分类： world

PANAMA CITY – In a historic announcement Thursday, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino confirmed the appointment of Ilya Espino de Marotta as the next chief administrator of the Panama Canal, marking the first time a woman has taken on the top leadership role of the strategic interoceanic waterway. Espino de Marotta will begin her seven-year term on October 1, stepping into the role after serving as deputy administrator of the canal since 2020.

The appointment wraps up a multi-week selection process led by the Panama Canal Board of Directors, which evaluated a pool of high-profile, qualified candidates before settling on Espino de Marotta. At 64, the incoming administrator brings more than three decades of on-the-ground experience with the canal, having built a reputation for delivering results on large-scale infrastructure projects – most notably the canal’s landmark $5 billion expansion effort. A recognizable figure across the waterway’s operations, she is widely known for her signature pink hard hat alongside her track record of decisive project leadership.

Following the official announcement, President Mulino shared his reaction on the social platform X, writing: “I have spoken with the new Administrator of the Panama Canal… to congratulate her and reaffirm the commitment to work in coordination on strategic projects that generate jobs, prosperity and progress for Panamanians.”

Espino de Marotta takes the helm at a pivotal moment for the canal, which faces both major infrastructure priorities and growing geopolitical friction between the United States and China. Her immediate policy agenda centers on advancing a suite of new development projects designed to expand and diversify the canal’s operational capacity: two new ports, one at each end of the waterway, will have tender documents released in the coming months, paired with upcoming bidding processes for a new natural gas pipeline and a cross-country logistics corridor.

Beyond infrastructure planning, the canal sits at the heart of a simmering international rivalry between Washington and Beijing. Tensions flared in early April this year, after Panama seized control of two key canal-connected ports from a subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based firm. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio subsequently accused China of “bullying” Panama by detaining dozens of Panama-flagged vessels for a short period, a claim Chinese authorities have outright denied. The U.S. has repeatedly pushed to counter China’s expanding economic and political influence across Latin America, and the Panama Canal has emerged as a central flashpoint in this rivalry – last year, former U.S. President Donald Trump went so far as to falsely accuse Beijing of controlling the strategic waterway.

A trained engineer, Espino de Marotta holds a bachelor’s degree in Marine Engineering from Texas A&M University and a master’s degree in Economic Engineering from Panama’s Universidad Santa María La Antigua.

Since mid-April 2026, Morocco has launched an expansive, ongoing deportation campaign targeting sub-Saharan African migrants seeking passage to Europe, with local sources confirming security forces are arresting more than 100 people daily as operations expand across the country’s northern region.

Initial coordinated raids targeted informal forest encampments between Fnideq and Belyounech, a common shelter area for migrants waiting to attempt crossings to Europe, where human rights groups estimate roughly 800 people have been detained. After sweeping through this northern border zone, authorities shifted focus to large-scale operations in Tangier and its surrounding areas. Multiple witnesses and migrant advocates have documented serious abuses during the crackdown, including mass arbitrary arrests, physical beatings, racist verbal harassment, and forced transfers toward Morocco’s eastern border with Algeria.

Deportation procedures follow a tiered pattern: detainees from Sudan and Chad are transported by bus to remote border regions and abandoned without supplies, while migrants from Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Guinea are put on charter flights out of Casablanca for expulsion to their home countries.

This escalation of migration enforcement is directly tied to the European Union’s deepening border externalization strategy, a core pillar of the bloc’s incoming Pact on Migration and Asylum set to enter into force in June 2026. For years, the EU has increasingly outsourced its immigration control to North African nations with well-documented poor human rights records, allocating more than €900 million through its Global Europe development instrument to fund expanded border management, surveillance, and migration restriction initiatives across the region.

“Essentially, this is about the EU exercising border control without getting its own hands dirty,” explained Frey Lindsay, a journalist with Statewatch’s Outsourcing Borders project, which monitors the bloc’s offshored migration enforcement. “The goal is to stop migration as far downstream along the route as possible, before anyone reaches EU territory.”

As a key transit country for sub-Saharan African migrants heading to Europe, Morocco has steadily deepened its cooperation with Frontex, the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency, to block irregular departures from its northern coast. Moroccan interior ministry data shows authorities thwarted 73,640 irregular migration attempts in 2025, a small decline from 2024 that officials attribute to shifts to alternative migration routes.

Worsening conditions for migrants in northern Morocco have been well documented by grassroots and human rights groups. Chad Boukhari, a journalist and member of Border Resistance, a Mediterranean grassroots collective supporting migrants, told Middle East Eye that migrants reported widespread mistreatment and humiliation at the hands of Moroccan security forces. “Many were abandoned near the Algerian border with no food or water, and many of those people were then detained by Algerian forces,” Boukhari said. “Witnesses told us the Algerian army tortured many detainees, and some migrants even found the bodies of other migrants left in the desert.” This pattern of cross-border abandonment and abuse is not new: in 2025 alone, Algeria expelled more than 30,000 migrants to Niger, leaving multiple deportation convoys stranded in the Sahara, with widespread accounts of torture, enslavement, and systematic abuse emerging from the region.

Middle East Eye reached out for comment to Moroccan, Algerian, and EU authorities, but had not received a response as of publication.

For most sub-Saharan African migrants, the journey to Morocco already involves crossing the Sahel, an arid, dangerous trans-Saharan belt, through Niger and Algeria or Mauritania. Many originate from Sahel nations gripped by chronic instability and ranked among the lowest on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, making the dangerous journey to Europe a compelling option despite the risks. After arriving in Morocco, many spend months or even years living in informal camps in the country’s dense northern forests, where humanitarian groups occasionally provide limited aid—though these efforts are often disrupted by authorities.

Long before the current 2026 crackdown, Human Rights Watch has documented repeated, systemic abuses against migrants in Morocco dating back to 2014, including beatings by police, confiscation and destruction of personal property, burning of informal shelters, and extrajudicial expulsions without due process. Ousman Sow, a Guinean migrant who spent a year in Morocco before successfully crossing to Spain and now resides in Germany, described a pattern of coordinated monitoring of humanitarian aid efforts. “Oftentimes, the Red Cross would come to the forest and give us blankets and clothing, but we always knew that was a bad sign,” Sow said. “Shortly after those visits, Moroccan security forces would show up, like they had been tipped off or were watching. They burned all our things, then drove us to remote areas and left us there with nothing.”

Security operations are primarily focused on blocking access to Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves on Moroccan territory that represent the only land border between Europe and Africa. The 2022 Melilla fence tragedy, where at least 23 mostly sub-Saharan African migrants were killed under disputed circumstances while attempting to cross the border, with another 70 people still missing, has served as a grim reminder of the deadly risks of this route. Reports have since emerged that Moroccan authorities buried many of the victims in unmarked, unrecorded graves.

Even with sharply increased enforcement, migration flows from North Africa to Europe have remained steady, driven by the ongoing war in Sudan and accelerating political and security collapse across the Sahel. For millions of displaced people, the promise of safety and opportunity in Europe still outweighs the extreme risks of the journey.

Lindsay warns that increased securitization of borders does nothing to address the root causes of migration, and only makes the journey deadlier. “The more borders and walls you build, the more dangerous alternative routes migrants are forced to take,” she noted. “Securitization doesn’t change why people leave their homes—it just makes more people die along the way.”

Rights advocates emphasize that the current crackdown in Morocco is a direct response to the EU’s new migration pact, which overhauls the bloc’s existing asylum system to speed up asylum case processing and deportations. The new framework expands biometric border surveillance and makes it easier to reject asylum claims on the grounds that a migrant passed through a “safe third country” before reaching the EU. Morocco is among the nations listed as safe third countries, alongside Egypt and Turkey—both of which face widespread allegations of systemic human rights abuses against migrants. Over 50 international non-governmental organizations have formally opposed the pact, arguing that its expedited procedures violate the fundamental right to a fair asylum review.

By externalizing enforcement, the EU effectively blocks most migrants from ever reaching a point where they can file an asylum claim, shifting all operational and ethical responsibility for border control to non-EU nations. Under the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, the bloc has already allocated hundreds of millions of euros to strengthen migration enforcement in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

The new migration pact is a high-stakes political priority for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her administration, which needs a legislative win to maintain political support among EU member states. “Member states have made it very clear they will not back the pact unless the European Commission does everything possible to cut arrivals and deport as many people as possible,” Lindsay explained.

Patterns of abuse linked to EU-funded externalized border enforcement have already been well-documented in Libya, where the EU directly funds, trains, and equips Libyan coastal authorities that have been repeatedly accused of colluding with human trafficking networks to detain migrants, who are then subjected to systematic exploitation, physical and sexual violence, and enslavement. The EU is currently moving forward with plans to fund a new maritime control center in Benghazi, which is controlled by warlord Khalifa Haftar—accused of multiple war crimes by the United Nations—to intercept migrants at sea and force them back to Libya. Similar violent pushback practices have been documented along the EU’s eastern Balkans route, where Croatian border forces have repeatedly been recorded forcing migrants back into Bosnia, blocking them from accessing asylum procedures on EU territory.

The new pact also establishes a network of “return hubs,” third countries where rejected asylum seekers can be transferred and detained while waiting for deportation—often to nations where they have no family, community, or prior connections, with proposed hubs ranging from Bangladesh to Rwanda.

Human rights groups warn the pact reflects a broad, dangerous hardening of anti-migrant policy across EU member states that will have deadly consequences for thousands of people every year. For migrants in transit, shifting political winds in Europe directly shape their treatment in North African transit nations. As Ousman Sow put it: “Whenever the political climate changes in Europe, you can feel it in Morocco. If Europe wants immigrants, Morocco is okay. If not, it’s hostile there.”

In January 2022, after 900 days of detention in an Egyptian correctional facility, Ramy Shaath stepped onto French soil at Paris’ Roissy Airport. To secure his release, the Palestinian academic and long-time political organizer was forced to renounce his Egyptian citizenship, and was greeted on arrival by his French wife Celine Lebrun-Shaath and crowds of cheering supporters. The release came after intensive diplomatic pressure from then-French President Emmanuel Macron, who personally lobbied Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to secure Shaath’s freedom. “I share the relief of his wife,” Macron wrote at the time. “Thank you to everyone who has played a positive role in this happy outcome.”

Four years later, that warm welcome has curdled into a formal deportation order, framing Shaath as a “serious threat to public order” in France. On Thursday, he is scheduled to appear before an advisory deportation committee in Nanterre, the western Paris suburb where he has resided since 2022, to review the government’s attempt to remove him from the country. While the committee’s ruling is non-binding and French authorities retain the power to act regardless of its outcome, the proceedings mark the latest escalation in a months-long campaign of administrative harassment targeting the prominent activist.

Born in the besieged Gaza Strip, Shaath argues that French and European law prohibit his deportation to any available destination. “They cannot send me back to Gaza; one, because it’s a war zone and because I am targeted by the Israelis,” he told Middle East Eye in an exclusive interview. “And in both cases, European law will not allow them to send me to Palestine. And of course, I know more Egyptians, but they cannot send me to Egypt.” While he acknowledges a remote possibility that authorities could resettle him in an unrelated third country – “so I could find myself in Liberia or Gambia” – he expects to instead be left in a permanent state of legal limbo, locked out from renewing his temporary residency, cut off from basic public services, and subjected to ongoing law enforcement surveillance.

The foundation for the deportation push is Shaath’s decades-long open advocacy for Palestinian rights and statehood. Before his detention in Egypt, he rose to prominence as a key organizer during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that ousted longtime authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak, and served as the national coordinator for the Egyptian chapter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel over its occupation of Palestinian territory.

After arriving in France in 2022, Shaath was granted an initial one-year residence visa. When he applied for renewal in September 2023, shortly after Israel launched its large-scale military campaign in Gaza following the October 7 attacks, he received no official response. He has since filed 10 urgent legal appeals for residency renewal, all of which have gone unanswered. On April 30, he received formal notice at his Nanterre home that deportation proceedings had officially been opened against him.

Documents released by the Nanterre prefecture lay out the government’s justifications for the order, centered almost entirely on Shaath’s public comments and pro-Palestine organizing. The filing cites his long-standing connections to prominent Palestinian rights organizers in France, his public descriptions of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a “criminal occupation,” his open self-identification as an anti-Zionist, and his public support for a one-state solution that guarantees equal rights for all people living in historic Palestine.

Reacting to the prefecture’s claims, Shaath expressed sarcastic disbelief. “Oh my god, are you fucking serious? The French services cracked the biggest secret of my life! For 40 years I have not had one speech that I didn’t attack Zionism, and today you cracked my heart that I’ve been lying about – that I am anti-Zionist? Unbelievable.”

Other accusations in the filing, he says, are outright falsifications. Authorities cite one incident where he gave a “militaristic speech” while wearing military fatigues; Shaath notes that publicly available video of the event shows him sitting to deliver an academic lecture, wearing plain beige Uniqlo trousers. The filing also highlights a public comment where Shaath called on Iran to intervene to stop Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them women and children, and reduced most of the Gaza Strip to rubble. Shaath counters that he has also repeatedly called on France to deploy its military to intercept Israeli aircraft carrying out strikes on civilian targets in Gaza, a fact French officials have deliberately omitted from their filing.

“This is a McCarthyist attack that is racist, that is criminal, that is beyond the law to harass everybody who talks about Palestine,” he said.

Middle East Eye reached out to both the French Interior Ministry and the Nanterre prefecture for comment on the proceedings, but received no response ahead of publication.

Shaath’s case is far from isolated. Since the start of Israel’s Gaza war in October 2023, France has joined most other Western European nations in rolling out a widespread crackdown on pro-Palestine advocacy and protest. The crackdown has been particularly acute on university campuses, where student organizers, faculty, and labor unions have repeatedly warned of growing punitive pressure on anyone expressing public support for Palestinian rights. Peaceful demonstrations, public lectures, and campus occupations have been reclassified as illegal public disorder, leading to disciplinary proceedings, administrative fines, criminal charges, and in dozens of cases, permanent criminal records for participants.

Last month, the French parliament was scheduled to debate a controversial new bill that would introduce a range of new criminal penalties for public criticism of Israel, including criminalization of denials of Israel’s right to exist and criminal sanctions for public comparisons of Israeli policy to Nazi Germany. While the bill was ultimately pulled from the parliamentary calendar amid procedural disputes, the Macron administration has confirmed it intends to reintroduce identical legislation this summer. The proposed text would also expand the definition of terrorism-related offenses to include “implicit provocation,” a vague standard that legal experts warn would enable widespread crackdowns on anti-war and pro-Palestine speech.

Unlike many grassroots Palestinian rights organizers, Shaath comes from a prominent Palestinian political background: he is the son of Nabil Shaath, a former Palestinian Authority prime minister and chief Palestinian negotiator, previously served as an advisor to iconic PLO leader Yasser Arafat, was a member of the Palestinian Authority’s official negotiation team with Israel, and has even been invited to deliver formal addresses to the French Senate and Foreign Ministry. Nanterre, his home city, named him an honorary citizen in 2021, before his release from Egyptian prison. None of these credentials have shielded him from the sweeping new crackdown on pro-Palestine speech.

In response to the deportation order, Shaath’s family, friends, and supporters announced a new public campaign last Sunday to block his removal, under the hashtag #FreeRamyShaath2. The name references the first international campaign that secured Shaath’s release from Egyptian prison between 2019 and 2022, when he was charged with “aiding a terrorist group in achieving its goals.” Crucially, the first campaign enjoyed formal support from the French political establishment; the second is a direct challenge to that same establishment’s current crackdown on Palestinian advocacy.

This is not the first time French authorities have targeted Shaath over his pro-Palestine speech. In November 2023, Laurent Nunez, then the prefect of Paris and now the French Interior Minister, referred Shaath to the French justice system on charges of “apology for terrorism,” based on a rally speech where he stated that “the Palestinian people, like all people under occupation, have the right to defend themselves and resist.” The case was ultimately dismissed by Paris prosecutors 11 months after it was opened.

Shaath, who explicitly says he opposes all forms of violence and racism, including antisemitism, argues that even when the baseless charges are thrown out, the administrative process itself is a form of punishment designed to force him to end his activism or leave the country voluntarily. “Yes, of course, if they continue this draconian decision against me and put me under house arrest… I will fight it, but I’m not going to spend my life in that condition. Eventually, probably, that might lead me to leave,” he said.

The deportation notice already includes a provision that would place Shaath under house arrest ahead of any final ruling, restrict his movement to his home municipality of Nanterre, and require him to check in “morning and evening” at the local police station. Shaath says he intends to exhaust every available legal avenue to fight the order, including taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

“I will not live under intimidation. If they insisted on being a banana republic, I will insist on taking the legal route,” he said. “They want to keep me, to stop talking about Gaza and Palestine. I’m not going to do that.”

Fresh firsthand accounts from serving Israeli military reservists have laid bare systemic widespread looting and deliberate destruction of civilian property by Israeli troops operating in southern Lebanon, according to a new investigation published Wednesday by Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. One reservist, who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity, laid out the consistent pattern of operations his unit followed: after opening fire on residential homes to clear any suspected Hezbollah fighters and confirm the area was secure, the unofficial, and in many cases primary, mission of stealing civilian property would begin. The reservist described that stolen goods ranging from fine rugs and upholstered armchairs to motorbikes and household heaters were pulled from private homes, while local shops were completely stripped of high-value merchandise. Even basic supplies used at Israeli military outposts in the region, including hand soap, were stolen from Lebanese properties, he added. Stolen spoils were stockpiled at forward outposts to be carried back to Israel when soldiers completed their tours of duty, and troops frequently argued over who would claim the most valuable items. This new account comes amid a growing tide of public reports of large-scale looting that have emerged since Israel-Hezbollah fighting escalated in March, following the joint Israeli-U.S. military strike on Iran. The issue of rampant theft by Israeli troops is not new: just one month prior, Haaretz first reported that soldiers had stolen sofas, televisions, and motorbikes from southern Lebanese households, with senior army commanders largely ignoring the practice. Earlier this month, Israeli outlet Ynet also reported that top military leaders have been unable to curb the scale of the looting across southern Lebanon. In comments made to senior commanders at a military conference last month, Israeli Army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir publicly condemned the practice, stating, “the phenomenon of looting, if it exists, is disgraceful and could stain the entire military.” He added, “If such incidents occurred, we will investigate them. I am not willing for us to become an army of looters.” Following Zamir’s remarks, Israeli broadcaster Channel 14 reported that the chief of staff had asked frontline commanders operating in Lebanon to sign a public letter pledging to crack down on looting. However, at least one senior commander refused to sign, telling the outlet that discipline problems within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) originate at the highest ranks of command. The reservist who spoke to Haaretz echoed this assessment, saying most senior commanders openly tolerated the looting. “The attitude was that there was no problem with looting as long as you didn’t get hurt. The higher command didn’t really try to stop us either,” he said. After initial reports of looting broke last month, the reservist said his own commanding officer ordered troops to halt theft – before entering local shops himself and smashing any remaining valuables so soldiers would have nothing left to steal. To date, no IDF soldiers have faced formal disciplinary action or punishment for participating in looting, the reservist confirmed. He added that some troops have even tried to justify the theft on religious grounds, while others argue that since most civilian properties were already slated for destruction, there was no reason to leave valuables intact. The reservist compared the IDF’s current approach to that of a historical Viking army, saying leadership allows widespread looting as a way to keep troops satisfied and willing to continue fighting. Israeli historian Adam Raz, who has extensively researched the looting of Palestinian property during the 1948 Nakba, noted last month that looting has been a consistent feature of every Israeli military campaign in the region. “What’s new is the total indifference,” Raz said. “The senior command turns a blind eye, the criminality continues, and the crime achieves its goals.” The findings from Haaretz’s latest investigation align with findings from international human rights groups. Last month, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on-the-ground reports from southern Lebanon confirm a clear, organized pattern of theft during Israeli military operations. The group documented that Israeli forces regularly raid civilian homes, rummage through personal belongings, and steal cash and private property, adding that the practice has become an official, unstated policy of the Israeli state and military. Euro-Med has also documented identical patterns of looting by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. In a separate incident from January, Israeli forces were reported to have stolen roughly 250 goats from Syrian territory and transferred the animals to Israeli settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank. Even after the United States-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was announced last month, cross-border clashes and military operations have continued uninterrupted. Data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows that roughly 100,000 Lebanese civilians have fled their homes in recent weeks out of fear of incoming Israeli strikes. Official figures from the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health confirm that Israeli forces have killed at least 3,020 people since the latest military offensive began in March, including 824 civilian and combatant deaths that have occurred since the April 17 ceasefire was announced. For its part, Hezbollah has killed at least 21 Israeli soldiers since March, eight of whom have died since the ceasefire, the majority of them invading troops stationed inside Lebanese territory. The new Haaretz testimonies also reveal that targeting Hezbollah fighters was not always the primary mission for Israeli troops on the ground. A second reservist told the outlet that the IDF’s core objective in southern Lebanon is not countering militant activity, but the deliberate destruction of civilian homes. “There was no reason other than revenge,” the reservist stated. He described a pre-invasion speech delivered by a battalion commander as “a pagan ritual”, adding that he had heard identical inflammatory rhetoric during previous Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. “When we entered the village, there were no militants. The houses were empty,” he said. “There was no fighting there at all – only operations to flatten homes.” The reservist noted that this destructive mission has been the IDF’s core focus in the region for the past two years, joking that the Israel Defense Forces should be renamed the “Israel Defence Forces for house demolitions”. He confirmed that even in areas with no sign of militant activity, soldiers still entered empty civilian homes to search for valuables to steal. According to his account, residential homes, public schools, and local clinics are destroyed without any formal military justification. Much of the demolition work is carried out by private contractors, including extreme Israeli settlers, as well as Bedouin and Druze laborers. For religiously observant soldiers in his unit, the reservist added, destroying Lebanese civilian homes is viewed as a sacred, ultimate mission. He also recounted that whenever troops raised the prospect of returning to Israeli territory, the battalion commander would respond: “This is Israel too.”