I was a child the first time the Taliban told me I did not belong in a classroom. I am an adult now, and they have told me the same thing twice. The second time, I was not a child hiding a schoolbook under my clothes. I was a woman who had built a company, a newsroom, and a life that answered to no man’s permission. On August 15, 2021, an armed movement that has never won an election, run a hospital, or built a school walked into my country and declared that everything Afghan women had built no longer counted. Five years later, they are still there, and the world has largely moved on to other headlines.

I have not. I will not.

Let me be precise about what this is, because language is the first casualty of every occupation. The men ruling Afghanistan are not a government. They are not, as diplomats like to say, a “de facto authority.” That phrase is a courtesy they have not earned and Afghan women cannot afford. They are a religious extremist militia that seized a country by force and has spent five years administering the systematic destruction of half its population. I will call it what it is.

Here is what they inherited and destroyed. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghan women did not wait for anyone’s permission to become people. We became judges, close to 270 of them, ruling in courts that would not have let us testify a generation earlier. We became members of parliament, provincial officials, ministers, generals. We built businesses, newsrooms, clinics, schools. I built mine, a media career and a company that let me walk into rooms my own mother was never allowed to enter, rooms I still remember the first time I sat in them, understanding exactly what it had taken to get there.

Nearly a million girls sat in secondary classrooms their own mothers never saw from the inside. None of it was handed to us. It was seized, year by year, by women who understood that power conceded slowly is still power lost. In 2021, men with guns and no governing experience took it all back in a matter of weeks: my company, my newsroom, my seat at every table I had earned, along with the parliament seats, the judgeships, the clinics and classrooms thousands of other Afghan women had spent two decades building. That is theft, carried out at rifle point, and dressed up in religious language its own leaders do not apply to themselves.

Here is the part that should make you angrier than anything else: the men enforcing this system do not believe in it.

Senior Taliban officials, negotiators, ministers, the men who signed the decrees banning Afghan girls from school, have spent the last five years quietly enrolling their own daughters in schools and universities in Doha and Peshawar. One of the men who helped design the architecture of Afghan women’s erasure has a daughter who became a doctor abroad, trained in the exact profession his government forbids Afghan girls at home from ever pursuing.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary political sense. The regime that has looked directly at its own policy and decided it is fit for other people’s daughters—not their own.

Their financial conduct tells the same story. A movement that claims religious purity as its governing logic has spent five years entangled in the opium and methamphetamine trade, in mineral deals with China cut behind closed doors, and in a mining economy worth an estimated one to three trillion dollars that flows almost entirely to a small circle of men from a handful of provinces, while the country they govern ranks among the hungriest on earth. Call it what you want. I call it a mafia that memorized scripture.

And they have not brought the peace they promised in exchange for our rights. Afghanistan under this regime has become exactly what the world feared and what the Taliban swore, in Doha, it would not become: a sanctuary for the armed groups threatening the entire region. The United Nations Security Council’s own monitors describe a country where ISIS-Khorasan recruits and trains with a freedom of movement it never had before, where al-Qaeda’s regional network treats Taliban-run Afghanistan as safe harbor, where Pakistani militants cross the border at will. Afghanistan and Pakistan are now, by any honest description, at war along that border, with airstrikes killing hundreds of civilians in a single incident this year.

The men who told Afghan women that stability required our silence have delivered neither stability nor safety, but instead a regional powder keg—with our rights as the down payment.

Meanwhile, the machinery of persecution grinds on with bureaucratic precision. Close to one hundred edicts and directives now govern what an Afghan woman may study, wear, say, and where her body may be seen. This year alone brought two edicts that history will not forgive. One set no minimum age for marriage at all, stripping a girl of any legal standing to object the moment she reaches puberty. The other, a criminal code signed by the Taliban’s supreme leader in January, formally reintroduced slavery into Afghan law, using the classical term for slave and dividing the population into four tiers: religious scholars, elites, a middle class, and a lower class, each facing different punishments for identical crimes.

Afghanistan is now the only country on earth to have legalized chattel slavery in the twenty-first century, and it arrived stamped with a supreme leader’s signature rather than smuggled in the shadows. Every woman who once sat on a judge’s bench under the republic has been removed and replaced by men with no legal training, ruling by these edicts instead of law.

The human wreckage is tangible. Fourteen million Afghans facing acute hunger this year, a third of the country, with malnutrition among children reaching crisis levels in a dozen provinces. The maternal mortality rate has risen to roughly 638 deaths per 100,000 births, among the worst on the planet, driven in large part by a healthcare system now starved of the female doctors, nurses, and midwives it needs, because the regime spent five years making sure fewer are ever trained. Afghanistan is projected to lose more than twenty thousand female teachers and health workers by 2030 to a ban that guarantees its own hospitals will one day have no women left to staff them. Child marriage rates have climbed as much as twenty-five percent nationally and, in provinces like Helmand, now claim nearly two out of every three young women before adulthood, girls sold into marriage as families run out of options. The mental health catastrophe is so severe that nearly seven in ten Afghan women describe their own mental state as “bad” or “very bad,” and roughly one in twelve knows a woman or girl who has attempted to end her life.

These are the intended output of a machine built to remove women from public existence.

Then their is the terror campaign against anyone who once wore a uniform for the government the Taliban destroyed. Despite a publicly declared amnesty, investigators have documented at least 110 killings of former Afghan security personnel since 2023 alone, men hunted, tortured, and executed years after they laid down their weapons, their families left with no recourse and no justice. Add to that the more than five million Afghans expelled or forced back across the border from Iran and Pakistan since 2023, sixty percent of them women and children, arriving in a country that offers them nothing but the same regime they fled, and you begin to understand the scale of what these past five years has actually cost.

Here is what I hear now, five years in, from women still inside the country. Their testimony matters more than my analysis of it. I hear about a former civil servant teaching her daughter algebra behind a drawn curtain because the girl refuses to stop learning. I hear about a physician running an informal referral chain so patients can still find one of the country’s dwindling female doctors. I hear about women who have turned their own living rooms into classrooms, clinics, and law offices, whatever the moment requires, because waiting for permission stopped being an option years ago.

What I have not heard, not once, in five years of these conversations, is a woman asking me to feel sorry for her. They report. They organize. They keep records the world will need one day, whether the world is interested in them yet or not. They are not victims. The country’s women are running a resistance network the rest of us have the luxury of hailing as “remarkable” and “resilient” from a safe distance.

In August 2021, the international community made Afghan women a promise: recognition and engagement would be conditioned on their rights being protected. Five years on, that promise is dead, and almost no one has said so out loud. I’m not telling you this as a victim. I tell you this as someone who has spent five years in exile rebuilding a media company, a podcast that reaches Afghan women in their own language, and a network of advocates in capitals that would rather issue a statement than change a policy.

I have watched the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader and its chief justice for the crime against humanity of gender persecution, and I have watched European governments host Taliban delegations in Brussels within the same year, quietly negotiating deportation deals with the very men that court has charged.

Here is what the world still refuses to understand, five years on. This wasn’t inevitable. It was never simply cultural, religious, or a fate Afghanistan was destined for. It was a choice, made by identifiable men, financed by an economy they control, and protected by a diplomatic community that keeps mistaking engagement for leverage.

And still the women continue to resist. Mothers teach algebra behind drawn curtains. Former judges run legal clinics from their living rooms. Women-run clinics operate on borrowed time and donor scraps because they refuse to close. Afghan women journalists still file stories in two languages so no government, anywhere, gets to say it did not know.

Real solidarity would not be complicated if the world actually wanted it.

It would mean the ICC warrants are followed by sanctions that bite, not statements that expire. It would mean an immediate end to deporting Afghan women back into the hands of men an international court has charged with persecuting them. It would mean funding the underground schools and women-led networks directly instead of hosting conferences about them. It would mean refusing to legitimize a regime that cloaks itself in religious language while shipping its own daughters abroad for the very education it denies everyone else’s.

And it would mean finally giving what has happened to Afghan women a name the law recognizes: gender apartheid. Codified, prosecutable, and impossible to shrug off as culture.

I do not know when I will go home. I know that Afghan women rebuilt a country’s courtrooms, classrooms, and clinics once already, out of the ashes the first Taliban regime left behind, and did it faster than anyone thought possible. We are still standing five years into the second attempt to erase us—hungrier, angrier, and far from finished. We built it before. We will build it again. The only open question is whether the rest of the world will finally stop rewarding the men trying to stop us.

Lebanon has quite the reputation for making the news for all the wrong reasons. But not this week. On August 11, the Lebanese parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, replacing it with a life sentence and “aggravated hard labor.” Once the law is signed by the president and published in The Official Gazette, it goes into effect; however, acquiring such a signature is just a formality in the Lebanese parliamentary system.

This is a historic decision for the Arab world and the Middle East. But despite The Washington Post hailing it as a “first” for the region, it is not. Djibouti, a member of the Arab League, abolished the death penalty in 1995. Turkey did the same in 2004.

This makes Lebanon the second Middle Eastern country and the second Arab League member to take the step.

According to Amnesty International, 17 countries carried out at least 2,707 executions in 2025, a 78% increase from 2024. Of those, 2,611 took place in countries in the Middle East and North Africa, with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen among the region’s most prolific executioners. In March of this year, Israel passed a mandatory death sentence for Palestinians convicted of terrorism.

Lebanon has chosen to move decisively against the regional current, with a majority of the 128-member parliamentary bloc voting in favor of its abolition. Hezbollah’s bloc, unsurprisingly, opposed it.

The decision did not appear out of nowhere. Lebanese abolitionists have campaigned against capital punishment for decades, with organized efforts dating back to 1997. In fact, the last execution carried out in Lebanon was 22 years ago, in 2004.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi described the vote as a decision that “honors Lebanon’s history,” arguing that life, dignity, freedom, pluralism, and human rights belong at the heart of Lebanese identity.

Member of Parliament Adib Abdelmassih, speaking to Middle East Uncovered, was even more direct.

“This is a victory for justice and human rights in Lebanon. Lebanon wins,” he said.

He pointed to the global trend: 113 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Once the new law takes effect, Lebanon will become number 114.

Abdelmassih also raised the less philosophical and more practical benefit of extradition. Countries that prohibit capital punishment can refuse to send wanted suspects to jurisdictions where they might face the death penalty. Abolishing it, he argued, will make it easier for Lebanon to recover fugitives from countries that previously required assurances that a suspect would not be executed.

For Abdelmassih, the strongest case against executions comes down to the fallibility of the courts—particularly in Lebanon. Throughout history, he argued, people have been sentenced to death only for evidence to emerge later that they were innocent, and in some cases, that evidence arrived too late.

“I oppose using violent crimes to justify killing someone, even if such killing is legalized,” Abdelmassih said.

It is easy to argue against the death penalty with the risk of innocence surfacing too late. However, it gets harder to argue against if it involves a crime where sympathy feels almost offensive.

One Lebanese prisoner who spoke to Middle East Uncovered through intermediaries doesn’t take the decision lightly. Eighteen years ago, he was sentenced to death for killing four people.

“I committed this horrible murder 18 years ago, and nothing can justify the ugly crime I did,” he said. “But after 18 years, I am not the same person. I turned a corner, found God, found peace, and if time goes back, I would never ever even consider doing it.”

But he does not describe abolition as much of a relief.

“Although this abolition gave me a chance to live, it will not give me freedom. I will continue to live with my horrific mistakes, and this is a big price I deserve to pay.”

For decades, Lebanon has struggled with political corruption, lengthy pre-trial detention, overcrowded prisons, and cases that can drag on through courts for years. Giving such a system the power to impose an irreversible punishment demands a degree of confidence it does not deserve.

The vote quickly drew international praise. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk lauded Lebanon and called on other states in the region to follow. The European Union welcomed the decision as a major human-rights advance and an affirmation of the right to life. Amnesty International described it as a “landmark victory,” and urged Lebanon to formally commute existing sentences and ratify the international protocol aimed at making abolition irreversible.

Lebanon still has an enormous amount of work to do before anyone can describe our justice system as just.

But it has finally decided that no government, judge, or political system should possess a power for which there can be no remedy. And that is a step in the right direction.

During the last three years since October 7 and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Israeli government and its political leadership have stated that the dismantling of Hamas’s military capabilities and capacity to strike Israel is one of their central war aims.

This makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of the new American-backed Gaza plan rather puzzling.

President Donald Trump and the Board of Peace announced at the end of July that Hamas has agreed to a 15-point roadmap. Under this agreement, Hamas will relinquish all of its weaponry as well as surrender its governing role in Gaza. This will make way for a new Palestinian technocratic government to oversee the rebuilding and development of the Gaza Strip.

That, if true, is a huge and monumental accomplishment.

Hamas has governed Gaza for the last two decades since they violently seized power by overthrowing the Palestinian Authority. Gaza has since been their base of militant operations against Israel. But it’s also been a source of political power over Palestinians, and an immense financial benefit for Hamas itself. Giving up control is an enormous loss and undeniable defeat for Hamas. Securing its agreement to do so is no small achievement.

Crucially, this was not a proposal asking Israel to withdraw from Gaza and simply trust that Hamas might disarm and surrender afterward.

The Board of Peace’s terms were explicit:

“For the first time, Hamas officially has committed to an actionable plan for relinquishing all its weapons, which will be followed by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.”

Notice the sequencing: Hamas is disarmed first. Only then will Israel leave.

The full roadmap is more detailed. It establishes an International Verification Committee and says movement from one phase to the next is conditional on the verified completion of the previous phase.

This means that Israeli withdrawal will only happen after decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons. In other words: Hamas and other armed groups lose their weapons and governing power, while Israeli forces progressively withdraw.

Yet Netanyahu has rejected the 15-point document, insisting that Israel will not withdraw at all until Hamas has been completely disarmed. In other words, Hamas must give up everything first for Israel to cede anything.

As I argued earlier this week, there are many reasons to distrust Hamas. Hamas is a jihadist terrorist organization that has committed grave abuses against both Israelis and Palestinians. Nobody should simply take its promises at face value.

But this untrustworthiness is exactly why the Board of Peace proposal created a verification mechanism and made the withdrawal conditional on its implementation.

If Hamas refused to hand over its weapons, Israel would not have to proceed with the corresponding withdrawal.

So why reject the framework outright?

One increasingly plausible explanation is Israeli politics.

Israel goes to the polls on October 27, and Netanyahu is fighting for political survival. His hard-right political partners and competitors—such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—have every incentive to portray any territorial withdrawal as capitulation. So it’s hardly surprising to see that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich welcomed Netanyahu’s rejection of the plan and are likely to be important to his prospects of forming another government.

Palestinian-American analyst and peace advocate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib makes this case even more strongly in a post responding to Netanyahu.

Alkhatib argues that Netanyahu’s announcement looks like political messaging aimed at the Israeli electorate. He notes that Board of Peace representative Nickolay Mladenov has already been negotiating Israeli objections, and argues that the modified framework substantially incorporates Netanyahu’s stated demand of verifiable disarmament before Israel completes its withdrawal.

There is other evidence pointing in the same direction. The Guardian reported that Netanyahu had been discussing implementation of the plan with senior Israeli military officials only days before publicly rejecting it.

Even Washington appears to view Netanyahu’s objections partly through the lens of domestic politics. The Times reported that the White House regards Netanyahu’s statement as part of his Israeli election campaign.

None of this conclusively proves that Hamas would actually have completed the disarmament process, to be clear. Hamas might well have stalled, or attempted to cheat.

But there was a simple way to discover that: test the agreement. Try to implement it. See what happens. If they are bluffing, call their bluff.

If Hamas refused to surrender its weapons, Israel would have been in a stronger position diplomatically. Netanyahu could say: we accepted the process, and Hamas rejected its obligations.

Instead, Netanyahu rejected the framework first.

Hamas can now tell Palestinians and the wider world: we accepted a process leading to disarmament and Israeli withdrawal; Israel rejected it.

This will undoubtedly serve as a rhetorical talking point for Hamas and its political allies or successors in the coming years.

Perhaps Netanyahu believes he can negotiate a better agreement. Perhaps there are genuine Israeli security objections that have not yet been publicly explained. And the Board of Peace itself says negotiations with Israel are continuing and that the plan remains operative.

If the answer is that no Israeli withdrawal can be promised until everything Israel wants has already happened, then this is not really a dispute over sequencing. It raises the question of whether there are any terms under which Netanyahu is prepared to end the war at all.

But if disarming Hamas is the overriding objective, then a verifiable international mechanism designed to do so seems like a victory. Not some kind of threat or problem.

Unless, two months before an election, being seen to make a deal is itself the threat.

John Aziz's Blog

Why Did Netanyahu Reject Trump's Gaza Deal To Disarm Hamas?

Donald Trump says he has a deal to disarm Hamas…

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9 days ago · 55 likes · 60 comments · John Aziz

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun arrived in Washington this week with a difficult proposition. Lebanon wants Israeli forces to withdraw from the south and reconstruction to begin. It also accepts that, in time, the state’s authority must extend to every armed group, including Hezbollah. The challenge is persuading each side to move before the others do.

Aoun returned with a decision to restore direct commercial flights between the United States and Lebanon for the first time in four decades, public support from the Trump administration, and the outline of a bargain that Lebanon still lacks the power to enforce.

Aoun’s visit was the first by a Lebanese head of state to the White House in nearly twenty years. He arrived at a moment when Lebanon is expected to restore state authority, even though Israeli forces still hold positions in the south and Hezbollah has no intention of giving up its weapons.

During the meeting, he made the case that Hezbollah’s disarmament could not be separated from Lebanon’s broader recovery. Asking Beirut to confront the group before Israel withdraws and before the state has the capacity to replace it, he argued, will leave intact the very conditions Hezbollah cites to justify keeping its weapons.

Aoun first met Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who praised the Lebanese government’s efforts to restore sovereignty and disarm Hezbollah. Rubio didn’t waste time mincing words after that, stating frankly that Lebanon could not achieve lasting peace while an armed organization remained stronger than, or ran parallel to, the state. Aoun also held talks with members of Congress and senior administration officials, making the visit broader than a single Oval Office meeting.

That outreach may prove to be more consequential than the Aoun-Trump meeting. American assistance to the Lebanese army, reconstruction support, sanctions policy, and long-term backing for any settlement with Israel cannot depend entirely on Trump’s mood. Aoun was trying to solidify Lebanon’s position across Washington, not just woo one president.

Still, charm played its part.

During the meeting, Aoun praised Trump's commitment to peace, told him securing it in Lebanon could become his legacy, and described him as a "great president." Trump smiled, agreed with the compliment, called Aoun handsome, and said the Lebanese president “knows how to get to me,” before adding: “Now he can have anything.”

It was, by diplomatic standards, practically a bromance. Trump, after all, had recently complimented Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s looks as well. Perhaps he has a type.

The exchange was amusing, but Aoun understood the man across the table. Trump likes praise, legacies, and agreements that can be presented as personal victories. Aoun did not lecture him on Lebanon’s historical complexity or beg for favors. Instead, he offered something far more useful—the prospect of making peace in Lebanon part of the president’s legacy.

For a small country negotiating with a superpower, understanding who you’re negotiating with is the first step toward good diplomacy.

Following the meeting, Trump directed his administration to allow American airlines to fly directly to Lebanon again, ending a ban imposed after the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847. The decision carries real weight for Lebanon’s large diaspora in the United States, making it easier to maintain the family and cultural ties that connect many Lebanese Americans to their homeland.

The flights will not resume immediately. American officials must first complete a security assessment of Beirut airport, and airlines must decide whether the regional security environment makes the routes commercially viable. The United States also continues to advise its citizens against traveling to Lebanon.

The possibility of a broader agreement was introduced as well.

According to Lebanese media reports, they discussed linking the end of Hezbollah’s military role to a political and economic return for Lebanon that includes Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction assistance, international support, and investment. Economic zones, potential American investment in Lebanon’s offshore gas fields, and Lebanon’s possible place in new regional energy corridors were reportedly among the issues raised.

For now, this is all talk. Nevertheless, the talks show that Aoun was trying to present sovereignty as an economic project, not merely a security operation. A state expected to replace Hezbollah’s parallel military and social structures must be capable of offering citizens more than speeches about sovereignty—and it needs support to do so.

Aoun rejected any Syrian military intervention against Hezbollah. Instead, the discussion turned toward Lebanese-Syrian cooperation to secure the border, stop weapons smuggling, and disrupt Hezbollah’s supply routes. Rubio similarly argued that Syria should focus on securing its side of the border rather than entering Lebanon.

Syria invading Lebanon to fight Hezbollah would reopen old wounds and risk importing Syrian vengeance that could escalate into another Lebanese conflict, but Syria preventing weapons from crossing its territory would be a legitimate contribution to Lebanese sovereignty.

Trump also described Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri as a “good person” who might join the process once he saw progress. Berri responded that Trump seemed to understand him better than some Lebanese did, while warning that neither a complete ceasefire nor the required Israeli withdrawals had yet materialized.

The exchange exposed Washington’s realism. No Lebanese agreement involving Hezbollah can easily bypass Berri, Hezbollah’s closest institutional ally and the gatekeeper of parliament. But relying on him also carries an obvious risk. For decades, Berri has cast himself as a bridge between Hezbollah and the state, but only so long as the path leads somewhere Hezbollah is willing to go.

The visit coincided with the first Israeli withdrawal under the pilot-zone program. Israeli troops left Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, and Lebanese soldiers began deploying there. The next negotiating round is scheduled for August 4 in Italy, where the timetable for further withdrawals and army deployments will be central to the discussion.

This gave Aoun a concrete sign of progress, but it also demonstrated how fraught the process is. Israel says it will retain territory so long as Hezbollah remains armed. Hezbollah refuses complete disarmament and rejects direct negotiations. Lebanon argues that an Israeli withdrawal would remove the justification Hezbollah has long used for retaining its weapons.

Everyone wants the other side to move first.

Aoun did not return with a commitment to a full Israeli withdrawal, a reconstruction package, or Hezbollah’s agreement to disarm. Nor could anyone reasonably have expected a single White House visit to deliver those outcomes.

The better measure is whether he left Lebanon in a stronger position than when he arrived. He did.

The warmth between the two presidents was genuine. The agreement to restore direct flights, even if implementation takes time, is a tangible result. The broader understanding between the two countries is still taking shape, but Aoun appears to have secured something just as valuable: Trump’s attention and admiration. As the president himself joked, Aoun could now “have anything.”

Lebanon will soon discover whether that includes the two things it needs most: its territory back and a state strong enough to keep it.

For most governments, diplomacy is a tool used to prevent war. Fighting begins only after negotiations have been exhausted. But Iran’s leaders do not see the two as separate phases. In Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s telling, diplomacy and war are not alternatives but successive tools in the same struggle.

In a recent interview, Araghchi lays out a strategic worldview unfamiliar to those who value peace. He sees negotiations as a way to delay conflict, shape international opinion, justify military action, and convert military gains into political ones. War, in turn, strengthens Iran’s position at the negotiating table. Rather than replacing one another, diplomacy and military force reinforce each other in pursuit of the same strategic objective.

Araghchi’s account of Iran’s recent negotiations was unusually explicit. Tehran does not enter talks expecting success to be measured by a signed agreement. The real test is whether Iran can defend its interests without signaling that military pressure can compel it to yield.

Iran, he says, has two ways of pursuing its rights: “Either we fight, or we talk and negotiate.” Negotiation is “the easier and less costly path.”

The similarity with Western thinking ends there.

Araghchi does not describe negotiations as a search for compromise, but as a contest of resolve. Iran can negotiate honorably, he argues, only from a position of strength.

That helps explain why he rejects the common claim that failed negotiations caused the war to begin with. The United States and Israel demanded that Iran abandon uranium enrichment. Iran refused. Once its adversaries realized “they could not achieve what they wanted through negotiations,” he argues, “they started the war.”

“The war began from there. When the other side saw that it could not achieve its demands through negotiation, it turned to war. It was not that negotiation led to war.”

The distinction is subtle but important. In Araghchi’s telling, diplomacy did not fail; it exposed a dispute that neither side was willing to negotiate away. Washington and Jerusalem saw Iran’s enrichment program as an unacceptable security threat. Tehran saw surrendering it under pressure as an admission that coercion works.

Iran ultimately refuses to set the precedent that it can be forced into anything.

When asked whether a temporary suspension of enrichment might have prevented the war, Araghchi dismisses the idea outright. Accepting such terms, he says, would have inflicted greater damage than the war itself. Iran would have “sold the country’s dignity” while demonstrating that military threats could pressure the Islamic Republic to retreat.

“This pattern must not be established,” he says. Iran therefore maintained its position in negotiations, “even if the price was war.”

He later reduces the doctrine to a principle attributed to Iran’s former Supreme Leader:

“We do not fight because war has costs and dangers. But when the cost of not fighting becomes greater than the cost of fighting, then you must fight. You must not hesitate.”

Iran sees itself as a besieged but enduring regional power surrounded by adversaries seeking to limit its sovereignty. From that perspective, no concession is ever isolated. Every step back under pressure becomes an invitation for greater demands later.

The Islamic Republic is willing to sacrifice infrastructure, prosperity, and even the lives of its own people as long as the regime can claim it has preserved its power and deterrence. The regime measures success by more than the damage Iran suffers. As long as it can adjust, preserve its military leverage, and avoid appearing defeated, it can still claim victory. That is also why it keeps negotiating even when it expects the talks to fail.

Araghchi effectively acknowledges as much. Iranian officials believed another war was imminent even as talks resumed, but they negotiated anyway. Either the negotiations would persuade the other side to abandon its demand for zero enrichment—which he regarded as unlikely—or they would demonstrate to domestic and international audiences that Iran had exhausted peaceful alternatives before resuming military action.

Political scientist Muhanad Seloom argues that the Strait of Hormuz exposes the economic dimension of Iran’s doctrine. When Iran’s chief negotiator declared that Hormuz “will never return” to its prewar condition, Seloom argues, the remark was misunderstood.

“It was not bravado,” he writes. “It was a business plan.”

Iran may never dominate the Gulf conventionally, but its geography allows it something different. By controlling the northern shore of one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints, the regime can increase the costs of regional stability even after suffering severe military setbacks.

“The toll booth is built,” Seloom observes. “Only the billing is paused.”

Araghchi’s interview reinforces that interpretation.

Iran had already prepared contingency plans to close Hormuz under specific circumstances.

“Why was the Strait of Hormuz closed on the first day?” he asks. “Because it had already been planned that if the leadership was targeted, the strait would be closed immediately.”

The closure of the Strait continues to complicate Iran’s relationship with its Gulf neighbors.

Iran’s leadership does not necessarily view Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain or Oman as its principal enemies. What it rejects is the idea that these states can remain economically insulated while Iran is isolated, bombed, or prevented from exporting its own energy.

In essence, if Iran cannot export its oil freely, others should not expect to do so without consequence. If American forces launch attacks from Gulf territory (as the regime falsely claims), then those bases—and the economic infrastructure surrounding them—become legitimate targets.

As Seloom argues, Gulf states risk paying “rent to the threat” while simultaneously paying “a retainer to the protector.” Iran can demand concessions for keeping Hormuz open, and the United States can demand stricter security commitments for defending it. Meanwhile, the Gulf states face much of the economic fallout but have little say in the negotiations shaping the region’s future.

The Islamic Republic only needs to retain enough leverage to make regional stability dependent on Iranian consent. It can lose missile sites, aircraft, nuclear facilities, and senior commanders while still retaining bargaining power through geography, disruption, and the credible threat of escalation.

None of this suggests Iran is eager for perpetual war. If anything, Araghchi’s interview suggests the opposite. Tehran is conscious of war’s costs; it simply defines strategic rationality differently from governments that prioritize immediate economic stability. The Islamic Republic believes there are moments when accepting dependency or externally imposed limits is more dangerous than fighting. Buildings can be rebuilt. Lost deterrence is far more difficult to restore.

That worldview should not be romanticized. Iran’s strategy has imposed enormous suffering not only on its adversaries but on Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, and increasingly the Gulf states. Its claim to resist domination has often meant extending its own coercive influence over weaker neighbors.

But dismissing Araghchi’s argument as mere propaganda risks misunderstanding how the Islamic Republic behaves. Western policymakers often ask whether diplomacy with Iran has succeeded or failed. Araghchi’s interview suggests Tehran asks a different question altogether. Negotiations are not meant to end the struggle. They are simply one phase of it.

Seloom concludes:

“None of this means choosing war over diplomacy. It means recognizing that the diplomacy is the war now, fought by other means, and that passivity is not neutrality but surrender by installment. The strait will be governed by rules. The only question is whose. Iran has taught the Gulf, at enormous cost, that Hormuz belongs to whoever is willing to set its terms and enforce them.”

Effective diplomacy begins with understanding how the other side defines success. For Tehran, negotiations are not designed to prevent conflict but to strengthen Iran’s position within it. Any strategy that mistakes those objectives for its own risks misunderstanding the Islamic Republic from the very start.

President Donald Trump’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi puzzled many observers of Iraq. On its face, the meeting appeared contradictory. Zaidi rose to power from the Coordination Framework, the coalition of predominantly Shiite political parties that has served as the principal political vehicle for Iranian influence in post-2003 Iraq. Before becoming prime minister, he was also publicly associated with allegations involving financial networks that U.S. authorities said were facilitating sanctions evasion benefiting Iran’s infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Yet there he was, warmly welcomed at the White House, praised by President Trump, and presented as a potential partner in leading Iraq into a new chapter.

Many analysts have treated this as evidence that Washington has either abandoned its previous concerns about Iranian influence in Iraq or become willing to overlook them for the sake of short-term stability. I believe there is a third, more likely explanation. The Trump administration is betting that Iraq’s political elite are less ideological revolutionaries than political mercenaries, willing to shift their loyalties when their interests stand to benefit from it.

Iran’s influence in Iraq rests on two mutually reinforcing pillars. The first is political and ideological. Through parties, militias, religious networks, and patronage, Tehran has spent more than two decades embedding itself within Iraq’s governing institutions. The second is economic. Iraq became Iran’s financial and commercial lifeline, particularly after the expansion of international sanctions. Access to Iraqi banks, exchange houses, border crossings, oil and gas deals, and commercial networks enabled Tehran to soften the blow of economic isolation.

Iraq’s integration into the global economy was an asset to Iran. It needed Iraq to remain sufficiently connected to international and regional markets because that connectivity created opportunities for sanctions evasion, financial transfers, and commercial activity that would have been impossible inside Iran itself.

This dual structure exposes an apparent contradiction in Iranian strategy. While Tehran invested heavily in maintaining armed groups and ideological influence, it also had every incentive to preserve an internationally recognized, economically integrated, and Western-financially integrated Iraqi state. Iraq functioned as a bridge between Iran and the global economy. The revolutionary project depended, to some extent, on the very international system it publicly rejected.

Washington, rather than attempting to dismantle Iraq’s political order or engineer another ambitious nation-building project, seems to be taking a risky gamble, asking, “What happens when the interests of Iraq’s political class begin to diverge from those of Tehran?”

This question deserves more attention than it has received. Many Iraqi politicians who built their careers in the post-2003 political system are not only ideological revolutionaries, as some claim. They are political entrepreneurs. Their primary objectives have often been longevity, influence, access to state resources, and personal enrichment rather than advancing an Iranian revolutionary project.

Iraqi leaders often develop interests that differ from those of the coalitions that elevated them. Every prime minister inherits responsibility for governing an increasingly complex country whose economic future depends on international investment, financial stability, and functioning relations with both regional and global powers. Once in office, Iraqi leaders often find that governing the country conflicts with the narrower interests of the political factions that helped bring them to power.

This pattern has appeared repeatedly since 2003. Successive Iraqi prime ministers, despite entering office with varying degrees of support from Iran-aligned political forces, have sought to consolidate their own authority once in government. Some attempted to strengthen relations with Arab neighbors. Others pursued closer cooperation with Washington. Still others tried to distance Iraqi state institutions from militia influence without directly confronting Tehran. Their success was mixed, but shows that political elevation in Baghdad often requires catering to personal political and financial interests rather than remaining indefinitely loyal to the coalitions that brought them to power.

Trump’s strategy suggests he understands this dynamic. Rather than assuming that every politician associated with the Coordination Framework is permanently subordinate to Tehran, the administration appears willing to test whether self-interest can become a more powerful force than ideological loyalty. The implicit offer is straightforward. Iraq’s political leadership can retain access to international capital, American investment, energy partnerships, and broader integration into global markets, provided it demonstrates a willingness to strengthen state institutions, combat corruption, and gradually reduce the autonomy of armed groups operating outside the state’s control.

Whether the strategy succeeds will depend on whether Iraq’s political elite are ultimately driven by ideological loyalty or political and economic self-interest.

The debate unfolding across Iraqi and Arab media reflects precisely this uncertainty. Some commentators argue that Zaidi represents the first serious opportunity in years to restore Iraqi sovereignty by centralizing control over weapons, pursuing anti-corruption efforts, and reducing the influence of armed factions operating beyond the state’s authority. Others are deeply skeptical, noting that he is still a product of the same political ecosystem that enabled Iran’s influence in the first place and questioning whether any leader selected through the Coordination Framework can genuinely dismantle the networks that produced him. Still others argue that Zaidi’s real objective is neither alignment with Washington nor with Tehran, but the preservation of a delicate equilibrium between the two powers while maximizing Iraq’s room to maneuver.

As it currently stands, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Will the Iraqi government move beyond arrests of lower-level officials and begin confronting politically protected corruption networks? Will financial channels that have enabled sanctions evasion be dismantled? Will the government establish a genuine monopoly over the use of force, or will armed organizations continue to operate as parallel security institutions? Will Iraq deepen its economic integration with Gulf states and Western investors while simultaneously attempting to preserve privileged economic ties with Iran?

The answers to these questions will determine whether Trump’s wager succeeds.

The administration is not attempting to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy. Nor does it appear to believe that Iraq’s political class will suddenly embrace the US-led world order.

Instead, it assumes that once presented with a clear choice between participation in the global economy and continued dependence on an increasingly constrained Iranian regional network, at least some of Iraq’s governing elite will choose the former.

This is not an explicitly transactional strategy. It rests on a reading of Iraq’s political economy’s evolution over the past two decades.

Iran retains enormous leverage through political allies, economic networks, and armed groups that continue to shape Iraq’s internal balance of power. Yet if Washington has correctly assessed that the defining characteristic of Iraq’s political elite is not ideological commitment but political and economic self-preservation, then Trump’s approach may prove more realistic than many of his predecessors’ attempts to reshape Iraq through military or institutional engineering.

The success or failure of this strategy will be measured by whether Iraq’s ruling class ultimately proves more committed to preserving its access to global markets than preserving the Islamic Republic’s regional project. If Trump’s calculations are correct, the forces that gradually loosen Tehran's grip on Iraq may be the very political incentives that once helped entrench it.

Last week, Hamas dissolved the body through which it has governed Gaza and claimed it was ready to transfer civilian authority to a committee of Palestinian technocrats.

Mohammed al-Farra resigned as head of the so-called Government Emergency Committee. The committee itself was dismantled. In its place, Hamas says it is prepared to accept the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, led by former Palestinian Authority official Ali Shaath.

Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. Since then, it has directly governed the territory. Its power rested partly on its weaponry, but also on the fact that it decided who ran the institutions, who received government jobs, which political organizations could operate freely, and what Palestinian children were taught in schools.

Control of the government allowed Hamas to shape Gaza's institutions—and, through them, Palestinian society.

Hamas coveted that position for years before attaining it. It fought Fatah for it, consolidated it through violence, and preserved it for nearly two decades. So the decision to dissolve the government tells us something about the condition Hamas now finds itself in.

The movement has lost much of the political momentum it once had in Gaza. Its claim to govern rested on the idea that armed “resistance” would eventually lead to victory over Israel. Instead, Gaza has been devastated, much of its population displaced, and its future placed in the hands of foreign mediators, international donors, and an administration assembled in Cairo.

Hamas’s leadership would have preferred to emerge from this war as the undefeated government of Gaza. It also wanted to control the reconstruction money, appoint the officials, and claim credit for whatever recovery followed.

Instead, it is being forced to give up the public face of power. Most of its leadership from October 2023—Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif—has been killed.

That creates a real opening. Ali Shaath’s committee has described its purpose as stabilizing Gaza, restoring civilian government, and establishing a single authority for security.

But what does Hamas intend to do from the sidelines?

It has dissolved its government while retaining its armed organization. Its fighters, command structures, and tunnel networks remain, albeit damaged. Its personnel continues to police areas under Hamas control.

The technocratic committee could end up being responsible for the day-to-day work of government, while Hamas preserves the power to set the boundaries within which that government operates.

Imagine that Ali Shaath appoints a police chief who begins investigating corruption involving Hamas officials. What happens then?

Imagine that a newspaper publishes evidence of abuses by Hamas commanders. Who protects the journalists?

If another Palestinian political movement begins organizing in Gaza and attracting popular support, Hamas may still be able to crush it.

This is the Hezbollah model.

Hezbollah entered Lebanese politics, participated in elections, and worked through state institutions. At the same time, it maintained an armed force with its own leadership and strategic goals. This allowed Hezbollah to share in government while preserving a separate source of power greater than its parliamentary representation, insulating the group from real responsibility while rendering the official government largely ineffective.

Lebanese governments shouldered the responsibility for economic decline, public services, and international negotiations. Hezbollah retained the ability to pressure those governments and make decisions that carried consequences for the entire country.

Hamas may now be seeking a similar position.

Direct governance has become a burden for Hamas. Gaza requires an immense reconstruction effort, with damage estimates running into tens of billions of dollars. Whoever governs will face public anger, ruined infrastructure, and intense scrutiny over the distribution of foreign aid.

By stepping away, Hamas can allow the technocrats to absorb these pressures. It can present itself as a “resistance movement” again, rather than the authority responsible for the condition of Gaza.

Shaath’s committee has begun recruiting a new police force. Around 2,000 Gazans applied within hours of recruitment opening, and the international plan envisions training 12,000 officers. Hamas, meanwhile, has sought places in the new system for roughly 10,000 existing police officers and more than 40,000 civil servants.

Realistically, many of those civil servants—responsible for functions such as water and sewage systems, rubbish collection, electricity distribution, public records, schools, hospitals and salary payments—will have to remain in place. They have the knowledge required to keep basic administration functioning.

The police present a different problem. A police officer carries coercive authority.

Existing officers could join a new force as individuals, after vetting and retraining, under commanders appointed by the new administration. But absorbing Hamas’s police units intact would preserve the organization inside the new state.

The same applies to Hamas’s military wing. Disarmament means breaking the organization’s independent capacity to use force. Its weapons need to pass into the custody of the new authority or an agreed international mechanism. Its military units need to dissolve.

This distinction provides a practical test for every proposed compromise. A Hamas member serving as an ordinary police officer under Shaath’s command represents a transfer of authority. A Hamas battalion entering the new police force under its existing commander would just be a continuation of the previous regime.

The negotiations are in limbo because while both Israel and Hamas have agreed that Israel will withdraw and Hamas will give up its weapons, each side is demanding the decisive concession first. Meanwhile, Shaath’s committee is in Cairo, with Hamas still policing the territory it says it is ready to hand over.

A workable agreement therefore needs a reciprocal timetable. As Hamas hands over weapons and dissolves its armed units, the new police force can deploy, and the technocratic committee can assume control. As that authority expands, Israeli forces can withdraw from agreed areas. Outside monitors can verify both processes.

Hamas has already surrendered the formal machinery of government it spent eighteen years building. The next stage asks it to surrender the independent armed power that allowed it to dominate that machinery.

That is the real measure of whether Gaza is entering a new political era or merely rearranging the old one. If Hamas relinquishes both government and its monopoly on force, Gaza could finally have a single Palestinian authority accountable to its people. If it keeps its weapons while others assume the burdens of governing, Gaza will not have replaced Hamas’ rule. It will simply have adopted a different version of it.

Since the beginning of the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, I have tried to approach the conflict differently from many of the voices dominating social media, television panels, and political debates. Rather than begin with the outcome I wanted, I tried to stay loyal to the facts, even when they were unpopular or inconvenient.

That may sound obvious, but war makes it unusually difficult. Conflict creates enormous pressure to choose a side, join a camp, and interpret every development through the lens of loyalty. Once that happens, sincere analysis becomes secondary. Evidence is valued only when it supports a conclusion people have already reached.

I have watched this pattern repeat across the Middle East, and this war has been no different.

My colleague’s and my work through Ideas Beyond Borders is grounded in the belief that societies in the region can become freer, more open, and more prosperous. Those values matter deeply to me and are the reason I have dedicated my entire professional life to this work. But believing in freedom and the painstaking work it takes to bring it to fruition does not exempt us from confronting reality. On the contrary, anyone serious about changing the world has an obligation to understand it as it is, not as we would like it to be.

That is why I made a conscious decision not to become a public cheerleader for any side. I wanted to understand what was actually happening on the ground.

Working across the region gives us access to sources often overlooked by pundits pushing a particular agenda or outcome. Through our audience, partners, local conversations, media monitoring, and increasingly sophisticated sentiment analysis, we hear from people living through these events in real time. Their perspectives often differ sharply from the dominant narratives circulating online.

One of the first assumptions I questioned when the war began was the idea that the Islamic Republic was on the verge of immediate collapse. That never seemed especially convincing.

This is not because the regime is strong in every respect. It faces serious economic, social, and political pressures, and it does not enjoy universal support among Iranians. But predictions of imminent collapse often ignore how such systems actually function.

The Islamic Republic is not simply a government. It is a dense network of institutions, security services, religious authorities, economic interests, patronage systems, and competing centers of power that has developed over nearly half a century. Systems like this do not usually disappear overnight.

Iran has also had something many of its neighbors did not: time to observe and learn.

The leadership in Tehran watched Saddam Hussein fall in Iraq, Libya collapse after Gaddafi, the Arab Spring unseat governments once considered stable, and Syria come close to disintegration. It studied military interventions, sanctions campaigns, insurgencies, uprisings, and civil wars. Like any regime focused on survival, it drew lessons from each.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about authoritarian systems is that they are static. They are not. They study one another’s failures, adapt their institutions, create redundancies, and refine the tools of surveillance, coercion, and political control. The Islamic Republic has spent decades examining why regimes fall and what helps them endure.

Whether we find that reality acceptable is beside the point. Refusing to acknowledge it does not make it less true.

Another assumption I found troubling was the belief that ordinary Iranians would naturally align themselves with outside powers simply because they oppose aspects of their own government. That reflects a shallow understanding of how people behave during crisis.

Those living inside a country experience war differently from those watching from abroad. When bombs are falling, the economy is deteriorating, and daily life is dominated by uncertainty, political priorities shift. National identity, fear, survival, family obligations, and social pressure can become more immediate than ideology.

That does not mean people suddenly become supporters of the state, but their choices become more complicated than outsiders often allow.

I have also noticed a widening gap between parts of the Iranian diaspora and many people inside Iran. This is not unique to Iran; similar tensions exist in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere.

Those living abroad often have the safety and freedom to advocate for outcomes whose consequences they will not directly bear. Those inside the country must calculate risk differently because they will live with whatever follows. Neither perspective is inherently illegitimate, but treating one as representative of the other can lead to serious analytical errors.

What concerned me most during this conflict was not disagreement. Disagreement is necessary. It was the extent to which people seemed more interested in defending a narrative than understanding the more complicated truths.

Too many commentators were not asking, “What is actually happening?” They were asking, “What do I want to happen?” Those are not the same question.

I believe deeply in aspiration. My work depends on the conviction that societies can change for the better. Without that belief, there is no reason to work for change. But aspiration untethered from reality does more harm than good.

The challenge is to hold both at once: the courage to imagine a better future and the discipline to assess the present honestly.

Throughout the war, I have approached each development by asking three separate questions: What do I want to happen? What is possible? And what is the reality on the ground?

In the Middle East, the answers to those questions often contradict one another. The region has a way of exposing simplistic thinking and punishing those who confuse hope with probability. It resists neat ideological frameworks and repeatedly forces us to confront complexities we would rather avoid.

Recognizing that a regime has staying power does not mean admiring it, and acknowledging the limits of a strategy does not mean opposing the goal behind it.

Too often, describing reality is treated as a form of defense or endorsement. In fact, the opposite is true. Understanding reality is the first requirement for changing it.

As this conflict continues to reshape the Middle East, I hope more people resist the pressure to become partisans first and observers second. The future of the region will not be determined by the narratives we prefer, but by the realities we are willing to face.

And if we genuinely want to build something better, honesty about the world as it is must come before confidence about the world as it could be.

The women in this story are still waiting for the opportunities they have been denied. If you’d like to support underground schools for women in Afghanistan, click here.

For a long time, I knew Afghan women the way most people do: through headlines. They appeared in stories about school bans, compulsory burqas, and Taliban decrees, but rarely as fully formed people. That changed when I began teaching English to a group of young Afghan women over WhatsApp.

Most of them were teenagers when we first met, having lost their right to education after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. I am in my mid-forties, but over the past few years we have become friends.

Their friendship has changed how I consume the news. It has made me more aware of how headlines are designed to provoke immediate emotional reactions, and of how easily we mistake that reaction for sustained attention. More than anything, it has shown me that people often disappear from public consciousness long before their problems disappear from reality.

Like many people, I once had a two-dimensional view of Afghan women. I saw victims whose suffering was visible, but whose personalities were not. The young women I speak with each week are funny, cheeky, clever, ambitious, irreverent, and principled. They have strong opinions, challenge one another, tell jokes, and worry about the same everyday things as my friends and colleagues. Knowing them has shown me how readily we reduce people to symbols, overlooking the rich, complicated lives behind the headlines. Denied a platform in their own country, they have embraced the internet as a space to learn, connect, and satisfy an insatiable curiosity about the world.

Our conversations can feel surprisingly ordinary, which makes it easy to forget how extraordinary their circumstances are. They have spent years denied an education. Their freedom of movement is almost nonexistent: they cannot leave home without the permission and accompaniment of a male relative. Whenever I stop to imagine what that means in practice—the dependence, the constant negotiation, the confinement—I feel claustrophobic.

While many of us in the West debate the internet’s impact on our mental health and our children, for the women I know in Afghanistan it is a lifeline. It is their only window to the outside world—a place to study, connect with like-minded people, and imagine a future beyond the confines of Taliban rule. It also offers something many of us take for granted: the freedom to explore ideas without asking permission.

The women we teach are among the fortunate few whose families can afford an internet connection and allow them to use it. It is no exaggeration to say that much of their world depends on it.

That is why, when the Taliban shut down the internet last year, these women were terrified. The international community’s response to the blackout demonstrated what might happen if it lasted longer: a day or two of outrage, a handful of hashtags, statements from governments and NGOs, and then the world's attention would move on. For the women I teach, they feared losing their only link to the outside world—and, with it, disappearing from public view.

I couldn’t reassure them because they were right. I had spoken to a couple of girls just that morning, and the experience of our text conversations being suddenly cut short, and my read receipts remaining singular and grey—neither received nor read—was unnerving. It occurred to me that I had always been perversely ‘pleased’ when Afghanistan made the headlines, because it meant the world focused on the country for a short time. But if the internet were to stay off, it would not take long for us all to forget Afghanistan because there would be no story: like the internet, our imaginations cannot function in a vacuum—we’d be distracted by other news and move on.

The internet rewards visibility. It is built to amplify what is new, dramatic, and emotionally immediate, not to sustain attention over time. For Afghan women, however, visibility can be dangerous. Remaining out of sight is often essential for survival under the Taliban. Yet the paradox is that people who cannot safely make themselves seen are also the easiest to forget.

Recently, Afghanistan returned to the headlines when the Taliban legalized marriage for girls as young as nine. The announcement rightly prompted widespread outrage and served as a reminder that millions of people continue to live under Taliban rule. But history suggests that attention will soon move elsewhere. The Taliban has learned that it can repeatedly cross moral lines, knowing each new headline will eventually be replaced by another. As consumers of news, we need to recognize that meaningful support depends not on moments of outrage, but on sustained attention.

This pattern extends beyond the headlines themselves. Plenty of institutions have learned the benefits of the aesthetics of charity, while knowing the spotlight will fade before any questions arise about the effectiveness (or existence) of their initiatives.

While researching opportunities abroad for some of the women I teach, I found universities proudly advertising scholarships for refugees and Afghan women that were almost impossible for refugees or Afghan women to access. Some required qualifications these women had been prevented from obtaining because of the education ban. Others required them to be on campus to benefit from them.

Similarly, commitments made by organizations and companies often involve public promises but privately underdeliver. Most initiatives have to be legal in the local country, which sounds like a respectful and reasonable requirement until we remember that the Taliban created laws specifically to erase women from public life: retreating behind these same laws is legitimizing them, not challenging them, and certainly not providing support to those in need. Those with the most to gain from these pledges and promises are voiceless and cannot speak out, while those of us in a position to hold institutions accountable are continually distracted.

I do not believe this is solely the responsibility of institutions. It is also down to us as consumers of information. We cannot pay attention to everything, but we can be more deliberate about where we direct our attention and how long we keep it there. Looking beyond the headlines does not require special expertise; it just requires curiosity and interest in the world beyond ourselves.

Personally, I have found that curiosity helps curb a sense of helplessness and compassion fatigue that can set in from endless doom-scrolling. The women I teach have taught me to be more active and intentional in what I pay attention to. They are striving to maintain their education so they are prepared for any opportunity that might come along; it’s up to us to ensure those opportunities reach them.

Each week, the teachers I work alongside spend time speaking with women in Afghanistan, asking nothing of them beyond what they would like to talk about. Those conversations have transformed how I see Afghanistan, what is happening there, and the voices that must be heard.

Where I once saw anonymous victims, I now see individuals with humor, talent, dignity, and agency.

These women—and the millions more like them across Afghanistan—deserve more than fleeting sympathy whenever a new Taliban atrocity makes the news. They deserve to be seen, heard, and remembered as people with ambitions, talents, and agency. Real solidarity, the type that enables people to challenge the status quo, is more than statements of concern and virtue-signaling; it demands sustained commitment, practical support, and accountability for the promises made in their name. By listening, we help these women shape their stories and bring them to a wider audience. By ensuring that scholarships, grants, and opportunities are genuinely accessible, we empower them with the conditions they need to build the futures they want for themselves and their country.

At Ali Khamenei’s week-long funeral, the body of the dead supreme leader was not the only thing being carried through the procession.

There were clerics, cameras, delegations, black clothes, grieving officials—all playing a part in the carefully curated choreography of a regime making a spectacle out of burying its most powerful figurehead. But something else was being covertly communicated. Iran used the funeral to address its guests through Qur’anic verses, seemingly selected to reinforce alliances, reward loyalty, and remind each delegation where it stood in Tehran’s regional order.

Qur’anic recitation at the funeral of an Iranian Supreme Leader is not unusual. It would have been odd if there were none. What made this ceremony different was that when different delegations entered, different verses were recited—and for a specific reason. Soon, people across the region began asking questions. Was Iran speaking in code?

No official Iranian explanation has confirmed that each verse was selected as a political message. But the regime is no stranger to coded communication, and this time the signal was hard to mistake.

Let’s start with Saudi Arabia. The verse recited before the Saudi delegation—Surat Al Nisa’, verse 13—recalled a moment when a smaller band of believers overcame a stronger enemy, a victory offered as a lesson to all who watched. The political meaning was difficult to miss. It was a reminder to Riyadh that Tehran remembers who stood where when the war came. In plain terms: we remember that you sided with the enemy.

This is often how Iran likes to levy threats. Sometimes you don’t need missiles or direct confrontation to get your point across.

Next came Qatar. The verse recited before its delegation—Surat Al Fath, verse 2—comes from a chapter associated with a compromise that initially appeared to be a concession but was later remembered as a strategic victory. For a state that helped facilitate negotiations, the implication was almost gracious by Iranian standards: thank you for helping make the agreement possible. But the victory belongs to us. Qatar was being reminded that, in Tehran’s telling, mediators facilitate history—they do not make it.

Turkey received a metaphorical cold shoulder. The verse recited before the Turkish delegation distinguished between those who join the struggle and those who lag behind, declaring that God grants a higher rank to those who fight with their wealth and their lives. Iran was telling Ankara: you watched. You calculated. You avoided the cost while others paid it. God, Tehran was suggesting, knows the difference.

Pakistan received a soft, but not neutral message. The verse associated with its delegation spoke of patience, steadiness, and remaining on God’s path. The meaning nearly supplied itself. Pakistan had stood close enough to Tehran to matter, yet cautiously enough to remain useful. Iran’s message seemed clear: remain patient, stay aligned, and do not drift when pressure rises.

Oman, too, had its place in the script. The chosen verse used the language of strength, solidarity, and a firm front. Oman is not a militia or a loud revolutionary actor, but a mediator, a subtle channel, and a state that often speaks softly where others shout. Yet even Oman was folded into Iran’s wider production. The message extended beyond mourning: the axis was meant to appear intact, disciplined, and unbroken.

Then came Lebanon. Iran’s view of the country has always been split in two. The official Lebanese delegation heard a verse about those who would hesitate if ordered to sacrifice themselves. Hezbollah’s delegation heard a line ending with “the party of God will be victorious”—a phrase that also translates literally as “Hezbollah.”

The meaning was unmistakable. The Lebanese state was portrayed as weak and hesitant; Hezbollah as loyal. The official delegation was addressed with caution, while the militia was addressed in the language of divine victory. The message was not only for Beirut, but for everyone watching: in Iran’s regional order, official governments are secondary. The groups that fight for the axis are rewarded.

Hamas was encouraged, with Iran focusing on endurance and sacrifice through a verse about men who fulfilled their covenant, both the dead and the living. It was scripture tailored to the politics of martyrdom. The message was: your losses are not the end of the struggle, but proof that the struggle must continue. Once again, in Iran’s hands, death was glorified.

This is both the power and the danger of Iran’s political language. The regime does not simply invoke religion to justify its policies after the fact. It fuses politics with religious symbolism until the two become inseparable. Rivalries are cast as divine warnings, negotiations as evidence of Iranian triumph, neutrality as moral failure, and militias as instruments of God’s will. Even death is reframed—not as an ending, but as a mandate to continue the struggle.

Saudi Arabia received a warning. Qatar was thanked for facilitating compromise. Turkey was rebuked for standing aside. Pakistan was urged toward patience and steadiness. Oman was folded into the facade of a strong regional front. Lebanon was reminded of its hesitation, and Hezbollah was given a metaphorical victory lap. Hamas was encouraged to endure.

A dead man was being mourned, but the living were being lectured.

There is something chilling in that. A funeral could have been a moment of silence and reflection, even for a man whose rule was defined by repression, war, and regional ruin. Instead, it became one last stage for the system he built, with Qur’anic verses used to reinforce its view of power, loyalty, and obedience.

Perhaps the most revealing part was not that Iran may have been sending political messages through Qur’anic verses. It was that so many people immediately understood them that way. Whether or not every verse was selected with that intention is almost secondary. The assumption itself reflects the political power the Islamic Republic has cultivated over decades.

In Tehran, religious symbolism rarely exists apart from politics. Scripture is used not only for worship, but also to frame alliances, rivalries, victories, and expectations. The funeral became another opportunity to do the same.

Khamenei may be gone, but the system he built will take much longer to dismantle. If the funeral demonstrated anything, it was that the Islamic Republic continues to view every public ceremony as an opportunity to assert dominance, reinforce alliances, reward loyalty, and signal where it believes everyone belongs—and expects each actor to play the role assigned to them.

At this year’s FIFA World Cup, millions of people around the world watched Iran’s national soccer team take the field wearing the colors of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC): green, white, and red. They marched beneath the regime's flag, sang its anthem, and presented themselves as representatives of more than 90 million people whom the Islamic Republic exploits and oppresses.

But for millions of Iranians, both inside the country and across the diaspora, one question hovered over every match: Who do they actually represent?

Can athletes truly claim to represent sportsmanship, humility, respect, integrity, and inclusion on a national stage while publicly embracing the very regime responsible for imprisoning, torturing, and killing their own nation’s people and diaspora across the globe?

As a former Iranian women’s national soccer player, I don’t think so. I was banned for life after being photographed playing soccer with male friends in Switzerland without wearing a hijab. Due to the regime’s harassment, I was forced to seek asylum in 2017.

So I speak from experience when I say that this team does not represent the Iranian people. It represents the Islamic Republic.

After one of Iran’s group-stage matches, midfielder Ramin Rezaeian was asked about the ongoing human rights situation inside Iran. His response was familiar—something I have heard many times before from authoritarian sympathizers. He described it as an “internal matter,” insisted that foreigners should not interfere, and suggested that Iranians were capable of solving their own problems.

That argument might sound reasonable if the issue were a mere domestic political disagreement. It is not.

When a government shoots peaceful protesters in the streets, executes political prisoners after sham trials, systematically tortures detainees, and criminalizes the most basic freedoms—including the right of women to choose how they dress— it ceases to be an internal matter and becomes a universal human rights crisis.

No government should be able to invoke sovereignty as a shield against crimes committed against its own citizens.

Since the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement began, the Islamic Republic has brutally suppressed peaceful demonstrations. It has imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and targeted dissidents abroad. It has sentenced young protesters to death. Families continue to search for justice while the world is asked to look the other way.

When members of Iran’s national team dismiss these atrocities as nobody else’s concern, they are helping protect the regime from international scrutiny under the guise of defending Iran’s sovereignty.

On the same international stage shared by the rest of the democratic world, pawns like Rezaeian use the national platform to chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” on American soil, and praise deceased Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—who bears responsibility for over 40,000 innocent lives lost. Is FIFA holding them accountable? Does FIFA support the values the Islamic Republic claims to represent?

There is another reason so many Iranians reject the idea that this team represents them. The Islamic Republic does everything in its power to silence and repress freedom wherever it can—even beyond its own borders. Its players insist Iran’s human rights crisis is an “internal matter,” yet the regime has no hesitation making American freedom of expression its business. At this year’s World Cup, Iranian officials formally urged FIFA to prohibit Pride-themed events and rainbow flags, attempting to export the regime’s intolerance onto the world’s biggest sporting stage.

Women in Iran are not allowed to enter stadiums freely. For years, they have been barred from attending soccer matches simply because they are women. Those who have tried to challenge this ban have been arrested, jailed, and even tortured.

And yet, FIFA still chose to host the team representing the regime.

FIFA says politics should not interfere in sport. But everyone knows that Iranian sport, especially soccer, is fully under the control and supervision of the terrorist-designated IRGC and the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic.

And the real cost is borne by the athletes who refuse to become mouthpieces for the regime.

During the recent nationwide protests, thousands of Iranians lost their lives. Among the victims were numerous athletes who should have been celebrated, not buried. Female soccer player Zahra Azadpour, soccer player Mojtaba Torshiz, and professional women’s referee Sahba Rashtian are among the names remembered by many Iranians as victims of the regime’s brutality.

Today, hundreds of male and female athletes remain imprisoned. Many report being tortured. Some continue to face the threat of execution simply for supporting peaceful protests or expressing dissent. They sit behind bars while others wearing the national jersey enjoy the privilege of competing before global audiences.

This is FIFA’s failure.

During the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Iranian athletes, activists, former players, and human rights organizations repeatedly appealed to FIFA. They asked FIFA to recognize that the Islamic Republic’s systematic repression could not be dismissed as ordinary politics, and to stop granting the regime the legitimacy afforded to any other national federation.

FIFA refused. Instead, it retreated behind the language of political neutrality.

Neutrality can be a principled position. But when an organization that regularly invokes inclusion, respect, equality, and human dignity declines to respond to systematic repression, that neutrality begins to look less like impartiality and more like acquiescence.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has repeatedly demonstrated that the organization’s stated principles are flexible whenever political convenience demands it. The world’s governing body for soccer has shown remarkable willingness to overlook the realities facing Iranian athletes while continuing to provide the regime with one of its most valuable international platforms.

This raises uncomfortable questions, not only for FIFA, but also for democratic governments that continue to separate sporting participation from political accountability.

The Islamic Republic has always sought to export not only its ideology but also its methods of intimidation. Whether targeting dissidents abroad, threatening journalists, or attempting to shape international sporting events according to its own repressive worldview, the objective is always to normalize authoritarianism wherever possible.

History teaches us that sports have never been morally neutral. The international community has previously excluded governments because of apartheid, racial discrimination, and aggression. Why should systematic executions, torture, and state repression be treated differently?

When athletes willingly participate in authoritarian propaganda, they assume a role that extends beyond sport. They become ambassadors for a regime seeking international legitimacy.

Iran’s true representatives are not the men standing beneath stadium lights in the national jersey. They are the women who remove their compulsory hijabs despite knowing they may never return home. They are the parents carrying photographs of children killed for demanding freedom. They are the imprisoned athletes who refused to surrender their conscience.

They are the soccer players who walked away from the national team rather than become instruments of dictatorship. They are the journalists, artists, lawyers, students, workers, and ordinary citizens who continue to risk everything for the belief that Iran deserves to be free.

They are the ones who carry the dignity of the Iranian nation. If anyone represents Iran, it is them.

Iran’s national soccer team was eliminated from the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The more enduring loss belongs to the mothers still searching for justice, to victims like Mahsa Amini and Nika Shakarami, to the countless unnamed Iranians whose lives were stolen by state violence, and to the imprisoned athletes, disappeared soccer players, and families shattered by executions.

FIFA had an opportunity to stand on the right side of history. Instead, it chose institutional caution over moral clarity.

Iran’s national soccer team represents a regime that has spent decades using sport as an instrument of political legitimacy. FIFA had an opportunity to distinguish between representing a nation and legitimizing a dictatorship. Instead, it chose to treat the Islamic Republic as just another participant in the world’s most popular sport. Until that changes, the tournament will continue to offer authoritarian regimes something far more valuable than points or trophies: international legitimacy.

This week, Tehran is staging what it hopes will be the largest funeral in modern history. According to Al Jazeera, representatives from more than one hundred countries are expected at the seven-day farewell to Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war launched by the United States and Israel. Pakistan’s prime minister is attending in person. Turkey is sending its vice president, China a senior lawmaker, India a deputy foreign minister and a state governor.

The processions will span from Tehran to Qom, cross into Najaf and Karbala, and end at the shrine in Mashhad, where the man who ruled Iran through fear for thirty-seven years will be laid to rest with full honors. One must admire the guests’ discipline. It takes a certain level of composure to bow before the coffin of a leader whose security forces, only months earlier, opened fire into crowds of unarmed protestors. It takes diplomatic skill of the highest order to offer condolences to a state that was, at that very moment, preparing to execute the very protesters it had arrested.

The dignitaries will speak of stability, history, and respect between nations. None of them, to be sure, will mention the innocent Iranians gunned down in January.

The guest list is instructive. Pakistan, whose prime minister stands among the chief mourners, is the same Pakistan that brokered the April ceasefire and the June memorandum of understanding between Tehran and Washington. The mediator and the mourner are one government.

According to CBS News’s live coverage, the mediators announced that the next round of US-Iran talks would be scheduled as soon as possible—but only after the funeral processions conclude. The diplomacy of the world’s great powers has come to revolve around the Islamic Republic’s calendar of mourning.

The world is waiting, hat in hand, for the regime to finish grieving.

Missing from the negotiating table is what U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk laid out in April. His office recorded at least twenty-one executions in the months prior, including nine hangings tied to the January 2026 protests, along with over four thousand arrests made under broad “national security” accusations.

He cited evidence of torture, forced confessions, and staged executions. He also described a financial tracking system built to seize the assets of Iranians abroad, four hundred of whom have been branded traitors to the homeland. He described an internet shutdown that had, by then, lasted sixty-one days. Amnesty International’s May report pushed the numbers higher: more than six thousand arrests, at least thirty-nine political executions, and an internet blackout that ultimately stretched to eighty-eight days, the longest ever recorded, sealing ninety million people off from the world.

I was among those in the streets that murderous January. I marched and bled among thousands of others. I still bear the wounds from the Islamic Republic’s response to my simple desire for an ordinary life.

So when I read that officials have since claimed over three thousand lives, while independent civil society groups, operating in darkness due to the blackout, believed the number to be much higher, I don’t see just a figure. It’s personal. I remember their faces, if not during the day, at night in my nightmares. The numbers represent real people who stood shoulder to shoulder with me. I can still remember the fruity, burning onion smell of tear gas that suffocated us, the stun grenades that blinded and deafened us, and the cinders I felt under my feet when I was shot.

The regime cut the internet precisely so that the world would never be certain of the number, and the world, conveniently, has moved on to discussing shipping lanes and frozen assets. The truth is simpler, as Eurasia Review recently put it: The Islamic Republic’s factions may quarrel over negotiations, foreign policy, and setting the tone to take with the West, but they converge absolutely on one policy: preserving power through coercion.

Escalating executions ensure the system’s survival. The weaker the Islamic Republic becomes politically, the more institutionally it depends on the gallows. A House of Commons Library briefing recorded that the United Kingdom backed the renewal of the UN’s fact-finding mission on Iran, deplored the crackdown, and promised further sanctions legislation.

These measures matter, yet they are dwarfed by the moment. A fact-finding mission documents the graves; it does not prevent the digging of new ones.

A state that hangs teenagers for protesting, disappears its critics, confiscates the property of exiles, and effectively muzzles ninety million people for three months is not merely conducting routine internal governance. It is simultaneously exporting its methods, through proxies, transnational repression, and the normalization that every bowed head at this funeral.

Negotiate with Tehran if you must; wars end at tables. But any agreement that trades assets and opens straits while the executions of innocent civilians continue is not peace. At least not for Iranians. It funds the next round of hangings. The regime is showing us exactly what it values at this funeral.

The rest of the world is simply deciding how much Iranian blood it is willing to overlook in order to secure a deal.

Ceasefires ought to be judged not by the documents that are signed but by the reality they create on the ground. Eight months after the agreement was signed in Sharm el-Sheikh, that reality bears little resemblance to the agreement’s stated goals. Israeli military operations have continued, reconstruction has yet to begin, and civilians are still confined to a devastating day-to-day reality. Taken together, the agreement may have reduced the intensity of the fighting, but it has yet to deliver on its promises.

The agreement, brokered under the Trump administration, was designed to unfold in three phases. The first phase called for a comprehensive cessation of military operations, humanitarian relief, the restoration of essential infrastructure, and the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from parts of Gaza.

But what happened in practice?

According to the Gaza Media Office, between the ceasefire and April 2026, Israel carried out 1,109 bombardments and shelling incidents across Gaza, killing 1,027 Palestinians and injuring 3,280 others.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claim that these strikes were carried out in response to violations by Palestinian armed factions.

The continued bombardment has had consequences beyond the immediate human toll. It has made it nearly impossible for the ceasefire to achieve its broader purpose: allowing Gaza to begin recovering from more than two years of war. Among the central commitments of the agreement’s first phase were the rehabilitation of Gaza’s water, electricity, and sewage infrastructure, alongside the restoration of hospitals, bakeries, and major roads. Eight months later, little of that work has begun.

Much of Gaza now functions without the infrastructure that makes modern civilian life possible. According to the United Nations, nearly 1.7 million people are living in displacement tents or temporary shelters, with 88 percent residing in improvised camps after Israeli military operations destroyed or damaged nearly 76.6 percent of Gaza’s housing stock.

Around 90 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. Severe restrictions on electricity and fuel have crippled water treatment and distribution systems, forcing families to ration water between drinking, cooking, and washing while many displacement camps remain surrounded by untreated sewage.

Skin diseases have become one of the most widespread public health challenges in Gaza’s displacement camps. According to UNRWA, the first four months of 2026 alone saw more than 70,000 reported cases of ectoparasitic infestations, including scabies and lice, conditions that thrive where overcrowding, poor sanitation, and limited access to clean water persist. Women, children, and elderly residents often live without adequate privacy, sanitation facilities, or basic protection from disease.

The ceasefire also envisioned the withdrawal of Israeli forces from designated areas of Gaza. Instead, the territory accessible to Palestinian civilians has steadily contracted.

At the beginning of the ceasefire, Palestinians were already confined to less than half of Gaza’s 365 square kilometers. Nearly two million people were concentrated within that limited space while much of the remainder remained under Israeli military control.

Since then, that area has become even smaller.

In May 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel controlled approximately 60 percent of Gaza and instructed the military to expand that control further.

That’s 13,699 people per square kilometer living within a confined land area of 146 square kilometers. Creating a situation of Tokyo-like density but packed into a small, almost completely destroyed area.

Residents across Gaza described waking to find that the yellow concrete blocks marking the ceasefire line had shifted overnight, leaving them inside a free-fire zone, where the Israeli military could consider any Palestinian person or vehicle a legitimate target. At least 77 Palestinians have reportedly been shot on sight after ending up on the wrong side of the yellow line or even in its vicinity.

The continued bombardment, the prevention of basic civilian rehabilitation, the denial of essential human needs, and the expansion of Israel’s territorial occupation all indicate that the government’s policy of war and collective punishment did not change; it merely slowed.

Senior members of Israel’s governing coalition, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have repeatedly advocated permanent Israeli settlements in Gaza and what they describe as the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians. When considered alongside continued military operations, stalled reconstruction, and the expansion of Israeli-controlled territory, these statements raise difficult questions about whether the ceasefire is failing to achieve its intended goals—or whether a different political objective has increasingly come to shape events on the ground.

A ceasefire is meant to do more than reduce the intensity of war. It is supposed to create the conditions for civilians to rebuild their lives and rehabilitate from the two-year nightmare. Eight months after the agreement was signed, those conditions are still out of reach. On paper, Gaza should be taking its first steps toward recovery. On the ground, Gaza does not look like a territory healing from conflict. It looks like one in which the conflict has continued under a different set of rules.

Greeting each of the Afghanistan women’s national cricket team players in Clarence House, King Charles inquired about their journeys, training routines, families, and marveled at their command of English.

“You’re amazing, you speak such good English!” he told the women as they beamed in their bright pink sports shirts.

Later, they presented the king with a signed shirt, a bat covered in Afghan-style decorations, and a lapel pin featuring the team’s badge.

This visit to Clarence House, on The Mall in London, was a warm, symbolic encounter in which the king honored a group of extraordinary women who have refused to surrender to one of the world’s most oppressive regimes.

Yet, just days earlier and only a few hundred miles away, European officials welcomed representatives of that same regime to Brussels.

The two moments could not have sent more different messages.

The Afghan women’s cricket team is celebrated by Britain because they represent everything the Taliban seeks to erase. Forced into exile after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, they now live in Australia and compete as the Afghan Refugee Women’s Team because they are barred from representing their home country. The International Cricket Council shamefully refuses to recognize them as their country’s official women’s team, even while the Afghan men’s team continues to compete freely internationally.

Their presence on the cricket field is a rebuke to the regime that outlawed their dreams.

For Marzia Babakarkhail—a former Afghan judge who survived two Taliban assassination attempts—Europe’s decision to engage directly with Taliban officials sends an alarming message.

“I believe the EU has made the wrong decision in this case,” she told Middle East Uncovered. “Any approach that leads to deportations or strengthens cooperation with the Taliban raises serious human rights concerns.

“Afghanistan is still facing a severe crisis, particularly for women and girls. Our schools are closed, women are forced to stay at home with no jobs, no system and no protection under the law.

Returning people to such conditions cannot be justified. The EU must remain consistent with its own values and commitments. Human rights, dignity, and the protection of life and safety must always come first.”

She has lived the consequences of the regime Europe is now engaging.

Babakarkhail spent years serving as a family court judge in Afghanistan while campaigning for women’s rights and establishing schools to educate girls. Those efforts made her a target. Taliban militants first stormed her home armed with guns. When that failed, they deliberately ran her down with a car and left her for dead. After six months in hospital, she fled to Britain without speaking a word of English. Today she is a proud British citizen and works for a member of parliament in Greater Manchester.

Her story mirrors the choices now confronting thousands of Afghans.

Firooza Afghan was only months into her professional cricket career when the Taliban swept back into Kabul. She and her teammates immediately went into hiding, fearing they would be identified as athletes in a country where women would soon be banned from almost every aspect of public life. An extraordinary rescue effort led by Australian cricket figures Mel Jones, Dr Catherine Ordway, and Emma Staples eventually secured humanitarian visas for the players, coaches and their families.

Firooza was among the last to escape. Together with her mother, siblings and aunt, she crossed illegally into Pakistan, passing through eleven Taliban checkpoints before finally reaching safety. Now 21, she says every match is played for those left behind.

“We are not playing for ourselves but for all Afghan women in our country where the situation is getting worse and worse day by day,” she said in an interview with a British newspaper.

“They, too, deserve to be free and choose their own path in life, and we want to remind a world that seems to have forgotten.”

This week, officials from the European Commission and representatives of 15 member states met a Taliban delegation in Brussels in an effort to accelerate the return of Afghan migrants, particularly those convicted of serious crimes or considered security threats.

It was the first time Taliban representatives had been invited to Brussels.

The meeting reflects a growing dilemma for European governments. Afghanistan has long refused to cooperate over deportations, while domestic political pressure to increase migrant returns continues to mount across much of Europe.

According to the latest figures, more than 14,000 Afghan nationals were ordered to leave EU countries during the first nine months of last year. Yet only around 340—or two percent—were actually returned.

European officials insist practical engagement with the Taliban does not amount to formal recognition.

Johan Forssell, Sweden’s migration minister, a country that hosts one of Europe’s largest Afghan populations, defended the meeting in the local press, arguing that his government must negotiate to “protect Swedish interests.”

For a regime that has spent years seeking international legitimacy, invitations to Brussels carry enormous symbolic value.

Since returning to power, the Taliban have issued more than 160 decrees systematically dismantling the rights of women and girls. Girls are banned from secondary schools and universities. Women have been pushed out of most professions, forced to comply with increasingly oppressive dress codes, subjected to severe restrictions on movement, and excluded from public life. In many cases they are effectively denied the ability to participate in society without male permission.

Against that backdrop, many human rights advocates fear that migration policy is beginning to eclipse the very values Europe claims to defend.

Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has warned against any forced returns, arguing that people can’t legally be sent back to places where they risk torture or persecution.

Amnesty International has likewise condemned any cooperation on deportations, describing Afghanistan as fundamentally unsafe and warning that engagement with the Taliban over returns ignores Europe’s legal and moral obligations.

Babakarkhail shares those concerns.

“I am deeply concerned about any engagement with the Taliban that could be seen as normalizing their authority,” she says. “Afghanistan is still facing a severe human rights crisis, especially for women and girls, who continue to be denied their basic rights, including education, work and freedom.

“Any discussion with the Taliban must be approached with extreme caution and must not come at the cost of human rights or the dignity of the Afghan people.

“The international community, including the EU, should ensure that human rights remain at the center of any engagement and that the voices of Afghan women are not ignored.”

That is precisely the question now facing Europe.

Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle, a member of the European Parliament and Chair of the Delegation for Relations with Afghanistan, said the visit was a “betrayal of our values.” She added, “The Taliban receive the privilege of dealmaking with the entire European Union, and some seem fine with it. Yes, getting migration under control is important, but so is maintaining a minimum of decency and standards.

“Europeans died to give women and girls their rights. So no, don’t legitimize the Taliban—ever. No one disputes that governments must manage migration or negotiate difficult international realities. But there is a profound difference between pragmatic engagement and conferring legitimacy on one of the world’s most repressive regimes.”

Europe cannot applaud the courage of Afghanistan’s exiled women cricketers on the one hand while, on the other, offering the regime that drove them into exile a seat at the diplomatic table in Brussels.

If the European Union truly believes in human rights, equality, and the protection of women, those principles should not be up for negotiation whenever issues around migration become inconvenient.

For Afghan women, it is yet another example of how world leaders, once again, are choosing to look the other way while they continue to suffer.

One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-five. That is the number of days Afghan girls have been shut out of their classrooms, and it climbs every morning. The count began in September 2021, when the Taliban reopened schools for boys and left the gates locked for their sisters. A girl who was eleven that autumn has now lost the whole of her secondary education, the years that quietly decide whether a person grows into a doctor or is handed over as a bride. She will not get those years back. There is no makeup exam for a stolen childhood.

Afghanistan holds a distinction no country should want: it is the only place on earth where girls are forbidden to study past primary school. This did not happen by accident or by drift. Since 2021, the Taliban have signed more than seventy decrees peeling away the right of women and girls to learn, to work, to travel, even to be seen in public. UNICEF now estimates roughly 2.2 million teenage girls are kept out of the classroom, a figure that grows every year the policy remains in effect. What looks from a distance like a broken school system is, up close, a cage built on purpose.

Ask what this does to a child, and the answer comes back in numbers that are hard to sit with. Researchers in Herat, the city my own life is bound to, surveyed girls locked out of education and published their findings in the Journal of Public Health: close to 88 percent showed signs of depression, and almost half said they had thought about ending their lives. A separate UN Women study found that 68 percent of Afghan women described their mental health as bad or very bad, and that many knew at least one woman or girl who had attempted suicide. Afghanistan is now among the very few countries where women die by suicide more often than men. Take a girl’s future from her, and you do not simply close a school. You begin to close off her reasons to keep going.

An empty desk is rarely left empty for long. Sooner or later, it is traded for a wedding. For twenty years, schooling was the strongest barrier the country had against child marriage, and the Taliban has spent four years tearing it down. Before 2021, roughly 28 percent of Afghan women were married before they turned eighteen. The UN estimates that the education ban on its own has pushed the risk of child marriage up by a quarter, and a 2023 survey found the rate had climbed toward 39 percent.

The logic in a ruined economy is merciless: a daughter who cannot study is recast as a cost to offset and a walwar payment (bride price) to collect. In May this year, the regime made it official, issuing a decree that writes child marriage into law and treats a girl’s silence as she reaches puberty as her consent. The same men who will not let her finish the seventh grade have decided she is old enough to be married off without being asked.

The cruelty of this does not stop with one generation. It reaches into the next. In December 2024, the Taliban closed the final corridor that had stayed open to women, banning them from training as midwives and nurses. Afghanistan already loses a woman to pregnancy or childbirth roughly every two hours, one of the worst maternal death rates anywhere in the world. By emptying those training rooms, the government has cut off an estimated 36,000 future midwives and thousands of nurses from the women who will one day be in labor with no one skilled beside them. In a society where many women will not, or cannot, be treated by a male doctor, shutting women out of medicine becomes a slow death sentence for mothers and infants not yet born.

There is a financial bill too, in a country that can least afford one. UNICEF reckons the secondary-school ban drained at least half a billion dollars from the economy in a single year, and that letting just one cohort of girls finish school could have added 5.4 billion. Stretch the ban on higher education out to 2066, and the projected loss climbs to around 9.6 billion dollars. Lock away half a nation’s talent, and it cannot hope to stand on its own feet. The Taliban are not only erasing girls; they are dismantling the future every Afghan was promised.

And still the world keeps pulling out a chair for them. At the Doha talks this spring, Taliban envoys waved away the question of girls’ schooling as an “internal domestic matter.” Too many diplomats let it pass and turned back to the subject of frozen assets. So, I will say again what I have said for years: diplomacy without women is betrayal. Every negotiation that files gender apartheid under “later,” as a footnote to be revisited once the serious business is done, tells the girls of Herat and Kabul and Kandahar that their disappearance is a fair price for someone else’s quiet. That is not peace. It is patience with a crime.

The clock runs on, 1,735 days and rising. We are long past the point of not knowing; the evidence sits in plain view. The only question left is whether the world will treat it as the emergency it is. Gender apartheid should be named and written into law as a crime against humanity. There should be no recognition, no released billions, no ordinary relations with this regime until the school gates open again. Someone must pay for the underground classes and protect the women teaching in them at the risk of their freedom. And the rest of us must refuse, on every single one of these days, to glance away.

Behind each statistic in this piece is a girl at a window, doing the quiet arithmetic of the years being taken from her. She is still there. She is still waiting. And what she is owed from the rest of us is not one more day of silence.

There is an old Lebanese saying that states: “Wherever the pregnancy happens, the labor pains are felt in Lebanon.” It is crude, bitter, and repeatedly proven right. A crisis erupts in the region, and Lebanon pays the price. Tehran escalates, southern Lebanon burns. Washington and Iran negotiate; Lebanese villages are destroyed. As other countries make decisions, Lebanon absorbs the consequences, again and again.

The latest escalation replayed this pattern, casting Lebanon as a support act in the regional power struggle. As negotiations raised the possibility of peace, those who claim to serve the country’s interests moved quickly to dismantle it. For Hezbollah, this is a battle for survival. For Lebanon, it is the price of submitting to powers driven by external interests.

Meanwhile, an estimated 1.2 million people, amounting to a fifth of the country’s population, are trapped in limbo, displaced by a conflict that could easily escalate further.

So far, broader diplomatic efforts have done little to contain Hezbollah, which views the prospect of peace as an existential problem. If Lebanon can negotiate through its government, what role remains for an armed group to speak on the country’s behalf? And if Lebanon can deal directly with Israel, why would Tehran need Hezbollah as its intermediary?

Hezbollah entered the war after the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei because Iran needed it to, not because the Lebanese government authorized it, or the Lebanese citizens chose it. Hezbollah acted because Tehran needed a lever, and the group exists in Lebanon to serve precisely that purpose.

The war also served Hezbollah’s interests, retaining its role as a shield for Iran and ensuring the group’s relevance as it confronts mounting opposition at home.

In recent months, tolerance has ebbed toward Hezbollah’s stranglehold on the Lebanese state, with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam announcing a formal ban on the group’s military activities in early March. Beirut has never been effective in enforcing its authority over Hezbollah, but politically, the significance is clear. Hezbollah’s actions will no longer be presented as a national decision. They are being recognized for what they were: an armed faction pushing an unwilling country into another war.

Iran and Hezbollah understood the danger peace would pose to them immediately. They rejected Lebanon’s direct track with Israel because it threatened to remove Lebanon from Iran’s regional chessboard.

Iran does not want Lebanon to negotiate as Lebanon. It wants Lebanon to negotiate as an Iranian asset. Hezbollah does not want a ceasefire that strengthens the Lebanese state. It wants any ceasefire to pass through the axis, through Tehran.

This is why Iran’s behavior during the latest skirmish was so revealing. Southern Lebanon has been absorbing Israeli strikes for months. Villages were emptied and Shia families, the very people Hezbollah claims to protect, watched their homes collapse into dust.

Despite the devastation, Iran did not treat the Israeli onslaught as a red line. For the Iranian regime, a village can be destroyed, a farmer can be killed, and a family can be displaced without disturbing the “regional architecture”.

But Beirut’s southern suburbs, it seems, are different. When Israel struck there, Iran acted with urgency. The message is becoming clear: the south is expendable, but Hezbollah’s central infrastructure is sacred. Ordinary Shia citizens may lose their homes, but the machine must survive.

Then, on June 7, Iran opened fire on Israel with a symbolic strike, marking the first attack since the April ceasefire. Israel threatened to retaliate, but Washington stepped in to order restraint. So Israel settled for a symbolic response, and the great regional drama ended where it always ends: Iran saved face, Israel claimed deterrence, Trump preserved his protracted negotiations, and Lebanon went back to being bombed in installments.

This is the horror of Lebanon’s dilemma, a country that’s forced to play the understudy in the performance of its own destruction.

The Iranian Embassy’s recent social media post captured the contradictions at play. Lebanon appears inside the map of Iran, with a message saying that Lebanon is “the heart of Iran.” Perhaps this is meant to mean that Lebanon is beloved by Iran. In reality, it looked like a confession. Iran does not see Lebanon as an independent country. It sees Lebanon as an organ in its body politic. And when Tehran hurts, Lebanon bleeds.

Hezbollah’s defenders may say this is an exaggeration. It is not. A Lebanese party that prioritizes Iran’s position is not a resistance movement; it is a mercenary structure with Lebanese victims. Its members may be Lebanese. Its dead, may be Lebanese. Its supporters may genuinely believe they are defending their community. But strategically, Hezbollah functions as Iran’s armed franchise. Its calendar is Iranian. Its escalation is Iranian. Its veto is Iranian. Its war is Iranian. However, the funerals, naturally, are Lebanese.

This is what makes the U.S.-Iran agreement so dangerous for Lebanon. The danger is not only what the agreement says. It is what Iran and Hezbollah now claim it means: that Lebanon’s border, Lebanon’s war, and Lebanon’s dead can be folded into Tehran’s bargain with Washington.

The agreement has been signed, but in Lebanon, the clashes have not truly stopped. The underlying war remains untouched. Israel is not going to surrender land or abandon its positions while Hezbollah remains armed on its northern border. No Israeli government will sell that to its public as security. And Hezbollah will not lay down its arms peacefully, because the arms are not merely a military tool. They are the party’s state, economy, identity, and veto.

What is Lebanon supposed to celebrate? A miracle? A ceasefire? A pause between funeral announcements? The best Lebanon can realistically hope for is a time-out, unless two impossible conditions suddenly become possible: either Israel withdraws without Hezbollah’s disarmament, or Hezbollah disarms without a fight. Neither is likely.

Following the U.S.-Iran agreement, the group claimed that Iran had pledged to pursue Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the next phase of talks with Washington. Even when it comes to its sovereign territory, Lebanon is denied the dignity of speaking for itself.

Meanwhile, Israel bristles with frustration toward Washington’s constraints. Israel does not want President Trump to reign in its military freedom while Hezbollah remains armed, so it vents where it can: on Lebanon.

In doing so, Israel is bombing a country whose citizens did not vote for this war. It is destroying villages, killing civilians, and deepening the very instability it claims to contest. Hezbollah gives Israel the pretext, Iran gives Hezbollah the order, and Lebanon buries its dead.

Iran was never going to sacrifice its agreement with Washington for Lebanese villages. It used them to raise the price. Now Hezbollah wants Lebanese citizens to believe that Tehran will recover their land in the next round of negotiations. These promises ring hollow in a country stripped of sovereignty by ‘well-wishers’ that keep it perpetually at war.

This is why the language must be clarified. Hezbollah is not protecting Lebanon, and the Lebanese state is not toothless by accident. It is enfeebled by a militia that turned sovereignty into a hostage file and called the ransom resistance.

And somewhere, in a Lebanese village that few people in Tehran can name, a bomb is dropped, and another family discovers that the pregnancy was elsewhere, but the labor pains are theirs.

Every time war erupts in the Middle East, the same debate follows. Who won? Who lost? Which side gained leverage, preserved deterrence, improved its negotiating position? Analysts map missile exchanges and flight patterns, politicians declare victory, and commentators rush to sort the players into winners and losers.

I think we are asking the wrong questions.

The one that matters is simpler: Would you invest your money in the Middle East today?

Not if you are a sanctioned oligarch hiding assets, or a connected businessman chasing government contracts, or a state moving capital for strategic reasons. I mean an ordinary investor or entrepreneur, someone who earned their money and wants to put it somewhere productive. Would they build a factory here, start a company, hire workers, or bet their future on the region?

The answer tells us more about the state of the Middle East than any war outcome. And the uncomfortable reality is that much of the region is getting the worst of both worlds, bearing the economic costs of war without the dividends of peace.

The numbers are starting to confirm it. The International Monetary Fund’s most recent outlook cut its expected growth for the Middle East and North Africa in 2026 to roughly 1 percent, down sharply from forecasts near 4 percent, with Iran and Iraq among the economies expected to bear the brunt. The World Bank has issued parallel warnings that conflict and geopolitical instability are eroding investment confidence and dragging down growth across the region.

What does this mean for the people living in the region? Lower growth means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs mean delayed marriages, delayed homes, and delayed independence. More graduates will compete for fewer job openings and more talented people will conclude that their future must lie elsewhere.

The real economic cost of instability is not the damage it causes today but the uncertainty it creates about tomorrow. Investors do not simply calculate returns, but also predictability. A manufacturer wants to know the supply chain will function next year. A tourism operator wants to know whether flights will continue to run. A founder wants to know whether skilled workers will still be in the country 18 months from now.

Conflict destroys that confidence, and the damage radiates outward. When airlines suspend routes, airports lose business. When shipping lanes get riskier, insurance premiums climb. When uncertainty rises, investors postpone, and postponed investment means fewer jobs created. The recent fighting disrupted energy production, trade, and air traffic across the Gulf, and that disruption reached far beyond the countries actually exchanging fire.

The reported U.S.–Iran framework deal captures the problem perfectly. If it holds, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will offer real relief to energy markets, shippers, insurers, and governments desperate for a break. But this does little to restore confidence or ensure predictability. The hardest questions—Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions relief, enforcement, and regional escalation—are being pushed into another round of talks. It may be a step forward, but for investors it is still uncertainty with a calendar attached.

Here the simple story breaks down, and it is worth being honest about why.

The region is not uniformly repelling capital. It is bifurcating. While the conflict zone hemorrhages confidence, the Gulf monarchies are doing the opposite. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar market themselves as the stable harbor precisely because the neighborhood is turbulent. Dubai absorbs the capital, talent, and company headquarters fleeing less predictable markets. Riyadh courts the foreign investment that Tehran and Baghdad cannot. For these states, regional instability is a competitive advantage they are actively selling.

The places that can least afford to lose their best people and their investable capital are the ones losing them, and much of what they lose flows straight to their wealthier, calmer neighbors.

This is also why Iran deserves its own line of analysis rather than being folded into a regional average.

Unlike the hollowed-out states that buckled under external pressure, the Islamic Republic defines its mere survival as victory; it can absorb economic punishment that would topple a more conventional government and call the endurance a win.

But survival does not automatically beget prosperity. A regime can outlast sanctions and war and still preside over an economy that no rational person would build a future in, and that gap between political durability and economic hopelessness is exactly where a generation gets lost.

That younger generations bear the deepest cost. Across the region, millions of educated, ambitious, globally connected young people enter the workforce every year. Ask many of them what their long-term goal is, and the answer is no longer to start a company, build a product, or buy a home. It is to leave.

And Western nations are not exactly chomping at the bit to accept more migrants or refugees.

Strategic victories mean little if a country’s most talented citizens conclude that their future lies elsewhere. Nations grow when people invest, build, and stay—not when capital and talent are searching for a way out.

So, before we debate who won the latest round of fighting or celebrate the next diplomatic breakthrough, we should ask a different question. Five years from now, will more people be building their future in the Middle East, or planning their exit from it?

That is the scoreboard that matters.

Governments can survive wars, regimes can survive sanctions, and militaries can preserve deterrence. None of those achievements guarantee that a young engineer will start a company, that an investor will build a factory, or that a talented graduate will decide to stay.

For too long, the region has measured success by what it has managed to endure rather than what it plans to build.

The real contest in the Middle East is not between rival states, armed groups, or competing alliances, but between countries that can convince people to invest their lives there and countries that cannot. The winners will not necessarily be those with the strongest militaries or the most durable regimes. They will be the ones that become places where people can confidently imagine a future for themselves and their families.

The future belongs to the places people choose to stay.

Lebanon’s latest debate over a general amnesty law is being presented as a humanitarian response to prison overcrowding, judicial delays, and unresolved legal cases. But that description captures only part of the story.

The proposed law would release or reduce the sentences of various categories of detainees and prisoners. Supporters argue that Lebanon’s prisons are overcrowded, that many cases have languished for years without resolution, and that the justice system is incapable of processing them in a reasonable timeframe.

Those problems are real. But the debate is not only about prison reform, but about how a failed state is attempting to deal with years of judicial abuse, sectarian bargaining, political paralysis, and selective enforcement of the law.

For non-Lebanese readers, the controversy began with a striking double standard. When Hezbollah crossed into Syria and committed horrible crimes to save Bashar al-Assad, the Lebanese state neither prosecuted nor seriously challenged its actions. An armed Lebanese movement crossed an international border, participated in a foreign war, and returned home without legal consequences.

At the same time, many Lebanese who opposed Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria or criticized its alliance with Assad found themselves under suspicion. Some were accused of terrorism. Others spent years in detention without conviction, and in some cases without formal charges. Whether one agrees with their views or not, the facts tell a troubling story. Hezbollah enjoyed effective immunity while many of its opponents faced the full weight of the security and judicial systems.

This does not excuse anyone who joined extremist organizations, attacked the army, killed civilians, or committed acts of terrorism. Such crimes should be prosecuted. But that is precisely the point. A state that tolerates impunity for one actor while abandoning basic legal protections for others is applying the law selectively and failing to administer justice consistently.

A functioning legal system does not hold people for years without charge, allow pretrial detention to become a substitute for a verdict, or leave suspects in prison because security agencies, judges, or political actors find it convenient. If someone spends years behind bars without conviction, that is a failure of due process and a serious abuse of state power.

This is how the general amnesty debate entered the scene. Instead of admitting that the judiciary and security agencies helped create the current crisis, Lebanon’s political class is discussing a general amnesty as if it were a clean humanitarian solution. It is not. It risks burying a judicial scandal underneath a political bargain.

The problem is not that some detainees may be released. Some should have been released years ago. The problem is that parliament is trying to place fundamentally different cases into one basket: people never charged, people never convicted, people convicted after questionable trials, terrorists, drug traffickers, fugitives, and criminals with political protection.

These distinctions matter. Where there was no charge, release them. Where there was no conviction, try them immediately or release them. Where there was a conviction reached through a corrupted or politicized process, order a retrial. Where there was a fair conviction for murder, terrorism, torture, or serious drug trafficking, there should be no pardon.

Terrorism must be condemned without hesitation. Those who carried arms against the state, killed soldiers or civilians, joined extremist groups, planted bombs, or used religion as a license for violence should be held accountable. Multiple things can be true at once. No political grievance justifies terrorism, no Sunni grievance against Hezbollah justifies jihadist violence, and no injustice committed by Hezbollah gives anyone the right to murder.

But condemning terrorism does not give the state permission to violate its own laws. A judiciary that imprisons without proof manufactures widespread resentment instead of fighting terrorism. A security system that arrests first and investigates later humiliates the society it is charged with protecting. A state that can keep a person in prison for years without conviction is operating outside its own stated legal principles.

Hezbollah’s role is central to this story because Lebanon’s judiciary and security agencies have not operated in a vacuum. They operate under the shadow of Hezbollah’s weapons, intelligence networks, political veto, and intimidation. Since the Syrian war, opposition to Hezbollah and Assad has often been treated as a security threat, while Hezbollah’s own illegal arms, cross-border war, extrajudicial assassinations, and domestic coercion are excused. This is the ugliest double standard in the republic: one side can own a private army and call it resistance; others can be destroyed by suspicion alone.

The Lebanese state was instrumental in its own failure. It allowed Hezbollah’s parallel power structure to shape the meaning of legality and facilitated a system in which the armed party enjoys immunity while its opponents face selective prosecution. That is how a state becomes a tool in the hands of a militia.

The rot is not limited to Islamist detainees. Political parties are also pushing for the amnesty to include drug-related cases, as well as the cases of Lebanese citizens who fled to Israel after Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. The proposed law has drawn predictable sectarian bargaining. Sunni leaders focus on Islamist detainees, Shiite parties on drug-related cases, and Christian forces on Lebanese who fled to Israel.

The drug file is especially pernicious. Minor users and addicts should not be treated like cartel bosses; they need rehabilitation and proportionate justice. But drug traffickers, organized dealers, and cartel figures should not be laundered through a political deal. Lebanon’s drug economy is not socially neutral. It is tied to areas where Hezbollah’s influence is dominant. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Lebanon-based figures accused of Captagon trafficking with ties to Hezbollah and the Assad regime, describing networks that generated revenue for Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, and traffickers themselves. To pardon cartel members would be a surrender to narco-politics.

The Israel exile file is also morally complex. Many Lebanese fled to Israel in 2000 because the state could not or would not protect them from Hezbollah’s revenge after Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon. That failure should be acknowledged. Those who killed Lebanese citizens, tortured detainees, or participated in crimes inside Israeli-run detention facilities should never be pardoned. Flight may be understandable. Murder and torture are not.

The real scandal is that Lebanon wants amnesty without accountability.

Who detained people without proper files? Who allowed investigations to rot? Who used military courts and security agencies as tools of political intimidation? Who protected drug networks? Who decided that Hezbollah’s crimes were untouchable while its opponents could be crushed?

An amnesty law that does not answer these questions is a cover-up.

Lebanon does not need another sectarian bargain or a deal in which every political faction secures relief for its preferred constituency and calls it “national reconciliation.”

It needs justice.

Release the uncharged. Try the untried. Retry the unfairly convicted. Punish the guilty.

Then ask the question parliament seems determined to avoid: who built a system in which some people could spend years in prison without conviction while others operated above the law?

Any amnesty that avoids that question is not an act of mercy, but a gross abdication of responsibility.

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed on CBS’ 60 Minutes and said something that, a decade ago, would have sounded almost unthinkable from an Israeli prime minister: Israel should eventually stop relying on American military aid, and will start winding down to zero American aid over the next decade.

He argued Israel is a strong, wealthy, technologically advanced country—one that should be able to defend itself without permanent dependence on U.S. taxpayers.

No doubt, a rich, highly developed state should not want to be permanently subsidized by another country. Israel should be able to stand on its own two feet. Today, it has a higher GDP per capita than the UK and Germany.

Netanyahu is saying this at a moment when American support for Israel is collapsing. For the first time ever this year, more Americans claim to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. The old so-called “bipartisan consensus” on Israel is now dust in the wind. And it is not coming back any time soon. While many Republicans still broadly express support—including enthusiastic support—for Israel, the same cannot be said of most Democrats and Independents. And this is especially true among younger voters, who tend to view Israel in a negative light.

You can see the same shift in the way American media now talks about alleged Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

A few years ago, allegations of abuse or systematic mistreatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers or guards circulated mainly in Palestinian and Arab media, activist spaces, and left-wing publications already hostile to Israel.

Now, major media like The New York Times have begun to weigh in on these issues. A column by Nicholas Kristof published last week aired allegations of sexual violence, torture, and abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody. Kristof cited testimony from Palestinian men and women who said they had been raped, sexually assaulted, stripped naked, threatened with rape, attacked with dogs, beaten, starved, denied medical care, or abused in other ways.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry denounced the column as propagating a “blood libel,” and has said that it will sue The New York Times, although no lawsuit has been filed yet.

Since October 7—when Hamas jihadists broke into Israel and murdered, kidnapped, and, according to a report citing testimony from survivors, brutally raped and mutilated Israelis—Israel has carried out enormous military operations in Gaza. It has detained thousands of Palestinians, including some in the West Bank. Many were Hamas fighters. Some were militants from other factions. Others were civilians, unfortunately, caught up in the dragnet of war.

The problem for Israel, here, is that the combination of mass detention, an atmosphere of revenge, fear, and a captive population is combustible.

Such abuse has been perpetrated in many different countries before, including Western democracies. The United States had Abu Ghraib. There, Iraqi prisoners were stripped, humiliated, threatened with dogs, sexually degraded, and tortured. France had Algeria. There, electric shocks, waterboarding, rape, disappearances, and summary executions were used. Britain had Kenya, with detention camps for Kikuyu prisoners and suspected Mau Mau sympathizers where beatings, starvation, forced labor, and sexual abuse were used.

So far, a lot of the discourse in the pro-Israel sphere has focused on trying to discredit the allegations altogether. For instance, many have cited Euro-Med Monitor—whose founder Ramy Abdu has been accused by Israel and pro-Israel advocates of links to Hamas—as proof that the whole story is rotten. That may be a reason to treat some of the material Kristof cited with caution. Not every allegation is necessarily true. Indeed, Kristof has previously had to retract claims made in The New York Times after having been misled by a source.

But Kristof’s column included 14 separate Palestinian testimonies, Israeli media reporting, UN material, HaMoked figures, B’Tselem’s prison report, and the work of Amnesty International. It’s not the case that he took a single allegation and ran with it.

On one hand, there is a real danger here. Allegations like this can be weaponized in ugly ways. People who hate Jews will use stories of sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers as an excuse to demonize them as a whole group, rather than as specific allegations about particular individuals, particular institutions, and a particular war. They will fold these allegations into older antisemitic fantasies about Jewish cruelty, perversity, bloodlust, or hidden power.

That should be rejected completely by all sensible people.

But if Israeli soldiers or prison guards abused Palestinian detainees, the perpetrators themselves should be held accountable. The commanders who enabled them should bear responsibility. The politicians who created a permissive atmosphere should answer for it.

But Jews as a people are not responsible. Jewish civilians in London, New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, or anywhere else are not answerable for the alleged crimes of guards in an Israeli detention facility.

On the other hand, the risk of antisemitic weaponization cannot be allowed to become a shield against a thorough investigation. Individuals who abuse Palestinians must be held accountable, and such abuse, if it has taken place, must be stopped completely and should never, ever be allowed to recur again.

This is the best first step for Israel to rehabilitate their reputation.

Netanyahu seems to understand the reputation problem, but not its cause. In the same 60 Minutes interview, he pointed to social media, TikTok, and the speed with which images now spread around the world. There is some truth there. The information environment has changed. Israel no longer speaks to Western publics through a small number of sympathetic editors, television anchors, and foreign-policy elites. A video from Gaza can travel globally before any Israeli spokesperson has drafted a line.

But social media is the medium, not the disease.

TikTok is not responsible for Palestinian suffering. Israel’s reputation is deteriorating because the effects of the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians are now visible in a way they were not before. Images of destruction in Gaza, videos of settler violence in the West Bank, and growing allegations of abuse against Palestinian detainees are shaping global opinion far more than any propaganda campaign or algorithm ever could.

Israel should hold itself to a higher standard than a terrorist organization. That means taking allegations of sexual abuse and mistreatment seriously rather than dismissing them outright as propaganda. It means investigating abuses committed by soldiers, prison guards, or settlers, and ensuring those responsible are punished.

The real solution, for both Israelis and Palestinians, is not better public relations. It is resolving the conflict itself before the violence and mutual dehumanization destroys what little legitimacy and hope for peace still remain for both peoples.

Today, Middle East Uncovered will publish two pieces examining the growing media and political controversy surrounding testimonies of sexual violence connected to October 7 and the war that followed. These accounts are graphic, painful, and difficult to engage with honestly.

We are publishing them because we believe difficult testimonies should not disappear beneath ideological battles. Too often, public discourse has centered more on defending narratives than confronting what victims describe. Our goal is not to litigate suffering selectively or protect one political camp from scrutiny, but to examine how these testimonies are being received, contested, weaponized, and, in many cases, buried beneath the broader war over narratives.

Since October 7 and the war in Gaza that followed, much of the public discourse surrounding the conflict has turned into a battle over competing narratives. More recently, the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel camps have clashed over two separate reports involving sexual violence. The New York Times (NYT) published testimony from Palestinian prisoners describing sexual abuse in Israeli jails, while The Daily Wire covered a report by The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, Children and Families documenting Hamas’s sexual violence against victims of October 7.

The timing intensified the dispute: The New York Times’ piece appeared less than 24 hours before the Civil Commission released its findings.

Those who viewed the NYT report as less credible, or rejected it entirely, focused heavily on its sources. One was the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, founded and chaired by Ramy Abdu, a Palestinian figure widely perceived by the pro-Israel camp as being close to Hamas circles—a connection used to cast doubt on testimonies collected through his organization. Another was Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an Israeli activist who shifted from outspoken pro-Israel advocacy to strongly anti-Zionist positions during the course of the war. Ben-Ephraim also amplified a claim circulated by Euro-Med Monitor alleging that Israeli forces used dogs trained to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, a claim many in the pro-Israel camp dismissed as antisemitic blood libel.

On the other side, many in the pro-Palestine camp dismissed the Civil Commission’s report outright because it came from an Israeli NGO focused specifically on documenting Hamas’s sexual crimes against victims of October 7. Others continued to deny the evidence surrounding Hamas’s sexual violence altogether, insisting that there is still not enough proof to conclude that such crimes took place.

The two reports include horrific, stomach-turning testimonies. Palestinian detainees described being sexually abused with objects such as metal batons and carrots by Israeli prison guards, while others recounted settlers in the West Bank zip-tying and violently pulling their genitals.

The Civil Commission’s report on October 7 documented multiple accounts of sexual violence committed by Hamas fighters during the attacks, including testimonies describing gang rape, mutilation, and the targeting of victims before and after death at sites such as the Nova music festival, where more than 370 people were killed. One survivor quoted in the report said he had been treated “like a sex doll” by his attackers.

Both camps have invested more time and energy in discrediting the messengers on the opposing side than in listening to the testimonies themselves.

Once that happens, the victims themselves disappear beneath the argument. This is despite the substantial evidence that Hamas used sexual violence against victims of October 7 and against hostages held in Gaza—evidence that exists regardless of which outlet covered it or who amplified it politically. The Civil Commission’s report, compiled over two and a half years from more than 10,000 photographs and videos and over 430 interviews, is not made less credible because The Daily Wire chose to report on it. A separate United Nations report likewise found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Palestinian militias committed sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.

The abuse of Palestinian prisoners is equally confirmed by a record of testimony that predates the most recent war. A leaked video from the Sde Teiman detention facility showed Israeli soldiers sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee. Five soldiers were arrested; the charges were later dropped. A survey published last year by Save the Children found that more than half of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 had witnessed or experienced sexual violence in Israeli jails.

It is, of course, reasonable to scrutinize the organizations and individuals collecting evidence. But what matters more is listening carefully to the testimonies themselves and examining whether the accounts are credible and consistent. A victim’s nationality should matter far less than the violence they endured. Suffering is not determined by ethnicity or political affiliation, yet both sets of victims are increasingly being turned into instruments in a broader political struggle by camps more invested in defending a cause than confronting the human reality of what these people experienced.

Listening to their testimonies should not be limited to publishing them in an opinion piece or an independent NGO report, though both matter. It must be followed by programs that help those victims recover from what they have been through, and hold the perpetrators accountable. The conditions of Palestinian prisoners inside Israel require a serious, independent investigation. Since Ben Gvir became Israel’s national security minister, and more so after October 7, he has openly boasted of his goal to worsen conditions for prisoners, writing on X in 2024 that it was one of the highest goals he had set for himself in office.

There are no winners in the battle for narratives. Each side will continue defending its own version of events for years to come. But every hour spent arguing over the credibility of a journalist or the politics of an NGO is an hour not spent listening to survivors describe what was done to them.

The testimonies discussed here—those of Palestinian prisoners and those of October 7 survivors and hostages—are not competing claims that cancel one another out. They are separate accounts of violence committed against human beings by specific perpetrators, and they demand serious investigation, accountability, and long-term support for those who survived them. The political camps that have turned these testimonies into ammunition would do far more for the people they claim to defend if they focused on that instead.