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The recent Israeli parliamentary elections have plunged Benjamin Netanyahu’s 15-year-long premiership into unprecedented uncertainty, with fragile coalition negotiations raising tangible prospects that the long-serving leader could step down from the prime minister’s post. Contrary to assumptions that a shift in domestic political power would erase his outstanding legal liabilities, international legal frameworks confirm that all ongoing cross-border proceedings against Netanyahu would remain fully active even after he leaves public office.

The most high-profile outstanding legal action is the November 2024 International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant targeting Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, issued over verified allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip. The charges include deliberate starvation of civilian populations as a method of warfare, targeted murder of non-combatants, and systematic persecution of Palestinian communities. Separate from the ICC proceedings, Netanyahu is also subject to an in-absentia arrest warrant and ongoing criminal trial in Turkey, where prosecutors have levelled charges of torture and crimes against humanity tied to Israel’s 2025 interception of a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla. Additionally, South Africa’s landmark genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), first filed in December 2023, will continue unimpeded regardless of changes to Israel’s top leadership.

A core legal reality underpinning these cases is that Netanyahu’s potential departure from office will strip him of the temporary personal head-of-government immunity that a number of ICC member states have previously invoked to avoid executing the arrest warrant against him. This immunity, a longstanding norm in international law, applies exclusively to sitting heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers, shielding them from arrest and prosecution in foreign national courts for all conduct during their tenure, and expires immediately upon leaving office. While a secondary layer of functional immunity, which covers actions undertaken in an official governmental capacity, technically extends to former leaders, leading international legal scholars have repeatedly confirmed that widely accepted carve-outs for core international crimes including war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity render this protection largely unenforceable for Netanyahu’s alleged conduct.

The ICC’s own legal framework explicitly rejects any immunity claims for individuals facing prosecution under the Rome Statute, per Article 27 of the founding treaty, which states that official governmental status cannot be used to bar criminal proceedings. This rule has been consistently enforced against leaders from non-ICC member states in past precedent: in 2019, the ICC Appeals Chamber ruled that Jordan was legally obligated to arrest then-Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir despite Sudan not being a Rome Statute signatory, and in 2024 the court found Mongolia in breach of its cooperation obligations for failing to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin during an official visit. While Israel continues to contest the ICC’s jurisdiction over its territory on the grounds that it never ratified the Rome Statute, the ICC Appeals Chamber ordered in April 2025 that the Pre-Trial Chamber review Israel’s jurisdictional challenge without suspending the active arrest warrants, and two pending Israeli appeals on the matter have not altered the warrants’ legal standing. ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan confirmed in September 2025 that the office has taken no steps to initiate withdrawal of the arrest warrants, which remain valid indefinitely under Article 58(4) of the Rome Statute unless explicitly terminated by a formal court order.

In recent months, a handful of ICC member states including France, Italy, and Hungary have attempted to invoke immunity provisions to avoid executing the Netanyahu arrest warrant during official visits, with Hungary even raising a formal Article 98 procedural objection during Netanyahu’s April 2025 trip, a move that later resulted in the ICC formally finding Hungary in breach of its statutory cooperation obligations. Once Netanyahu is no longer serving as prime minister, these immunity justifications will no longer hold legal weight, exposing him to arrest in all 123 ICC member states that recognise the court’s universal jurisdiction, as well as in dozens of other countries that have incorporated universal jurisdiction statutes into their national legal systems to prosecute war crimes committed anywhere in the world, even with no direct territorial or national connection to the offences.

Historical precedent reinforces this legal pathway: in 1998, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London under a Spanish universal jurisdiction warrant, with the UK House of Lords ruling that he could not claim immunity for counts of systemic torture. Most recently, in July 2025, France’s highest court annulled an arrest warrant against sitting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on immunity grounds, but explicitly ruled that a new warrant could be immediately issued as soon as he leaves office, confirming that functional immunity does not extend to former leaders accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes.

Practical barriers to Netanyahu’s arrest will remain significant, however. The ICC operates no independent police force, and is fully reliant on national law enforcement agencies across member states to execute its warrants. A future Israeli government would face immense domestic political pressure to refuse to surrender Netanyahu to the ICC, and the former leader is widely expected to sharply restrict or eliminate all international travel to countries that could detain him. Even so, national courts operating under universal jurisdiction rules will retain the authority to issue additional domestic arrest warrants against him for alleged international crimes, without requiring his physical presence on their territory to open formal proceedings.

The parallel ICJ case launched by South Africa operates on a distinct legal track, focused exclusively on state responsibility for alleged genocide in Gaza rather than individual criminal liability. Even after Netanyahu leaves office, his public statements and formal government decisions during his premiership will remain central to the prosecution’s evidence of genocidal intent on the part of the Israeli state. Israel submitted its full counter-memorial raising jurisdictional objections to the case in March 2026, with the court scheduling South Africa’s final reply for 22 November 2027 and Israel’s subsequent rejoinder for 22 May 2029, meaning a final binding ruling on the genocide allegations will not be issued for several more years.

Separately, Netanyahu’s long-running domestic corruption trial in Israel, ongoing since 2020 on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust across three distinct cases, will also proceed unimpeded regardless of his political status. The former prime minister, who has consistently denied all wrongdoing, submitted a formal pardon request to Israeli President Isaac Herzog in November 2025 without admitting to any of the alleged offences. Herzog’s office has since stated that the two parties will first pursue a negotiated out-of-court settlement before the president rules on the pardon application, while opposition leader Yair Lapid has publicly asserted that Herzog has no legal authority to grant a pardon unless Netanyahu formally admits guilt and permanently withdraws from political life.

In a firm diplomatic pushback, Iranian authorities have formally turned down a Qatar-mediated draft ceasefire framework designed to bring an end to the eight-month U.S.-led military campaign targeting the Islamic Republic, dismissing the proposal as entirely non-negotiable. The Gulf state of Qatar, which has long acted as a neutral intermediary in regional geopolitical disputes, shared the full text of the proposed deal with Iranian negotiating teams during a meeting held last Sunday. A high-ranking Iranian official confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday that the submitted draft contained terms Tehran could not endorse, emphasizing that the country would refuse to make any concessions on its civilian nuclear program. U.S. Vice President JD Vance had laid out a precondition earlier this month that Iran must scale down its uranium enrichment activities as a prerequisite for halting the ongoing conflict, a demand that runs counter to Tehran’s longstanding public position that its entire nuclear infrastructure is dedicated exclusively to peaceful domestic energy and medical purposes. These behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts are unfolding against a backdrop of widespread international alarm that the United States and Israel could imminently launch a new wave of large-scale military strikes on Iranian territory. The prospect of renewed hostilities has been amplified by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has leaned into tough anti-Iran rhetoric as a central campaign plank in his bid to secure a new term in Israel’s parliamentary elections. With 77 percent of all ballots tallied, Netanyahu’s right-wing electoral bloc has emerged as the largest faction in the new Knesset, positioning him to lead incoming government coalition negotiations. On Wednesday, as formal coalition talks were set to kick off, Netanyahu publicly pledged to collaborate closely with U.S. President Donald Trump to neutralize what he describes as the “existential threat” posed by Iran. Even Netanyahu’s leading electoral rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, has voiced support for coordinated targeted strikes against Iran paired with sweeping economic sanctions against the country. The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which first broke out in February, has already triggered cascading disruptions across the global economic system, driving sharp, sustained spikes in international energy prices. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi issued a stark warning on Wednesday that any unprovoked Israeli military operation in the Persian Gulf region would trigger catastrophic ripple effects for global commodity and financial markets. In a public post on social media platform X, Araghchi stated, “The devastating impact on international markets of any Israel-instigated military misadventure in the Persian Gulf region remains a major concern for both gas suppliers and consumers across the world.” The risk of wider regional chaos is further compounded by the ongoing, intensifying armed conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen. On Wednesday, Houthi leadership, formally known as Ansar Allah, issued an urgent public call for all personnel at Aden International Airport, the seat of the Saudi-backed internationally recognized Yemeni government in the country’s south, to evacuate the facility immediately. Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree announced in a post on X that the evacuation order was issued after intelligence confirmed a Saudi military cargo plane loaded with weapons destined to kill Yemeni civilians was stationed at the airport. Cross-conflict military sources confirmed to AFP that nearly 100 fighters have been killed in clashes between Houthi forces and Saudi-aligned Yemeni combatants since the start of the week, with 63 of the fatalities belonging to the Houthi movement and 34 aligned with the internationally recognized government, almost all of whom lost their lives in combat near the strategically critical Bab al-Mandab Strait.

Israel’s 2026 national general election, the first national poll held since the devastating October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks and the subsequent multi-front conflicts across Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran, has delivered an unprecedented hung parliamentary outcome after a record-breaking voter turnout unseen in a generation. Official partial vote tallies released early on the day following the election confirm that neither former long-serving prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc nor former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist and anti-Netanyahu alliance has secured the 61 Knesset seats required to form a stable governing majority. Voter participation hit 77.7%, the highest recorded national turnout since 1999 and a full seven percentage points above the 2022 election, dispelling widespread pre-election fears of widespread public apathy. The most dramatic surge in participation came from Israel’s Arab citizen population, which makes up roughly one-fifth of the country’s total population, with reported turnout reaching approximately 80% — a historic high for the demographic that has long seen lower engagement in national elections. This unprecedented Arab voter mobilization is the defining structural factor behind the deadlocked results: exit polls had initially projected the two major blocs running nearly neck and neck, with some major public and private broadcasters showing Eisenkot’s side holding a narrow lead, but overnight vote counting trended steadily in Netanyahu’s favor to narrow the gap further. As of the 55% vote count mark, Netanyahu’s outgoing governing coalition holds 56 seats, Eisenkot’s change bloc sits at 49, and the combined Arab-led parties hold 15 seats. Netanyahu’s Likud party remains the single largest faction in the Knesset with 27 seats, though this represents a notable drop from the 32 seats it won in 2022, and the broader right-wing bloc has fallen from the 64-seat majority that allowed Netanyahu to form his previous government. Eisenkot’s newly founded Yashar party ranks second with 21 seats, followed by the joint Together list led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett and ex-premier Yair Lapid, and the Arab-majority Joint List, both tied at 11 seats. Other factions include Yair Golan’s Democrats with 9 seats, ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism with 9, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu with 8, Shas and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit at 7 seats each, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist list at 6, and Ra’am at 4. Despite neither side hitting the 61-seat threshold, both Netanyahu and Eisenkot immediately laid claim to a victory on election night. Eisenkot addressed cheering supporters to declare that the long-dominant old political order had been broken, and a new era of accountable governance was set to begin. Netanyahu, by contrast, emphasized that Likud held a commanding lead over all rival parties, and that the broader right-wing camp maintained a decisive majority among Jewish and Zionist voters. Analysts note that both claims hold factual weight, as the final result is less a clear win or loss for either frontrunner than a vivid political map of a deeply divided Israeli electorate, meaning the post-election negotiation process will carry far more weight than the ballots themselves. Every plausible path to a 61-seat majority requires leading figures to break explicit campaign promises, with no easy route for any side. For Netanyahu to return to office, his current 56-seat bloc needs five additional seats, but the most obvious potential partners are largely off the table: Liberman has repeatedly pledged he will never serve under Netanyahu or in a coalition that includes ultra-Orthodox factions, while Bennett told his own supporters on election night that Netanyahu had effectively lost his mandate. The only low-effort path for Netanyahu is a late shift in remaining uncounted ballots that pushes his existing bloc over the majority line. For Eisenkot, his current 49-seat bloc is far short of a majority, and the only way to hit 61 is to bring Arab parties into the governing fold — a step that his key allies Bennett and Liberman have categorically ruled out. Eisenkot himself has previously stated that all coalition partners must accept Israel’s identity as a Jewish state and the goal of dismantling Hamas, terms that nearly all Arab Knesset lawmakers have rejected, leaving even the proposed option of a minority government backed by external Arab parliamentary support deeply unpopular among his own camp. A national unity government combining Likud and Eisenkot’s Yashar party would easily clear the 61-seat threshold, and pre-election reports from TIME indicated Netanyahu was open to such an arrangement, while Liberman has publicly accused Eisenkot of secretly pursuing a unity deal. For Eisenkot, however, entering a unity government would mean propping up the very incumbent leader he spent the entire campaign vowing to remove from office. The final remaining scenario is a snap sixth national election, a outcome that most Israeli voters would reject after five consecutive tightly contested elections between 2019 and 2022, but one that remains a very real possibility if no faction can cobble together a working majority. The election was widely framed as a de facto referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership before, during and after the October 7 attacks, with his supporters hailing him as a resolute wartime leader who projected strength against regional enemies and maintained close strategic ties with the United States, while his critics hold him responsible for the catastrophic intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 atrocities to occur, as well as the years of domestic polarization driven by his government’s controversial judicial overhaul push and bitter disputes over ultra-Orthodox military conscription. Notably, the leading anti-Netanyahu challengers did not run as a traditional left-wing bloc: Eisenkot, Bennett and Liberman are all established security hawks, meaning the campaign was fought far more heavily on questions of public trust and competent governance than on policy toward the Palestinians. Even the United States became an implicit factor in the race, as sitting US president Donald Trump issued a public explicit endorsement of Netanyahu nine days before voting day, marking the first time a sitting US president had openly backed a candidate in an Israeli national election. Most local analysts concluded the endorsement did little to shift voter sentiment, citing widespread public frustration among Israelis over the Biden administration’s handling of the conclusion of the recent Iran conflict, while Eisenkot publicly pushed back on the intervention by stating that only Israeli citizens have the right to choose their own national leader. Full final vote tallies are expected to be completed by October 30, with official certified results set to be published on November 4. Even a shift of one or two seats from factions hovering near the parliamentary entry threshold could dramatically alter the calculus of coalition negotiations, after which Israeli President Isaac Herzog will formally consult with all party leaders and task the candidate with the highest likelihood of forming a government, who will be granted up to 42 days to secure a Knesset majority. The recommendations from kingmaker figures Bennett, Liberman and the two Arab party blocs will carry far more weight than the positions of either of the two top frontrunners in determining the final shape of the next government. The overarching takeaway from the election is that the massive, record-breaking wave of Israeli voters turned out specifically to deny any single political camp a clear, unchallenged mandate. Netanyahu’s long-running era of political dominance has not formally ended, and Eisenkot’s promised new era has not yet begun, meaning the next phase of Israeli politics will be defined not by who “won” the election, but by which political actors are willing to make unprecedented compromises and negotiate cross-faction deals to form a functional government.

For Mohamed Ahamjik, the legacy of Morocco’s 2016–2017 Rif protest movement is etched into every facet of his family’s daily struggle. Since his younger brother Nabil, a key grassroots activist in the uprising, was handed a 20-year prison sentence in 2017, Mohamed has dedicated himself to advocating for Nabil’s release and amplifying the movement’s unmet demands, even as his mother’s health has steadily declined amid years of relentless stress. “This has always been a duty towards my mother, my brother Nabil and our family,” he shared in an interview with Middle East Eye, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the protests that first erupted across Morocco’s northern Rif mountains.

The 2016–2017 Hirak (movement) was ignited by a devastating, widely publicised tragedy: on 28 October 2016, 31-year-old local fishmonger Mouhcine Fikri was crushed to death inside a municipal rubbish truck in Al Hoceima, as he attempted to retrieve a haul of seafood that authorities had seized and ordered destroyed. What began as small, local demonstrations over Fikri’s killing quickly swelled into a region-wide mass movement demanding an end to decades of systemic poverty, state neglect, political marginalisation and the pervasive “hogra” – a local term for state-sponsored humiliation and arbitrary oppression – that Rif residents had endured for generations.

For several months, Moroccan authorities allowed the largely peaceful, grassroots protests to proceed without major intervention. But as demonstrations spread beyond Al Hoceima and its surrounding province to draw solidarity from communities across the country, officials shifted to a harsh, coordinated crackdown. The state attempted to discredit the movement by branding it a separatist plot – a label that leading Moroccan historian Maati Monjib dismisses as a deliberate fabrication. “Although a tiny fringe of activists shared separatist views in isolated Facebook groups, none of the prominent, now-imprisoned leaders of the movement ever advocated for breaking away from Morocco,” Monjib explained to MEE, noting that the false accusations were deployed solely to delegitimise the protesters’ core demands for equitable development and political representation.

The crackdown reached a violent turning point on 20 July 2017, when riot police deployed tear gas and batons to break up a peaceful demonstration in central Al Hoceima. In the clashes, 22-year-old protester Imad el-Attabi sustained severe injuries that resulted in his death the following month. The incident sparked a wave of national solidarity protests across Morocco throughout the rest of that summer, but the state’s mass arrest campaign continued unabated, detaining hundreds of activists, journalists, and bystanders. Ten years on, six of the Hirak’s most prominent leaders remain behind bars, including movement figurehead Nasser Zefzafi, who was handed a 20-year prison sentence alongside Nabil Ahamjik. Transferred between multiple correctional facilities across the country in the years since his arrest, Nabil is currently held in a prison near Tangier, where he has defied the hardships of incarceration to pursue advanced academic study: he completed a master’s thesis examining the Rif’s fraught historical relationship with the Moroccan state through Mohammed I University in Oujda, earning a top mark of 18 out of 20 and an official recommendation for academic publication. Now enrolled as a PhD candidate, he staged a 10-day hunger strike last month after prison administrators refused to provide him with adequate space or resources to continue his doctoral research.

The ripple effects of the 2017 crackdown extended far beyond the borders of Morocco, targeting Rif activists living in the diaspora as well. Said El Amrani, a Belgian-based digital creator, former journalist and human rights advocate who was born in Al Hoceima, left Morocco for higher education in the 1990s, and has not been able to return to his homeland since his final visit to the Rif in late 2016, just two months before the Fikri killing. “Since the beginning of the Rif movement, at least 11 activists have been arrested when arriving in Morocco. Two of them were sentenced to prison, one of them is still in jail,” El Amrani told MEE. He and other exiled Rif advocates have also faced sustained, targeted harassment online: malicious actors stole personal photos from his private social media accounts, including images of his underage daughter, manipulated them to create explicit sexualised fake content, and circulated the doctored material across public Facebook groups. He has also been repeatedly smeared by a media outlet widely documented to have close ties to Morocco’s domestic intelligence services. Today, El Amrani notes, the Rif region remains under heavy, visible security presence, with at least five new police stations constructed across the area in the decade since the protests.

This pattern of state repression in the Rif is not a new phenomenon, but the latest chapter in a century-long history of resistance and violent state suppression that local residents pass down through generations. Jamal El Khattabi, a 1960s-born Al Hoceima native now living in exile in the Netherlands, grew up hearing stories of the 1921–1926 Rif War, when Berber tribal fighters led by iconic anti-colonial leader Abdelkrim El Khattabi (no direct relation, though a distant tribal connection) united the region to fight invading Spanish, and later French, colonial forces, and proclaimed a short-lived independent Rif Republic. Jamal’s father was one of the young fighters who joined Abdelkrim’s uprising, and his maternal grandfather was among the thousands of Rif residents killed when Spanish colonial forces deployed chemical weapons to crush the resistance, suffocating to death after exposure to toxic gas. After Morocco gained full independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in 1956, the region’s suffering did not end: the Moroccan royal army under then-Crown Prince Hassan, who would later rule as King Hassan II, launched a brutal crackdown on Rif communities to suppress remaining local autonomy movements. Jamal, who joined student activist groups while at university, was arrested twice under Hassan II’s notoriously authoritarian regime: during his 1989 detention, interrogators beat him with a thick wooden stick and threw him from a building rooftop, leaving him with permanent, life-altering back injuries. He was also held in the infamous Derb Moulay Cherif detention centre in Casablanca, where he endured blindfolding, repeated severe beatings, threats of violence via attack dogs, and days of continuous exposure to blinding bright lights as part of systematic state torture. “I could no longer stand without them having to ‘help’ me,” he recalled. After his second period of detention, he fled Morocco for Spain before eventually settling permanently in the Netherlands.

When King Mohammed VI ascended the throne in 1999 following his father’s death, many Moroccans held out hope that the decades of iron-fisted rule, political persecution, torture and enforced disappearances would end, ushering in a new era of open governance and reform. The 2011 Arab Spring protests led to a revised national constitution that formally placed limited checks on the monarchy’s powers, but public optimism for sweeping, lasting political reform quickly faded. State repression intensified steadily in the years that followed, accelerating dramatically after the 2017 Rif crackdown. Over the past decade, multiple independent human rights reports have documented how the Moroccan monarchy has increasingly relied on cutting-edge surveillance tools – including the notorious Israeli-made Pegasus spyware – coordinated online defamation campaigns, and systematically unfair trials to crush all forms of political dissent. This playbook was deployed most recently during last year’s nationwide Gen Z protests, where young Moroccans demonstrated against rampant government corruption, skyrocketing unemployment and collapsing public services, even as the state poured billions of dollars into new stadiums and prestige infrastructure for the upcoming 2030 FIFA World Cup. Unlike the Rif protests, which authorities tolerated for several months, the 2023 Gen Z demonstrations were crushed within weeks: Moroccan security forces arrested an estimated 6,000 people, the vast majority in the first 72 hours of unrest. According to data from the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), roughly 700 of those detainees remain in prison today, including dozens of minors.

Against this turbulent backdrop, the 10th anniversary of the Rif uprising has taken on renewed, urgent relevance for Moroccans across the country. The kingdom has posted impressive headline economic growth in recent years, and made global headlines last month with the appointment of its first ever female prime minister, but deep structural social and economic grievances remain unaddressed. National youth unemployment currently sits at a staggering 37%, and soaring cost of living pressures have pushed millions of working-class families into precarity. These frictions were thrown into sharp relief earlier this summer, when tens of thousands of Moroccan youths – a large share of them from the long-neglected Rif region – attempted to breach the border fence into Ceuta, a small Spanish autonomous enclave on Morocco’s northern coast, in a mass bid to escape their lack of local prospects.

The stark two-tier economic divide across Morocco is impossible to ignore: coastal investment hubs such as Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier, as well as tourist hotspots like Marrakech, have attracted tens of billions of dollars in foreign direct investment, gleaming new transport infrastructure, high-tech industrial zones and export-focused job creation. The Tanger Med port complex, for example, has grown into one of the busiest trade hubs on the African continent, driving record national export figures. But the Rif, and other impoverished inland regions such as the remote Atlas Mountains, have been almost entirely excluded from this prosperity. The Rif has the highest recorded rate of cancer diagnoses anywhere in Morocco, a public health crisis widely linked to residual chemical contaminants left behind by the Spanish colonial military’s 1920s chemical weapons campaigns. Yet the specialised oncology hospitals and life-saving treatment equipment that local residents need are located hours away, across regional borders. While the state has rolled out a handful of small concessions to address the 2017 protesters’ demands – including a new university faculty affiliated with the University of Tetouan – local activists say these measures are largely performative and under-resourced. “A new hospital was recently built, but there is not enough medical staff to operate it properly,” El Amrani explained. For young people across the region, formal employment opportunities are almost non-existent: thousands have left the Rif clandestinely to make dangerous sea crossings to Europe, while others have migrated to larger northern Moroccan cities such as Tangier and Tetouan in search of work. For generations, many Rif border communities relied on informal cross-border trade with the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to make a living, but recent years have seen Moroccan authorities dramatically tighten border controls, shutting down that informal economy entirely and pushing even more families into poverty. “They have nothing to lose,” El Amrani said of the region’s disaffected youth. “Many are out of school, without work and without access to healthcare. They feel they have no future. For them, the only solution is to leave.”

Monjib, who himself spent three months in prison for his pro-democracy activism and remains a regular target of state harassment, notes that while heavy state repression has largely paralysed the formal organisational structure of the 2017 Hirak movement, shifting its public focus to campaigns demanding the release of all remaining political prisoners, its core foundational demand for equal dignity has never faded. “There continues to be a deep desire for dignity and equal recognition – where a Moroccan, in the Rif or elsewhere, should be the equal of every other Moroccan, regardless of status or background,” he said.

*This report is produced as part of Middle East Eye’s independent, award-winning coverage of North Africa and the Middle East.*