixon administration’s “madman theory” of nuclear deterrence: a politically and economically isolated state may be willing to carry out extreme action in the CUI domain—action that rational observers would deem disproportionate to the stakes—to deter more conventional military attacks against its territory.

This development should not come as a surprise. Just as roads, bridges and railways became standard military targets in 20th century conflicts to disrupt an opponent’s war-fighting capacity, undersea cables are the critical infrastructure of the digital age, and they have now become a strategic target for nations in conflict.

While Iran’s exact intent to carry out attacks on the Gulf’s CUI remains unconfirmed, that very ambiguity is already reshaping investment and security planning across the region, with consequences that will be felt for global digital connectivity for years to come.

A wave of artist withdrawals has rocked Ed Sheeran’s ongoing *Loop Tour*, after opening act Macklemore was removed from the lineup for his public pro-Palestine stance, leaving the British pop star facing widespread criticism over his neutral position on the escalating Gaza conflict.

On Tuesday, Grammy-winning artist Finneas became the highest-profile of four supporting acts to confirm their exit from the tour, joined by Irish singer Aaron Rowe, Irish folk band Beoga, and Danish pop group Lukas Graham. All four acts issued public statements framing their departure as an act of solidarity with both Macklemore and the Palestinian people, arguing that artists must never be silenced for speaking out against human rights abuses.

“Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” Finneas wrote in a social media post confirming his exit. Aaron Rowe, who described Sheeran as a personal friend who had transformed his career, emphasized that his Irish background gave him unique perspective on systemic violence and occupation. “But as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation. I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children,” Rowe said.

Beoga echoed this position in their own announcement, blaming pressure from Zionist lobbies for Macklemore’s removal from the tour. Lukas Graham frontman added that freedom of speech must extend to conversations about civilian suffering in conflict, saying, “Nobody’s bank balance should decide who gets to speak or which suffering we’re allowed to acknowledge.”

The chain of exits traces back to a September 4 performance, when Macklemore took the stage as an opening act and delivered a two-minute speech calling for a free Palestine before performing his track *Hind’s Hall*—a song named for 5-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza earlier this year. The speech quickly drew both widespread praise from pro-Palestine activists and fierce backlash from pro-Israel groups, including the Israeli American Council, which launched a public petition demanding Sheeran drop the rapper from the tour.

On Monday, Macklemore released a statement explaining his ouster: after billionaire Robert Kraft organized a coalition of stadium owners to threaten to block Sheeran from accessing their venues if he kept Macklemore on the lineup, Sheeran and his management team removed the rapper from all remaining tour dates. Sheeran has pushed back against this narrative, arguing that the decision to cut Macklemore rested solely with tour promoters, not with him.

The *Shape of You* singer has also rejected accusations that he is complicit in silencing pro-Palestine voices by refusing to take a public stance on the conflict. Sheeran says he holds personal views on what he calls a devastating ongoing conflict, but chooses not to inject political discourse into his professional tour platform. “Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have [views] and it doesn’t mean I don’t care,” he said in a statement. Still, many fans have taken to social media to criticize Sheeran’s position, pointing to past instances where the singer has used his platform to raise awareness for other political and social causes.