分类： world

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.

Six months after securing her release from 12 months of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, 33-year-old Palestinian activist Leqaa Kordia is confronting a debilitating new health condition that never existed before her incarceration: repeated, unrelenting seizures. Her most recent episode, the fifth since her March 2026 release, struck Sunday shortly after she returned home from speaking at a panel hosted by New York City’s Riverside Church. Kordia, who was in prayer and still dressed in her prayer garments when the seizure hit, described the harrowing experience in an Instagram statement shared Monday.

“I was scared, exhausted, dizzy, and confused,” Kordia wrote. “I had never had a seizure before ICE jailed me for exercising my freedom of speech and my right to protest.”

Kordia first entered the United States in 2016 from the Israeli-occupied West Bank on a Palestinian Authority passport, initially as a visitor before transitioning to student status to study English. Her detention saga began in March 2025, when she voluntarily attended a scheduled meeting with immigration agents after learning authorities had questioned her acquaintances and visited her home to inquire about her. During that March 13 meeting in Newark, New Jersey, Kordia was served a notice to appear for immigration court and was immediately transferred overnight to a detention facility in Texas.

She spent 368 days in ICE custody before an immigration judge ordered her release on March 13, 2026. Her first seizure, which was documented publicly, occurred one month earlier in February while she was still detained at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, and required emergency hospitalization. Recounting the incident to Middle East Eye in April, Kordia said she had developed a high fever the night before the seizure, and fellow detained women begged guards to provide her with basic over-the-counter pain relievers like Ibuprofen or Tylenol. Their pleas were ignored, Kordia said, and the seizure followed shortly after. “I swear, that night I thought I was going to die,” she told MEE at the time. Supporters had repeatedly raised alarms about the lack of medical access for Kordia during her detention, and she was only hospitalized days after the fever had already spiked.

Kordia’s ongoing health struggle is far from an isolated incident. It has drawn renewed attention to longstanding, widespread allegations of systemic medical neglect across ICE detention facilities, a crisis that advocacy and medical rights groups have warned about for years. Middle East Eye has previously documented multiple other cases of inadequate medical care for detainees held by ICE.

One such case involves 65-year-old Syrian detainee Iemad Saifo, who was taken into ICE custody in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, in July 2025. Saifo’s family told MEE in August that facility staff failed to properly log his regular prescription medications when he was admitted. Over his two-week detention, Saifo’s health deteriorated drastically because he could not access his required treatment, a common outcome that disrupts routine, life-sustaining care for detainees entering the system. Kordia herself recounted a similar experience from inside the facility: a woman detained in the same housing unit as her had brought her own medication with her when she was taken into custody, but officers never cataloged the drugs and kept them locked in the woman’s seized purse, despite repeated urgent requests to release the medication.

Inadequate medical access is not the only pervasive complaint about conditions in ICE detention. Earlier this year, detainees at Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE facility in Newark, launched a hunger strike to protest abysmal living conditions that included insufficient food and substandard medical care. During a May visit to the facility, members of Congress documented these claims, with Representative Jerry Nadler telling reporters that some detainees reported meals containing maggots. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly denied all allegations of poor conditions in its detention facilities.

A March 2026 report from the Florence Project, an Arizona-based nonprofit providing legal services to immigrants, further corroborates claims of widespread medical neglect. The organization documented a sharp, alarming rise in the number of its clients facing severe, chronic health conditions that have been exacerbated by life-threatening denial of care in ICE custody. Case studies included in the report mirror Kordia’s experience: a woman who developed recurring seizure-like convulsions only after entering detention, multiple pregnant women denied appropriate prenatal care, and a woman who was scheduled for surgery to repair a broken ankle just before her detention, who remains in severe chronic pain with an unhealed broken bone months later.

For Kordia, the crisis is deeply personal. “I can’t take back the 368 days that were stolen from me,” she wrote in her Instagram post. “I can’t fully live a normal existence. I don’t know whether I will ever heal from this trauma and sickness.”

Sally Pillay, executive director of the Mami Chelo Foundation, told MEE that Kordia’s account is deeply troubling and aligns with what the organization hears consistently from people held in ICE detention: requests for medical care are routinely delayed or ignored until a condition becomes a life-threatening emergency.

“No one should leave civil immigration detention with their health permanently damaged because they could not access timely, adequate medical care,” Pillay said.

Six months after her release, Kordia says the seizures that started only after her detention continue to upend her life. “Now I carry the pain of my people and my family in my chest, and the consequences of raising my voice live in my brain and body,” she wrote. “I will pay the price of speaking up for the rest of my life.”

Before dawn breaks over the war-torn Yemeni city of Taiz, Naseem al-Odaini and a group of fellow women already stand gathered in a small kitchen, their hands deep in flour as they knead dough for date-filled pastries and sweet biscuits. Nearby, an oven hums to temperature, and a large mixing bowl waits for the next batch. Every warm, fragrant treat they pull from the heat is bound for the front lines, carrying a quiet, unshakable message of solidarity stitched into every ingredient: “Women stand beside you.”

This grassroots act of support is no new impulse for Yemeni women. For years, through cycles of intense conflict, they have gathered in home and community kitchens to back government forces fighting on the front lines. The initiative that Odaini now leads first launched in 2015, when large-scale conflict erupted across the country, but it went dormant for more than four years as fighting cooled. Now, after a major new military escalation across Taiz governorate, Odaini and her fellow volunteers have brought the mission back to life.

The resurgence of violence began on September 3, when Houthi forces launched a sweeping offensive against government-held positions in both Hodeidah and Taiz governorates. The offensive succeeded in seizing control of the remaining districts of Hodeidah city, the coastal port of Mocha, the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, and Mayyun Island. Today, fierce clashes continue to rage across western Taiz governorate, where Houthi forces have clawed out small territorial gains, while sporadic skirmishes persist along the eastern edges of Taiz city.

For Odaini, the renewed violence makes the work of civilian support non-negotiable. She says women in Taiz carry a clear duty to stand with frontline fighters, not just by providing food and critical medical supplies, but by lifting morale through every possible means. She oversees the production of hundreds of pastries each week, funding the operation through a mix of her own personal savings, small donations from friends and acquaintances, and contributions from supporters who found the initiative through social media.

To Odaini’s surprise, the level of public support for the revived initiative has far outstripped what the group saw a decade ago. “The support base has grown significantly compared to previous years, with many women from both inside and outside Taiz eager to participate,” she explained. “I did not expect this level of engagement, especially after being inactive for more than four years. I was truly surprised.” To protect the safety of fighters, the group has strict protocols: they do not accept pre-prepared food from unvetted sources, instead asking donors to buy key ingredients like flour and cooking oil from pre-approved trusted vendors, and submit proof of purchase.

Unlike many volunteers who send supplies through intermediaries, Odaini insists on delivering the baked goods to the front lines personally – a practice she has maintained since 2015, even after tragedy struck the group. “Three of my colleagues were killed on the front lines while delivering supplies, but I continued delivering the food myself,” she said. The fallen members – Moamen, Osama, and Reham – were core contributors to the initiative, and their loss has only deepened Odaini’s commitment to carrying on their work. “When I reach the front lines and see the fighters enduring the scorching sun and freezing cold, I feel that baking these biscuits and preparing preserved food is the least I can do for them,” she added.

Fighters say Odaini’s presence means more than any amount of supplies. When she visited frontline positions last week, she recalled, the troops greeted her with overwhelming joy. “They told me, ‘We don’t care as much about the biscuits as we do about your presence among us – it gives us immense psychological support, ‘” she said. Beyond baking and frontline delivery, Odaini is keen to emphasize that women’s contributions to the conflict stretch far beyond this initiative: many have lost their husbands, fathers, or sons – their families’ primary breadwinners – and have been forced to enter the workforce to keep their children fed and housed, taking on roles they never expected to hold amid the chaos of war.

Odaini is not alone in reviving this work. Israa al-Tayeb, another Taiz-based activist whose mother was killed during the 2011 revolution against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Taiz’s Freedom Square, also launched her own baking initiative in 2015, paused operations in 2022 as fighting calmed, and has now restarted her work at a larger scale than ever before. For six straight days, Tayeb and her team have worked almost non-stop to turn out thousands of biscuits and package other essential supplies including fresh milk, bottled water, and non-perishable snacks for fighters. “We do not feel tired because we know this food is reaching those who deserve it,” she said.

Tayeb’s team operates with a structured division of labor, adapted to meet the sharp increase in demand for supplies. Some members collect cash donations and source ingredients from local markets, others handle baking and packaging, and a separate trusted team handles frontline delivery – meaning Tayeb herself does not travel to the combat zone. Women who do not have the time or ability to bake often contribute cash instead, allowing the team to rent a small commercial kitchen and scale up their output. “We didn’t realise we could provide this much support, but with the steady stream of donations coming in, we have managed to grow our operation dramatically,” Tayeb explained. Encouraged by messages from fighters, she says the group has no plans to slow down: “These supplies make the fighters feel that the entire city stands behind them, so we will continue.”

This tradition of baking for frontline fighters is not unique to government-held Taiz: it is widespread across Yemen, with women in Houthi-controlled areas also preparing home-cooked food for their fighters, especially during major religious holidays. Men across the country also contribute, delivering everything from medical supplies and warm blankets to water and milk to frontline units as an act of solidarity.

For fighters on the front lines of western Taiz, this civilian support is transformative. Ahmed, a frontline fighter who spoke on condition of anonymity, said lightweight, non-perishable food and other supplies are not just critical for physical survival – they provide a huge boost to troop morale. “When I see a car loaded with food arrive at the front line, I feel as though the entire governorate is fighting alongside us and that we are not alone,” he told Middle East Eye. He noted that while most civilians flee combat zones to seek safety, many Taiz residents choose to stay behind to support the troops. “We all belong to this governorate, and everyone has a role to play,” Ahmed said. “While we fight on the front, others contribute financially, and women refuse to sit idly by – they bake for us.”

Psychological expert Hail al-Fakeeh explains that home-baked goods carry a unique emotional weight that generic ready-made food or direct financial aid cannot match. Unlike outside donations, these treats are prepared in the very homes that fighters are defending, creating an immediate emotional connection. “These biscuits connect the fighter on the front line emotionally to home, sending a powerful message that the people back in the city stand with them,” Fakeeh said. “It goes far beyond basic material support.” He added that this practice is a generations-old Yemeni tradition, with women across the country preparing homemade baked goods for fighters to lift morale during wartime dating back decades.

This report is part of independent, on-the-ground coverage of the Yemeni conflict by Middle East Eye, a publication focused on independent reporting from the Middle East and North Africa region.