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On a Wednesday evening, Syria faced a trio of interconnected security crises that have reignited fears of widespread instability across the country, just months after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024. The first and deadliest incident was a targeted ambush on a civilian bus traveling through the western countryside of Homs province, which left at least seven private sector employees dead and four more with severe injuries.

According to local health authorities, the bus was carrying workers back to their homes after the end of their work shift when gunmen opened fire on the vehicle as it crossed the Masyaf Bridge. Maan Mahmoud Fahd, the director of Homs Grand Hospital, confirmed to Syria’s official state news agency Sana that four of the seven fatalities were pronounced dead immediately upon their arrival at the medical facility, having suffered catastrophic gunshot wounds to the head and torso. The remaining casualties were transferred to other medical centers across the Homs governorate for urgent treatment.

Moments after reports of the shooting emerged, Syrian security units were deployed to the attack site to cordon off the area and launch a full criminal investigation. Brigadier General Bassem Mohammad Shaaban, commander of Homs Internal Security Forces, told reporters that forensic investigators have begun collecting physical evidence to track down the perpetrators and uncover their motive for the attack. As of the latest updates, no militant or opposition group has claimed responsibility for the shooting, and no suspects have been publicly named by authorities.

Shaaban issued a firm promise that the attackers would face justice, stressing that the brutal act would not go unpunished. “We view this cowardly attack as an attempt to undermine security in Homs and destabilise the stability we have worked to consolidate,” he said. “We will not allow criminals to threaten the security of our people or undermine the stability the city is experiencing.”

Brigadier General Munir al-Hariri, a veteran Syrian military analyst, told local broadcaster Syria TV that the attack most likely bears the hallmarks of operations carried out by former Assad regime loyalists, who have carried out a string of small-scale attacks across the country to undermine the new government’s efforts to restore order. Wednesday’s bus shooting is part of a growing wave of security incidents that have raised alarm across Syria since the transition of power last December. In August alone, two separate attacks targeting buses near the capital Damascus left 14 people injured: one targeted a convoy of internal security personnel, while the second was a hidden explosive device detonated on a public passenger bus in Jaramana, a town southeast of the capital.

Simultaneously to the Homs shooting, a major explosion hit a key gas pressure-reduction station at the entrance of the Tishreen thermal power plant, located roughly 36 kilometers outside Damascus in the Damascus countryside. The blast sparked a massive blaze that injured two plant workers and severely damaged the two main gas pipelines supplying the facility, according to the Syrian Petroleum Company.

The loss of gas input forced three major power plants – Tishreen, Deir Ali, and Nasiriyah – to shut down all operations immediately. The Syrian Electricity Company issued a public warning that the shutdown would lead to extended scheduled rolling blackouts across affected regions. Abdul Hamid Salat, head of the media department at Syria’s energy ministry, added that the cut in gas supplies also disrupted operations at critical water pumping and treatment facilities, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents across Damascus, its surrounding countryside, Daraa, Sweida, and Quneitra without consistent access to clean running water.

Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir confirmed that civil defence teams managed to bring the large fire under control overnight Wednesday. Speaking to reporters from the blast site, al-Bashir said technical specialists would conduct a full inspection of the facility once cooling operations are complete to “precisely determine the causes and circumstances” of the explosion. Authorities have not yet ruled out any potential causes, including accidental technical failure, deliberate sabotage, or a targeted attack.

The third incident unfolded on Thursday morning in southern Syria’s Quneitra governorate, when approximately 12 Israeli military vehicles entered the village of Saida al-Golan as local students were traveling to their schools. After a short presence in the area, Israeli forces withdrew back to positions in the Yarmouk Basin, and no reports have emerged of arrests, home searches, or additional casualties from the incursion. This incursion follows a pattern of increased Israeli military activity in southern Syria in recent weeks: on Tuesday, Syrian state media reported that Israeli troops carried out incursions into Quneitra, where they questioned and physically assaulted local shepherds.

Local news outlet Al-Araby News also reported Thursday that an assassination attempt was carried out against a Syrian Ministry of Defence officer in Sanamen, a city located north of Daraa, though no further details on the officer’s condition or the perpetrators have been released.

These concurrent crises come just days after Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa revealed that ongoing negotiations with Israel over a new cross-border security framework had reached roughly 90 percent completion before Israel pulled back from the deal and introduced new, unagreed-upon conditions. Speaking at an Atlantic Council policy panel in New York last week, al-Sharaa noted that multiple rounds of negotiations had been held over the past year with diplomatic mediation from the United States, and that talks would continue moving forward.

The string of back-to-back security incidents highlights the significant challenges the new Syrian government faces as it attempts to consolidate control, rein in armed factions, and restore basic public services across the country after decades of civil conflict and the recent collapse of the previous regime.

In the quiet Palestinian village of Deir Nizam, located northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Saleh Tamimi stands amid the tangled wreckage of the olive and citrus trees he spent decades nurturing. Where a lush, productive grove once spread across his family’s backyard and surrounding land, only broken branches, uprooted stumps, and churned soil remain, the result of a recent incursion by Israeli bulldozers that cleared land his family has held as private property since the 1960s.

“What harm could this lemon tree ever have done to their security?” Tamimi asked Middle East Eye, gesturing to a splintered pile of broken branches. “I watered this olive tree by hand every single day,” he added, motioning to another destroyed ancient tree. Beyond the loss of his grove, Tamimi says his family home has also been slapped with an Israeli demolition order, part of what he calls a deliberate campaign to force Palestinian families off their ancestral land. “They want to displace us. I have nowhere else to go. Even if they tear this house down, I will not leave,” he stated firmly.

Tamimi’s story is far from an isolated incident. It is the center of a rapidly escalating, widespread campaign targeting Palestinian agricultural land and centuries-old olive groves across the occupied West Bank, new data confirms. Just weeks before the annual October olive harvest—one of the most critical economic and cultural events for Palestinian rural communities—Israeli military authorities issued a flurry of orders demanding the clearing of vegetation and uprooting of trees across hundreds of dunams of privately owned Palestinian land.

Figures collected by the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission show that between January and September of this year, 55 military orders targeting trees and farm vegetation have been issued, affecting roughly 2,373 dunams of land. That marks a sharp increase from all of 2025, when the total reached just 47 orders covering 1,613 dunams.

The surge in targeting of Deir Nizam’s land came shortly after a settler was killed in a shooting near the village in mid-September. On September 20, just days after the incident, the commission confirmed a military order was issued targeting 99.79 dunams of the village’s land, requiring all vegetation and trees to be removed. Four days later, a second order followed, covering an additional 94.79 dunams, and gave local landowners just 12 hours to clear the trees themselves before military bulldozers moved in.

Nathir Tamimi, another Deir Nizam landowner, says his family owns 24 dunams of groves that have been passed down through multiple generations. In recent operations, Israeli bulldozers cleared eight of his dunams, along with adjacent plots. To date, roughly 140 dunams of the village’s agricultural land has been fully cleared, he confirmed.

This escalation has not been limited to Deir Nizam. On September 24, just two days after a military order was issued, Israeli forces bulldozed 31 dunams of private Palestinian land in Beit Rima, also northwest of Ramallah, uprooting more than 400 mature olive trees. Many of the destroyed trees were already heavy with ripe fruit, just weeks away from harvest.

Sixty-one-year-old Hazem Rimawi, who lost all the olive trees on his three-dunam plot, called the destruction devastating. “Decades of hard work were erased in just a few hours,” he told Middle East Eye. “This land and these trees are my only source of income. What use is this land to me now that all the trees are gone?”

Afrah Sanaf, a 63-year-old Beit Rima resident whose land was also targeted, says local residents were only notified of the clearing order on September 22. When they traveled to the local municipality to review the official map, they discovered their private, generational land was included in the order. Sanaf’s plot held 138 olive trees, some of which had stood on the land for more than a century, and had been part of his family’s life since he was a child. “I cannot remember a time when those trees were not here,” he said.

With only 12 hours given to remove the trees themselves, Sanaf says the choice was obvious: “Naturally, we refused to pull up trees that we or our ancestors planted with our own hands.” The bulldozers moved in shortly after, clearing the entire plot. Sanaf noted that the targeted land sits three to four kilometers away from the nearest Israeli settlement, undermining Israeli claims that the clearing is for security purposes.

Just one day later, on September 25, Israeli bulldozers began clearing tree-covered Palestinian land in Beit Ur al-Fuqa, southwest of Ramallah. The operation followed a clearing order for 29 dunams issued two days after a Palestinian car-ramming attack at a nearby Israeli checkpoint that injured one soldier. Ali Samara, head of the village council, says the bulldozing ultimately extended to roughly 60 dunams, and warned that if operations continue, as many as 1,500 olive trees—some more than 200 years old—could be destroyed.

The campaign has also reached Kafr Malik, northeast of Ramallah, where Israeli authorities issued an order targeting more than 56 dunams of olive-growing land.

For Palestinian farming communities, the timing of this surge in clearing could not be more damaging, coming just ahead of the annual October olive harvest. The loss extends far beyond this year’s crop: mature olive trees take decades to reach full productivity, so destroyed groves represent a generational loss of livelihood and cultural heritage. Beyond the loss of trees, the bulldozing has destroyed traditional agricultural terraces and stripped away fertile topsoil, leaving large areas of land unsuitable for cultivation for years to come. Many residents say the campaign is a deliberate effort to force Palestinian landowners to abandon their land to make way for Israeli settlement expansion.

“What happened left all of us in shock. This is an act of pure injustice,” Sanaf said. “The trees and land we lost were the only livelihood we have ever relied on.”

Nathir Tamimi echoed that frustration, noting the damage reaches far beyond individual landowners. “The damage doesn’t stop at the owners whose land was bulldozed—it affects our entire village,” he said. “Our landscape has changed completely, from green, living olive groves to empty expanses stripped bare of every tree.”

Despite the destruction, Tamimi said local Palestinian residents remain firm in their commitment to stay on their land. “We are just like the olive trees we inherited: rooted in this land,” he said.

Nearly 11 years after it first deployed to defeat the Islamic State group, the US-led counter-IS coalition formally concluded its combat mission in Iraq this week, marking a historic shift in regional security dynamics that has left the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq grappling with deep uncertainty over future threats.

The drawdown, agreed upon by Baghdad and Washington in 2024, unfolded gradually over months: coalition forces withdrew from bases across Iraq, consolidated remaining troops in the Kurdistan Region, and finalized the full pullout by September 30. Before the final exit, roughly 1,500 coalition troops remained stationed at Erbil Air Base, a reduction from the 2,500 personnel deployed across Iraq before the 2024 drawdown agreement was reached. The mission first launched in 2014, when IS seized swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria and perpetrated widespread mass atrocities. While the militant group was declared territorially defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria in 2019, coalition troops stayed behind to assist local forces in containing the group’s scattered remnants.

In the hours leading up to the full withdrawal, Erbil residents reported military aircraft circling overhead, and the first signs of shifting risk emerged quickly. On the night of September 28, three Iranian drones targeted a camp operated by an Iranian Kurdish opposition party in the town of Koya. Two days later, following the coalition’s official departure, Koya was struck by another drone — the first attack of its kind after the pullout was completed. These strikes have underscored a harsh reality: the Kurdistan Region remains highly exposed to cross-border drone and missile attacks amid the escalating ongoing conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel that began in February 2024.

According to a September 27 statement from the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, the governing body of the autonomous region’s military forces, Iraqi Kurdistan has endured more than 1,000 drone and ballistic missile attacks since the outbreak of the Iran war, resulting in civilian casualties and extensive material damage. KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani warned last week in comments to the Financial Times that the coalition’s exit, conducted without leaving a robust defensive air defense system in place, has created a dangerous gap in regional security. “The threat is real – we are vulnerable, we are being attacked,” Barzani said.

The Peshmerga Ministry echoed this concern, noting that “the departure of the United States from the Kurdistan Region in such a complex regional situation, without providing any defence system, is a cause for concern,” and called on the federal Iraqi government in Baghdad to “assume the duty of protecting the airspace of the Kurdistan Region when necessary.”

Announcing the end of the mission, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the U.S. expects Iraqi security forces — including the Peshmerga — to take full ownership of securing Iraq and rooting out remaining IS cells. “The Department of Defense will continue to provide targeted training and intelligence support to our Iraqi partners,” he said.

But these commitments have done little to ease anxiety among ordinary Iraqi Kurds. Nineteen-year-old Canel, an undergraduate student at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, told Middle East Eye that he shares widespread fears of renewed instability. “The Kurdistan Region does not have the level of military equipment, air power and intelligence that the coalition provides,” he explained. “The presence of the coalition gave Kurds a feeling of safety, and I fear that without it, IS or another extremist threat could return and endanger the people of the Kurdistan Region again.” Those fears were amplified just days before the withdrawal, when two Kurdish teenagers were killed during clashes between IS cells and Iraqi Counterterrorism forces in the city of Pirde, located in Kirkuk Governorate, sparking large-scale Kurdish protests across the region.

Senior KRG leaders have moved to reassure anxious residents. Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, wrote in a post on X Wednesday that the coalition’s departure would not “leave the Region vulnerable and threaten its very existence.” “I wish to reassure the beloved people of Kurdistan that there is strong coordination with the Federal Government of Iraq to confront any threat or danger,” he said.

For its part, the federal Iraqi government in Baghdad has framed the coalition’s exit as a milestone of national sovereignty. Iraqi Air Force Commander Lieutenant-General Khalid al-Tamimi said that the Iraqi air force no longer requires U.S. support and can carry out all necessary security missions independently. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi similarly declared that Iraq will “assume full responsibility for its security and stability,” and announced that October 1, the day after the withdrawal was completed, would be celebrated annually as Sovereignty Day. The prime minister also reaffirmed the government’s commitment to disarming all unauthorized armed factions, saying “There shall be no weapons outside the framework of the law and no force outside state institutions.”

However, many Kurdish officials and regional security experts reject Baghdad’s optimistic assessment, warning that critical capability gaps remain unaddressed at a moment of extreme regional volatility. Lieutenant-General Bakhtiar Mohammed Sadiq, secretary general of the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, told Middle East Eye that while the 2024 US-Iraq Security Agreement governing the withdrawal is a standard, legitimate framework on paper, the timing is ill-suited to the current conflict between Iran and the U.S. “IS is not the only problem. There are other security threats. The capabilities of the Iraqi Army and Peshmerga are still not fully developed. Iraq has an air force, but it does not have all the capabilities it needs,” Sadiq explained. “More time is needed for advice and support – perhaps a couple of years. The coalition should continue providing capability support to the Peshmerga, including weapons, ammunition, training, intelligence, air support and counter-drone capabilities.”

An anonymous coalition officer who worked on building up Peshmerga capacity told MEE that the withdrawal timeline was postponed multiple times before the Biden administration ultimately locked in the September 30 deadline. “The war in Iran and the course of the current administration have accelerated everything. Until a year ago, the idea was still to position the [coalition] headquarters in Erbil instead of Baghdad, and this was implemented. But due to the escalation and Iran’s effective targeting, Erbil is now disappearing from the equation,” the officer said. Sadiq added that with coalition forces now relocating to Kuwait and Jordan, the logic of a full exit from Iraq remains unclear: “If they are staying in the region, why can’t they remain in Iraq?”

Noreldin Waisy, press secretary to Prime Minister Barzani, emphasized that the region’s security interests must be centered in any future defense arrangements with Baghdad. “It is clear to everyone that Iraq’s security situation remains fragile. Militias and armed groups have increasingly become a threat to Iraq’s internal security, as well as to the security of the Kurdistan Region,” Waisy said. “In any future security or defence arrangements with Iraq, the security interests of the Kurdistan Region must be fully taken into account, and the Kurdistan Region and the Peshmerga forces must be an integral and clearly defined part of these agreements.”

Alex Plitsas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Pentagon official who deployed twice to Iraq, told MEE that while the U.S. relationship with the KRG and Peshmerga remains enduring, the withdrawal creates a security vacuum that hostile actors are likely to exploit. “Iran has demonstrated a willingness to attack Kurdistan as part of its strategy to combat the United States by attacking allies in the region,” he noted.

Hejar Berenji, U.S. representative for the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) — an opposition group whose camps have been targeted 163 times since the Iran war began — said that while Iran has used the presence of coalition troops as a pretext for strikes, the deployment was never the root cause of attacks on the region. Berenji pointed out that most Iranian strikes on Kurdistan have targeted exiled Iranian opposition groups, critical energy infrastructure, and Kurdish civilian institutions, not just U.S. military sites. “Therefore, coalition forces’ withdrawal is not a security guarantee. It is wrong to assume that removing coalition troops will, by itself, end the threat,” he said.
Berenji also noted that while the Peshmerga confirms no replacement air defense system is being left behind after the withdrawal, Baghdad has delayed its planned disarmament of Iranian-backed factions from September 30, 2024 to June 2027. “Coalition forces and their defensive systems are leaving before that process is complete,” he said. “Further attacks are expected, although their timing and intensity cannot be established in advance. The practical questions are [about] who controls the missiles and drones, and what protection is actually operational for civilians and critical infrastructure. Ending the coalition mission is not the same as ending the danger facing the Kurdistan Region – mainly from Iran and its proxies.”

Not all Kurdish leaders share this pessimism, however. Sirwan Barzani, a senior Peshmerga major-general and prominent Kurdish businessman, said he holds out hope that the exit of U.S. forces will remove Iran’s justification for strikes, bringing an end to attacks on the region. “There is no more excuse, there are no more Americans, so we hope there will be no drones and no rockets,” he told MEE.

A hard-hitting documentary examining Israel’s military operations in Gaza has defied intense domestic political backlash to claim the top spot at Italy’s box office, beating a high-profile re-release of a Hollywood blockbuster to debut at number one. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, *NAZA* outperformed Disney/Marvel’s extended re-release of *Avengers: Endgame Encore* in its opening two days, pulling in roughly €1.1 million ($1.2 million) on Monday and Tuesday, compared to just €356,000 ($404,000) for the Marvel film over the same period.

The documentary, which recently took home the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, centers on first-hand testimony from Israeli sources regarding the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. It probes the role of artificial intelligence-powered systems in Israel’s military targeting strategy, and examines allegations that military planners explicitly accounted for high expected civilian casualties when selecting targets. To protect their sources, the film draws on anonymous interviews with 24 current and former Israeli military and intelligence insiders, offering a rare unvarnished look at internal Israeli perspectives on the conduct of the war.

At its world premiere in Venice, *NAZA* made history by earning a 24-and-a-half-minute standing ovation from the audience—the longest in the festival’s recent history, according to industry outlet *Variety*. This reception broke the previous record set just one year prior by Kaouther Ben Hania’s *The Voice of Hind Rajab*, a documentary about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024, which received a 22-minute standing ovation.

Almost immediately after *NAZA* was awarded the Special Jury Prize on Saturday, the filmmakers faced a wave of fierce condemnation and legal threats from senior Israeli politicians and public figures. Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar labeled the film “despicable” and announced his intention to immediately move forward with revoking the Israeli citizenship of Abraham and Szor, alleging their work amounts to treason against the state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly echoed Zohar’s attacks, announcing that he would introduce two new pieces of legislation targeting individuals accused of “defaming” the Israeli military. The first bill would formally allow the government to revoke the citizenship of anyone found to have defamed Israeli soldiers, while the second would increase the maximum damages that can be awarded in defamation cases against such individuals by twenty times. “They have no place among us,” Netanyahu stated of people he accuses of smearing the Israeli military.

According to reports from Israeli media, the backlash has extended to the country’s top military leadership: Israeli military Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has ordered the country’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, to pursue legal action against Abraham and Szor. Despite this intense domestic pressure, the documentary is set to roll out globally. It is scheduled for wide release in the United States starting after 9 October, and will also screen in 55 other countries across the globe, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and multiple nations across the Middle East.

One year after a ceasefire deal was signed to end hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian factions, repeated violations of the truce have pushed Gaza back into deadly instability, with at least eight Palestinians killed in fresh Israeli strikes across the blockaded enclave on Wednesday.

The deadliest attack of the day targeted a makeshift civilian transit vehicle in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of western Gaza City. An Israeli air strike hit a small cart attached to a minibus, a common adaptation for public transit amid the enclave’s crippling fuel shortage and skyrocketing transportation costs that leave formal transit options out of reach for most residents. These rigged vehicles, which often carry dozens of travelers moving between Gaza’s neighborhoods, were packed with commuters at the time of the mid-day strike.

The attack left five people dead and 15 more wounded, among them women and children, according to first responders. Motaz Ayoub, a civil defence ambulance officer who arrived at the scene within minutes of the blast, described a horrific scene of carnage across the crowded street. “The Israeli missile struck the civilian transport vehicle at a crowded hour of the day, when the streets were full of displaced people moving around,” Ayoub told Middle East Eye. “When we arrived, many of the killed and wounded were scattered across the street. We did not know who they were or where they had come from. One man’s body was cut in half, and many of the injured were in critical condition.” Ayoub added that a passenger bus passing near the target was also damaged in the strike, leaving additional people injured.

Witnesses nearby recounted the immediate panic that followed the explosion. Ayman Shubair, a 47-year-old mobile shop owner whose business sits 100 meters from the strike site, had just finished speaking with a customer when the bomb hit. “The sound of the explosion was deafening. I thought the building I was in had been bombed,” Shubair said. “The customer fell to the ground from fear and could not move for several minutes.” Shubair said crowds in the street scattered in all directions, with many screaming for help, while he stayed locked inside his shop out of fear of a follow-up strike — a common tactic used by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Shubair, who has already survived a separate attack on a vehicle just 30 meters from his shop last week, said low-flying Israeli drones had been visible over the neighborhood since the day before the strike, a clear warning to residents that violence was imminent. “I still remember that day. I saw the bodies of two people burning inside their car after it was hit,” he said. Like the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents, Shubair now lives in constant fear of attack, no matter what routine activity he is carrying out. “There is no safe place in Gaza,” he said. “Where is the ceasefire they keep talking about? Everywhere, all the time, there are bombings and random Israeli gunfire. The Israeli forces claim they do not kill civilians, but that is a lie. If they want to target someone, they kill everyone around them too.”

Three additional Palestinians were killed in separate Israeli strikes in other parts of Gaza City and the southern city of Khan Younis on Wednesday, bringing the total death toll from the day’s attacks to eight. The violence follows a similar strike on Tuesday that left another eight Palestinians dead, marking an escalation of the near-daily ceasefire violations Israel has carried out since the truce was signed one year ago.

Since the ceasefire agreement went into effect, at least 1,430 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces — an average of four people per day — including more than 300 children. The truce was originally negotiated to end Israel’s full-scale military campaign and lift crippling restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid and commercial goods into the blockaded enclave. To date, Israel has failed to uphold either commitment: it continues to carry out daily bombing raids across Gaza while maintaining a near-total blockade that has left the territory on the brink of famine and collapsed most essential services.

Since the start of Israel’s military campaign in October 2023, more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 175,000 wounded, according to local health officials. Ayoub, the civil defence officer, said the recent escalation of strikes has left all Gaza residents bracing for violence at any moment. “The Israeli drones are lately flying low over the city. People are so concerned,” he said. “Everyone feels the danger of being bombed or witnessing a strike nearby.”

Against a backdrop of unrelenting humanitarian crisis and widespread global scrutiny of Israeli military actions in Gaza, independent news outlet Middle East Eye (MEE) has announced the launch of a groundbreaking new podcast that aims to shift global narrative away from dehumanizing statistics and toward the unfiltered, firsthand experiences of Palestinians living through the conflict.

Titled *The Gaza Podcast* and helmed by Hussam Tannera—a Gaza-based teacher, father, and direct survivor of the ongoing conflict—this new series is intentionally structured to place ordinary Palestinians at the forefront of its reporting, giving listeners an intimate, unmediated look at daily life in the enclave that goes far beyond breaking news headlines.

Every episode of the series will feature in-depth, unscripted conversations with Palestinian residents covering the full spectrum of their lived realities: from mass displacement and the widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure to crippling shortages of life-sustaining resources including food, clean water, and medical care, as well as the quiet, ongoing fight to preserve normal family life amid constant chaos and uncertainty.

The debut episode, now available to audiences globally, features an extended, raw conversation with Mariam Yusuf, a newly graduated medical doctor who has built a life in Gaza. Yusuf shares her harrowing experience of seeking shelter in a Gaza hospital early in the conflict, detailing her forced quarantine after contracting chickenpox, the devastating loss of close family members to starvation, and the impossible struggle of processing profound grief while surrounded by total systemic and physical collapse.

In his remarks ahead of the launch, David Hearst, co-founder and editor-in-chief of MEE, framed the podcast as a critical intervention into a global discourse that has increasingly normalized the suffering of people in Gaza. “The genocide in Gaza has been normalised. What happens there is now openly being used as a model to try elsewhere, in the occupied West Bank and Lebanon,” Hearst explained. He added that mainstream coverage too often reduces Gaza’s civilian population to abstract numbers and casualty counts, and that *The Gaza Podcast* directly addresses that gap by giving Palestinians full agency to share their own stories on their own terms. “Hussam brings a deeply personal perspective to these conversations, making this an important and timely series for anyone who wants to understand what life is really like in the strip,” Hearst said.

The launch of the series comes as Gaza’s 2.3 million residents continue to face catastrophic, long-running hardship. More than 80% of the enclave’s population has been internally displaced, with most families surviving in overcrowded, unsanitary makeshift shelters after Israeli military operations destroyed more than half of Gaza’s residential and public infrastructure.

Since the outbreak of full-scale conflict in October 2023, Israeli actions in Gaza and its ongoing occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem have sparked widespread international diplomatic condemnation, and have led to formal legal proceedings against the Israeli state at two of the world’s highest international judicial bodies. At the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest court for state-to-state disputes, the court has already confirmed there is a plausible case that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide, with a second ongoing case examining the legality of Israel’s 58-year occupation of Palestinian territories. Separately, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have issued formal arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, charging both with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Israeli government has consistently rejected all allegations of wrongdoing, routinely justifying strikes on civilian infrastructure—including residential towers, schools, hospitals, and United Nations aid facilities—by claiming Palestinian armed groups including Hamas operate from these sites. Human rights organizations and independent investigators have documented that these claims are rarely verified, and have largely gone unchallenged by major Western media outlets and Israel’s key Western allies, including the United States.

As of October 7, 2025, official Palestinian health authorities record that at least 20,179 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli operations in Gaza, including more than 1,000 infants under one year old and 420 newborns. Even after a fragile ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, Israeli military raids and attacks across the occupied Palestinian territories have killed at least 1,257 Palestinians and wounded more than 4,100 more, with victims including journalists, medical workers, first responders, artists, writers, and athletes among the civilian casualties.

It is within this context of ongoing trauma and erasure of civilian experiences that *The Gaza Podcast* was built: to create a space for Palestinians to speak for themselves, beyond the dehumanizing casualty counts that dominate much mainstream coverage of the conflict.

*The Gaza Podcast* is currently available to stream on YouTube for video viewers, and can be accessed via all major audio podcast platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Middle East Eye is an independent media outlet focused on original, unconflicted coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa, and surrounding regions. More information about the outlet and its work is available on its official website.

When Captain Dharav Gosalia first received news of the terrifying incident that befell his long-time friend Smit Machchhar, the first sensation he felt was sheer disbelief that sent goosebumps across his skin. Their decades-long bond stretches back to when both men were 20-year-old aspiring pilots, neighbors in Mumbai’s Ghatkopar suburb, who went on to train together in New Zealand. Machchhar was Gosalia’s senior, and the pair later worked side-by-side for six years at India’s SpiceJet, where they co-piloted Boeing 737 aircraft across regional routes. When their careers diverged, Machchhar relocated to Dubai to join Flydubai in 2022, while Gosalia stayed with Air India to pilot larger Boeing 777 jets. Despite the distance, the two stayed connected, checking in regularly via WhatsApp and phone calls to swap stories about new routes, share family updates, and discuss the daily rhythms of life as commercial pilots.

The global energy shortage and skyrocketing oil prices that have upended economies worldwide in 2026 did not emerge overnight. Their roots stretch back years, to flawed long-term energy forecasts and an unforeseen geopolitical shock that exposed the extreme fragility of the world’s oil supply system.\n\nIn 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that global oil supply would outpace consumer demand by 2028. This and similar projections of slowing demand pushed oil prices down to levels too low to justify new investment in drilling projects and refinery expansions. No forecaster, however, predicted that the Strait of Hormuz – the critical chokepoint that carries most Middle Eastern oil to global markets – would be almost entirely shut down by geopolitical conflict.\n\nThat shock came in March 2026, when the strait closed following US and Israeli military strikes on Iran. With years of underinvestment in new production capacity, there was no quick way to restart the flow of oil and gas that the global economy relies on. While major energy-consuming nations coordinated a massive release of strategic petroleum reserves, this intervention only temporarily cooled prices. Worse, the drawdown of reserves will eventually require replenishment, creating an unexpected increase in future oil demand that will put further upward pressure on markets.\n\nMonths before the conflict erupted, author John Patrick Schoeneman Jr. and Hiroyasu Sakaguchi of the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan, published a report through the Trilateral Energy Security Committee – a body fostering energy security cooperation between the US, Japan, and South Korea – warning that even amid apparent oversupply, the global buffer against energy disruptions was alarmingly fragile. That warning has proven prescient: as fighting has continued, crude prices have surged, triggering widespread fuel shortages and pushing up costs for nearly every sector of the global economy, from gasoline and diesel to fertilizer, food, and all consumer goods.\n\nTo understand how this crisis unfolded, it is first necessary to understand how long-term oil forecasting works. Bringing a new oil or gas field online from initial exploration to commercial production can take roughly 20 years. When energy companies, lenders, and governments evaluate whether to fund new projects, they depend heavily on long-term projections of future oil and gas demand. These projections are built from a series of assumptions about economic growth rates, adoption of new energy technologies like electric vehicles, and future policy changes around pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Each set of assumptions produces vastly different demand projections: when Schoeneman and his colleagues compared leading 2025 forecasts for 2035 global oil demand, the highest projection stood at 116.6 million barrels per day, while the lowest was just 89.4 million barrels per day – a gap of 27.2 million barrels per day, equal to roughly one-quarter of current global oil consumption.\n\nJust as with weather forecasting, the accuracy of oil market projections degrades sharply the further out they extend. Short-term forecasts for one or two years out tend to be relatively accurate, since most planned production is already underway, but long-term projections are vulnerable to both small errors in baseline assumptions and entirely unforeseen black swan events.\n\nHistory is full of examples of these forecasting misses: in the early 2000s, most analysts warned the world was running out of cheap, easily accessible oil. That narrative was upended when new drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology unlocked massive volumes of shale oil, pushing US oil production from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to 13.6 million barrels per day by 2025. More recently, the IEA has repeatedly shifted its projection for when global oil demand will peak: in 2022, it forecast a peak in the mid-2030s; by 2023, rapid growth in electric vehicle sales pushed that peak to before 2030; and in 2025, amid pressure from the US government and other stakeholders who argued existing forecasts failed to account for growing energy demand from AI data centers and green technology supply chains, the IEA revived a previously shelved scenario that projects oil demand will keep rising until at least 2050.\n\nMany forecasting assumptions rely on predictions of consumer behavior that often fail to materialize. Electric vehicle adoption offers a clear case in point: in Norway, nine out of 10 new cars sold in 2024 were fully electric, yet road fuel consumption only fell by roughly 10% because most heavy-duty buses and trucks still run on diesel. In China, more than half of new cars sold in 2024 were electric, but national gasoline consumption remains higher than it was before 2020. In the US, fully electric vehicle sales appear to have hit a temporary peak after the expiration of a federal tax credit in 2025, and even with plug-in and hybrid models included, EVs still make up less than 10% of registered passenger vehicles. While high pump prices have made most American drivers more open to buying an electric vehicle, high upfront purchase costs continue to suppress actual sales.\n\nThese forecasting errors have real-world consequences, because global energy investment follows long-term demand projections. If forecasters predict falling demand, companies hold back on new drilling, refinery expansion, and infrastructure investment to avoid being left with unprofitable excess supply. For much of the past decade, leading forecasts consistently pointed to slowing future oil demand, and growing commitments to renewable energy expansion and emissions reductions made banks increasingly wary of funding new fossil fuel projects. While banks have recently become more willing to back petroleum projects, new production takes years to bring online – and most current production spending is going only to offset declining output from aging fields, not to expand total supply beyond current levels.\n\nThe result was a global energy system structured for gradual supply decline, not for a sudden major disruption. When the Strait of Hormuz closed, there was almost no excess capacity to draw on, turning a regional geopolitical shock into a global energy crisis with runaway price growth.\n\nThis pattern of delayed market adjustment is not without precedent. When oil prices crashed in 2014, energy companies all but halted approvals for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities. Global LNG demand continued to grow, particularly in China, and investment surged to a record high in 2019, with $65 billion in new project commitments. But because LNG facilities take years to construct, the skipped projects from the 2014–2018 price slump left the global system with no spare capacity when Russia cut natural gas exports to Europe in 2022, leading to record European gas prices.\n\nThe same dynamic is playing out today in global oil markets. New investment committed in 2026 will not deliver substantial new production until the 2030s. Investors currently face a new set of uncertain guesses: how quickly will renewable energy capacity expand amid high oil prices? When will the Middle East conflict end, and how long will it take to repair damaged infrastructure and resume normal oil exports from the Persian Gulf?\n\nFor consumers facing higher fuel costs and inflated prices for nearly all goods and services, this means energy prices will likely remain high and volatile for years to come – even after the conflict in the Middle East ends. The energy supply the world has today was shaped by forecasting decisions made decades ago, and the energy security of future decades will be determined by the assumptions and choices being made by companies and governments right now.