A recent United Nations report paints a troubling picture of life for women and girls in Gaza. The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) documents rising levels of gender-based violence, including an increase in forced and child marriages.

The report notes:

“Adolescent girls aged 12 to 17 are increasingly facing forced marriage, sexual exploitation, and abuse.”

One of those girls is Bissan. She was just 16 when she was forced to marry:

“My father was killed during the war, and we lost our home and all support. We were displaced and struggling to survive. Soon after, I was forced to marry because my family believed it was the only way to protect and provide for us. I was expected to become a wife overnight. When I tried to escape, I was forced to return. I did not want this life.”

Bissan is not alone. Reported cases of gender-based violence in Gaza rose by 60 percent during the first six months of 2026.

Meanwhile, reports of forced and child marriage increased by 123 percent between January and June.

In part, the increase may reflect improved reporting. Before the ceasefire last October, the war made it difficult for many cases of gender-based violence, forced marriage, and child marriage to be reported at all.

But the effects are clearly spreading, and as reconstruction stalls, women and girls are paying the price.

According to UN Protection Cluster monitoring for the first quarter of 2026, gender based violence affected 53 percent of those who they assessed. Meanwhile, child marriage affected 46 percent of assessed households.

The war in Gaza has left its people in a very tough predicament. As of this month, 65 percent of households are still living in tents or makeshift shelters. Hundreds of thousands are living in low-lying displacement sites near the shoreline, vulnerable to flooding when it rains in winter.

The economic picture is similarly bleak. Gaza’s unemployment rate stood at 78 percent last year, according to UNCTAD data. That’s the highest unemployment rate anywhere in the world.

According to a report from Al Jazeera earlier this year:

For many young men and women, jobs are nowhere to be found, forcing them to pace the streets or wait endlessly for a chance to work.

“I’ve been looking for a job for months,” Mohammed Shatat told Al Jazeera. “Even temporary work is hard to find. Every day feels the same… I go from place to place, asking, hoping, but there’s nothing.”

And although the ceasefire meant that significantly more food and humanitarian aid started entering Gaza—with aid entering the strip increasing over 50% according to the World Health Organization—the latest IPC assessment still projects that more than 1.4 million people—around 67 percent of Gaza’s population are facing crisis levels of food insecurity.

And yet, in recent months, a very different picture of Gaza has increasingly been presented.

Since the ceasefire took effect late last year, a number of Israeli officials and commentators have argued that the scale of Gaza’s hunger crisis was exaggerated—and in some cases that the famine declared in 2025 never really existed at all.

That argument gained momentum after a nutrition survey conducted in June found relatively low levels of acute malnutrition among children in areas of Gaza researchers could access. Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon said the findings showed that the “false narrative” of famine was falling apart.

The trouble is that not only does this narrative not match up with the statistics on food security from the IPC, but it also doesn’t fit with the horrific reality of women and girls being traded for food, either.

And the issue isn’t solely about getting more food into Gaza. It’s also about making sure that the food that gets in is properly distributed, and not stolen by Hamas or other militant groups.

In July this year, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, Ramiz Alakbarov, accused Hamas of obstructing humanitarian operations. He said armed personnel affiliated with Hamas had forcibly entered a food distribution point in Jabalia and a World Food Programme warehouse, where two truck drivers were reportedly assaulted. Alakbarov said the episode was not isolated, but reflected an “increasingly dangerous pattern” of intimidation, obstruction and attempted smuggling.

Gaza desperately needs serious progress on reconstruction and economic revitalization today.

With a competent government—including the end of Hamas rule and the full implementation of the Board of Peace transition plan—I believe most of Gaza’s problems are fully addressable.

For women and adolescent girls, Gaza’s widespread mismanagement has had brutal, deeply personal consequences.

When families have no stable home, little income, and not enough food, dependence on others for basic survival can leave women and girls more vulnerable to coercion and abuse. The rise in forced and child marriage is a direct byproduct of that reality.

None of this excuses what is happening. Desperation may help explain why forced and child marriage is increasing, but it does not justify it. Poverty does not excuse forcing a child into marriage. Neither does hunger or displacement. No matter how desperate the circumstances, forcing a girl to marry is an unconscionable abuse committed against her—those responsible must be held accountable for the harm they inflict.

But laws and prosecutions alone cannot address the conditions that are making them so vulnerable in the first place.

Gaza needs functioning government, reconstruction, jobs, secure housing, and a system capable of protecting its people. Without that, families will continue making desperate decisions under desperate circumstances, and girls like Bissan will continue paying the price.

She was 16 years old when she lost her father and her home. Then she was forced to marry. She was a child, too young to consent to what was being done to her. When she tried to escape, she was forced to return. That is what these statistics look like in the life of one girl. And if Gaza is left in its current state, there will be more like her.

On September 12, Turkish authorities launched a nationwide operation called “My Family Is Safe,” part of a government campaign presented as an effort to protect traditional family values. Within days, authorities had blocked more than 180 social media accounts. The crackdown began with LGBTQ organizations and university groups, but quickly expanded to include journalists and Amnesty International Turkey. Women’s rights organizations that had publicly expressed solidarity with those targeted were soon caught up in it as well.

If the goal were simply to silence LGBTQ organizations, there was no need for a nationwide operation. They have had almost zero public visibility for years, and Istanbul Pride has been banned for over a decade. So why now?

The timing was no coincidence. Within days, Erdoğan’s inner circle was making the government’s intentions clear.

On September 17, chief presidential adviser Mehmet Uçum announced that Erdoğan would run “one last time” and floated April 16, 2028, as the election date. There is, however, the rather inconvenient matter of Turkey’s constitution: presidents are limited to two terms, and Erdoğan is already serving his second.

The next day, Justice Minister Akın Gürlek told party members that the next election would be held “to re-elect our president,” rather neatly settling the question of its intended outcome.

The raids came first; the statement five days later. In Turkish politics, that sequence is rarely an accident.

Read together, it feels as if the next election season has just kicked off. But why start it this way? To understand that, we need to look more closely at Erdoğan’s peculiar position.

The next election will decide whether Erdoğan’s era continues into a fourth decade. He enters it at his strongest in terms of control over the institutions, and at his weakest in terms of popular support. Things did not look great for him, even before the last election. In 2023, despite near-total control of the state and the media, a questionable rival, and a pre-election spending spree so large that the country is still paying for it, he barely made it, falling short of 50 percent in the first round and winning only in a runoff.

Now, three years later, he finds himself in even more dire straits, with the latest poll averages putting his governing bloc at around 41 percent of parliamentary support. Even after three years of (semi-)austerity, inflation still sits above 30 percent, so he can no longer afford the same playbook, at least not at the same scale. And the cracks within his own ranks, driven by the failing economy, are widening.

The most dramatic change since 2023 has come from Erdoğan’s main opposition. After losing the presidential election that year, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) made a striking comeback under its new leader, Özgür Özel. In the March 2024 local elections, it won eight of Turkey’s 10 largest cities and dealt Erdoğan’s ruling party its worst electoral defeat in more than two decades.

Then the courts intervened. On May 21 of this year, an appeals court annulled the party congress that had elected Özel and reinstated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, his predecessor and the man Erdoğan defeated in 2023. Three days later, riot police raided the CHP’s headquarters. The fight eventually split the opposition, with Özel and 90 lawmakers leaving to form the New Party. Prosecutors are now seeking to strip Özel of his parliamentary immunity.

The 2024 local elections gave the opposition control of Turkey’s largest municipalities and their budgets. Today, more than 40 opposition mayors have been arrested, removed from office, or replaced by government-appointed trustees, and at least 17 elected on the CHP ticket have defected to Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), often after investigations were opened against them. As we head into the next election, many of the cities voters handed to the opposition in 2024 will be run by people they did not elect.

And the defections are still coming. Just last night, nine more opposition mayors joined the AKP, including five from the CHP. Erdoğan personally welcomed them into the party and pinned AKP badges to their jackets.

Then there is the constitutional question. Erdoğan can run again only if parliament calls an early election, which requires 360 votes. His alliance is roughly 30 short.

Uçum’s plan relies on a technicality. Parliament would call an early election in February 2028, with the vote on April 16, only weeks before the regularly scheduled date. Because the constitution sets no minimum on how early an early election must be, as long as parliament acts before the regular election calendar begins, that is enough to give Erdoğan another run. Technically, parliament would be cutting his second term short after four years and eleven months, and the constitution would compensate him for this “injustice” with another run. It would also allow the government to go to the polls with a fresh 2028 budget, as Uçum openly admitted.

The missing votes are not hard to find. The opposition has demanded early elections for months; it can hardly vote against one now. The trap is built into the rules: every opposition “yes” hands Erdoğan his eligibility, and every “no” looks like fear of the ballot box. Calling the election is the easy part. Winning it is the problem.

Taken one by one, each of these cases has its own legal file and official explanation. Taken together, they show the machinery of the state being used to cripple Erdoğan’s opponents before voters ever reach the ballot box.

This is where the LGBTQ crackdown fits in. It does two jobs at once. First, it gives Erdoğan a rallying cry for his conservative base. Pro-government newspapers have already framed the issue as a fight to defend the Turkish family against decadence imported from Europe. The message is designed to bring back conservative voters who have drifted away from Erdoğan, largely because of the economy.

Second, it exploits a country already in survival mode. Two years of arrests, trustees, and court cases have pushed nearly every independent actor in Turkey into triage. The New Party is vying for survival, and its leader is fighting to stay out of court. Mayors are wondering who is next on the chopping block. Civil society groups are navigating investigations and frozen accounts, and while journalists increasingly have to weigh every word before they publish.

Everyone is busy saving themselves. In this environment, who has the strength to defend a group with little electoral weight? That is precisely why LGBTQ organizations were chosen. Defending them is costly, and the political payoff is small. The card was played at exactly the right moment.

The women’s movement is a different case. It is one of the most organized forces in Turkey’s independent civil society. When more than 120 women’s organizations signed a declaration opposing the raids, authorities blocked their accounts too. The crackdown had expanded from the original targets to organizations that objected to their treatment.

Ankara also knows that the outside world is no longer paying attention. In July, Europe’s leaders came to Ankara for the NATO summit, shook Erdoğan’s hand, and left. None of them publicly mentioned Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor and the opposition’s presidential candidate, who has been in prison since March 2025. With a war next door in Iran and another still raging in Ukraine, Turkey has become too useful to criticize. If an imprisoned presidential candidate did not merit a mention, Ankara has little reason to expect one over a few blocked accounts. It has rarely operated in a more comfortable international environment.

But the real prize is what disappears from the conversation. Annual inflation stood at 31.5 percent in August, more than three years into an austerity program meant to bring it down. Rent, wages, and pensions should be the country’s focus. This is the issue that could cost Erdoğan the election, and it is the one no one has the energy to talk about.

The next steps are easy to predict. Around the New Year, the government will likely announce generous raises for minimum wage earners and pensioners, perhaps with a gift for those caught in the retirement calendar. The sequence is simple, yet it has worked historically in Turkey: exhaust, silence, sweeten, then vote.

The opposition carries its share of the blame for how well this is working. After İmamoğlu’s arrest last year, I wrote that the balance of courage in Turkey had shifted, and it had. Crowds filled the square outside Istanbul City Hall night after night, and some 15 million people cast ballots in the CHP’s symbolic primary to say İmamoğlu was their candidate. That was an extraordinary reservoir of energy, much of it from citizens who belong to no party but care deeply about democracy.

The opposition failed to turn it into anything lasting.

That energy has since largely depleted, and many of those who once filled the squares have tuned out. By the time riot police fired tear gas inside the headquarters of the party that founded the Republic, only a fraction of those crowds came out.

The government’s latest move lands on that fatigue. Its answer to last year’s courage is not more intimidation, but instead relies on the people’s exhaustion. A society too busy surviving to argue, or to hold on to each other. And a ready-made campaign line: look at them, they can barely manage their own affairs; how could they run a country?

Last year, Turks proved they could still find their courage. The question for 2028 is whether they will still have the energy to use it.

Last week, President Masoud Pezeshkian arrived at the United Nations carrying photographs of dead Iranian children.

He spoke of a school bombed in Minab and civilians killed by American and Israeli attacks, rejecting Donald Trump’s description of the Islamic Republic as a terrorist state and turning the accusation back on the accusers: “We have been the victims of terrorism.”

“We have only defended ourselves,” Pezeshkian said. He spoke of “our innocent people” and ended by declaring that Iran had been hit but had not “bent the knee.”

But who exactly is “we”?

Mere months ago, Iranians took to the streets not to defend the Islamic Republic, but to challenge it. Far from demonstrating against the United States or its allies, they were confronting the very political system Pezeshkian represents. At the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, he intentionally collapsed that distinction. Government, country, and people merged into the same pronouns: “we,” “us,” and “our people.”

Pezeshkian warned of a world in which military power overtakes politics and force becomes a substitute for diplomacy. Yet the political system he represents has allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to grow far beyond the role of a conventional military. The Guards wield enormous influence over Iran’s politics, economy, internal security, and foreign policy. The stunning irony is that Pezeshkian was warning against military power encroaching on politics while representing a system in which it already has.

For Iranians, the contradiction is familiar. The same government warning the world about the dangers of military force has repeatedly used its own security forces to crush dissent at home. And that use of force has not stopped at Iran’s borders.

Much of that activity has been carried out through the IRGC’s Quds Force and its network of armed groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.

But the Islamic Republic has not always worked through proxies.

In June 2022, Turkish authorities arrested five Iranian nationals suspected of planning attacks against Israelis in Istanbul. Turkish media reported that police seized pistols and silencers from houses and hotels used by the suspects. The alleged targets were Israeli tourists and businesspeople. Iran did not immediately respond to the allegations.

This was not an isolated incident. In a 2024 investigation, Reuters identified at least 33 assassination or abduction attempts since 2020 in Europe and the United States that authorities alleged were connected in some way to Iran, Iranian operatives, or people closely linked to the country.

Despite that history, Pezeshkian told the General Assembly:

“No one in this region will enjoy security alone. Either we will build security together, or we will endure insecurity together.”

He chose his words carefully. The statement could be naively read as an appeal for collective security. But coming from the head of a state with a long history of projecting coercive power abroad, that interpretation falls flat.

Pezeshkian framed his message around diplomacy while making the underlying threat unmistakable. If Iran feels insecure, it is prepared to make that insecurity everyone else’s problem.

This is one of the central contradictions of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. It demands respect for Iran’s sovereignty while interfering in other countries through armed groups and its own security apparatus. It condemns military pressure while using military and paramilitary power to pursue its interests across the region.

The same double standard applies to how the Islamic Republic talks about the Iranian people. It now points to their resistance to foreign attacks as evidence of support for the state.

The Islamic Republic wants to have it both ways. When Iranians rise against it, they become rioters, terrorists, or agents of foreign powers. When Iran comes under attack from abroad, those same Iranians are suddenly folded back into the nation, their opposition erased so the state can speak on their behalf.

But a nation’s people and its government are not the same thing. To take the suffering of Iranians under foreign attack and use it as evidence of loyalty to the Islamic Republic is more than dishonest. It turns their pain into political propaganda and their refusal to abandon their country into an endorsement of the state that rules it.

For decades, Iranians have fought their own government for sovereignty over the most basic parts of their lives: their bodies, their clothing, their speech, what they read, what they learn, how they live, and who gets to govern them. That is what makes Pezeshkian casting the Islamic Republic as a defender of Iranian sovereignty so bitterly ironic.

War gives the Islamic Republic cover to redraw the line between loyalty to Iran and loyalty to the regime. Under foreign attack, dissent can be recast as disloyalty, and opponents as allies of the enemy.

But Pezeshkian’s portrait of “our people” conveniently omits the brave Iranians who have spent years demanding something different from the state that claims to represent them. It leaves out the women who took to the streets during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, removing their hijabs and risking arrest, imprisonment, and worse for the right to control their own bodies and lives. It leaves out the protesters killed by security forces, the dissidents and protesters executed by the state, the political prisoners still behind bars, the journalists and activists punished for speaking openly, and the families who have spent years demanding answers for loved ones killed by the government.

These people are not somehow less Iranian because they oppose the Islamic Republic. Their courage, grief, and demands belong to Iran’s story just as much as the suffering Pezeshkian chose to display at the United Nations.

Any claim to speak for “our people” has to include them too.

I lived for decades under the political system Pezeshkian represents. So I hear his words differently than someone listening in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin might.

I understand why parts of his speech can be compelling abroad. Here is the president of a country at war, standing at the United Nations and denouncing American and Israeli power. He speaks of sovereignty and equality. He holds up photographs of dead children and condemns a world in which military force determines who gets heard. To some Western audiences, it can sound like the familiar language of resistance to imperial power.

But Iranians have heard these words before. We have heard the government speak of “resistance” while imprisoning and executing those who resist it. We have heard it defend Iranian sovereignty while denying its own citizens control over their bodies, speech, and lives. We have heard it condemn foreign violence after turning violence on its fellow Iranians, and denounce foreign interference while its own security apparatus wreaks havoc across the Middle East.

That is why the photographs Pezeshkian did not hold up at the United Nations matter as much as those he did.

The people killed in foreign attacks are Iranian. So were the protesters killed for challenging the Islamic Republic. So were those executed by the state. The political prisoners still behind bars are Iranian. So are the women who refused to cover their hair, the families demanding justice for their children, and the millions of people who want a different future for their country.

Iran is bigger than the Islamic Republic. Its people cannot be reduced to the government that rules them.

The Islamic Republic does not get to claim their suffering as proof of their loyalty. And it does not get to turn their love for their country into consent.

On October 6, 2025, Sherif Gaber, a prominent young Egyptian YouTuber, posted the following plea on X:

“I’m in dire need of a change in atmosphere.. and mindset.. and place.. and memories. I’m in need of recovery. I miss the social interactions and connecting with people. There’s something hurt inside me.. I think.”

This was not an ordinary request for a change of scenery. Gaber, who built a massive following as an atheist content creator in the Arab world, spent years in hiding from Egyptian authorities. He was prosecuted repeatedly over his criticism of religion and convicted of blasphemy in absentia, with sentences totaling nine years in prison.

By the time he posted his plea for help, Gaber was still in hiding and facing the prospect of arrest if authorities found him. It would be his last public communication. Shortly after the post, in November 2025, unconfirmed reports emerged that Egyptian authorities had arrested him as part of a broader crackdown on people accused of violating the country’s blasphemy laws. He has not been heard from publicly since.

Gaber had been jailed before. In 2013, while a college student, he was arrested and detained for allegedly “corrupting public morals,” after challenging his professor’s claim that homosexuality was a mental illness and that it was proper to hang homosexuals in the public square. Gaber objected to his professor’s characterization and confronted him in class. After the encounter, Gaber said, “I was insulted, demeaned, and made to fail after I had been at the top of my class.” The controversy eventually reached the university’s rector, who forwarded it to the local prosecutor, who arrested Gaber for promoting “deviant” behavior.

In one of his videos, Gaber recounts his experience spending a few days in Egypt’s notorious jail system:

“Imagine living in a 9-square-meter room with more than 20 people. Sleeping on your side if you can. Eating only once a day some stale rotten bread and a piece of cheese unfit for human beings, as you keep counting the time minute by minute.” He hints at sexual abuse by guards who “disrespected every part of me,” then pauses to regain his composure.

Far from breaking him, his imprisonment gave him clarity about his lifelong mission:

“Even after everything I’ve endured, I can’t hold a grudge against anyone,” he said in a 2018 reflection video. “It’s unreasonable to expect those raised in a toxic environment with flawed beliefs to recognize those flaws on their own—unless an external influence opens their eyes. They need a spark to help them see what those around them fail to see. Following my imprisonment, I decided to become that spark—someone who says what people are forbidden to hear and teaches what they are forbidden to know.”

In another country, or in another Egypt, Gaber could have found conventional success as an educator or a documentary filmmaker. But those paths were closed to him, so he turned to YouTube and found digital success as both.

Online, he hoped to bypass men like his professor and build a direct relationship with his audience. By late 2025, his channel had more than 520,000 subscribers, making it the largest Arabic-language atheist channel on YouTube, with videos that regularly exceed a million views.

He used his channel to promote gender equality and intellectual freedom, among other things, and to dispel widely held prejudices and superstitions. In one video, he implored Arab women not to accept a subordinate status: “How could you accept living such a life?” In others, he debunked stories of miracles and demonic possessions. He taught his audiences about the theory of evolution, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy and the history of science to show that the Quran’s supposed scientific discoveries are either untrue or borrowed from more knowledgeable sources. He went on an academic deep dive into the history of the hijab to argue that it did not always have the sacrosanct hold it does now, and he introduced viewers to scholarly works arguing that the Quran, far from being handed down directly by God, heavily copied Syriac Christian texts. For many Arabic-speaking young people, his channel was one of the few places they could engage with these questions and the research behind them. Gaber stayed true to his original vision to “teach people what they are forbidden to know.”

He also used humor as a communication tool, acting out skits and tackling questions like the problem of evil. Gaber parodied the keyboard jihadists ever-present on Egyptian social media, and mocked the Islamic fundamentalists living in the West who want to censor and imprison him while they themselves are protected by the West’s secular laws and institutions. The scripts are cleverly written, well produced, and undoubtedly a large part of why his messages traveled so far. At the height of his online fame, both Al Azhar and the Egyptian Coptic Church felt the need to release statements condemning the spread of atheism among the youth.

Gaber’s influence on the Arab youth is hard to measure, but his viewership count speaks for itself. Gaber himself seems to think that the pressure to arrest him is itself a sign of his impact: “This system is so fragile that if it didn’t persecute those who criticize it, then it will fall. The system is not based on science, nor logic, nor conviction, nor even love. The basis that holds this system together today is intimidation and persecution of anyone who criticizes it.”

The hostile videos in response to his work speak to his impact. Each of his uploads drew attention from Egypt’s online inquisitors and heresy hunters, but Gaber took their zeal as yet another indication of weakness: “When your work makes a dominant cultural majority react as though they are an embattled minority, that’s how you know that you’re bringing about real change,” he said in one video.

When one of his critics, convinced that Gaber’s videos were too well-produced to be the work of one man, accused him of being a Freemason puppet, Gaber responded with an extravagant 15-minute skit in which he meets his “handlers” (all played by himself) around a table in a dark, smoky room to debate what to do now that they’ve been “discovered.” “We are here to spread freedom and corrupt the public’s morals,” all the agents around the table say in unison at one point in the video. He invented a screenwriter named Levy, which he also voices, to playfully mock the recurring accusation that he’s secretly working for Israel.

Despite his characteristic sarcasm, there is a remarkable quality of innocence and earnestness in his work: “I won’t force anyone to listen to me, nor threaten them with hellfire if they don’t. I will simply speak. That is all I need to do.” He has the simple and convincing aura of someone who truly believes the values taught in an intro to science class: that a claim survives on its evidence or it doesn’t, and that no title, however sacred, exempts an idea from having to prove itself: “If an idea is true, it needs neither reward nor punishment to be convincing.”

Those platitudes about the marketplace of ideas, so often invoked to defend one’s allies and discarded the moment they might protect someone else, were convictions Gaber actually lived by. He built an entire career around the belief that ideas should survive or fail on their merits, and eventually received a prison sentence for putting that belief into practice.

Gaber never hid his atheism. That transparency made him an easy, and eventually favorite, target for one man in particular: Al-Haytham Hashem Saad, a lawyer affiliated with the Salafist Al-Nour Party, who made arresting and silencing Gaber a personal obsession of his. In 2018, Saad filed a complaint accusing Gaber of “assaulting the Islamic religion” and “mocking the divine self and the Prophet.” Six years later, Saad’s lawsuit produced the sentence that landed him in prison. Saad called the verdict “a vindication of the values of Egyptian society.”

Gaber’s case did not happen in isolation. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) documented that the campaign began in mid-September 2025, with the arrest of another YouTuber known as the “Mufti of Humanity”—Maged Zakaria Abdel Rahman—who was held incommunicado for ten days before his family learned where he was. Security forces then moved outward, arresting people simply for appearing as guests on his channel or posting in a Facebook group called the Arab Atheists Network and Forum. By January 2026, EIPR had documented 26 people charged in that case alone, on charges of “joining a group founded in violation of the constitution and the law” and “publicly assaulting one of the religions whose rites are practiced openly.” One prisoner died in custody; fellow inmates reported it to prosecutors in January 2026. Egyptian authorities have offered no explanation. Only a few weeks after Zakaria’s arrest, Sherif Gaber disappeared, bringing the total number of people EIPR tracked under this single campaign to 52 in just three months.

Egypt’s government has released such prisoners before, but only when there were reputational costs to keeping them detained. It responded when the University of Bologna claimed the Coptic human rights activist Patrick Zaki as its own, and when Vienna’s Central European University did the same for Ahmed Samir Santawy. It responds to diplomatic pressure tied to money it needs, and to the embarrassment of being singled out by Western educational institutions that it desperately wants to be associated with.

But Sherif Gaber has no foreign passport, no foreign enrollment, no government invested in bringing him home. What he can count on instead is the admiration of fans like myself, and the solidarity of the small number of organizations, like the one running this publication, that share his commitment to intellectual freedom without qualification. Scientific and research institutions exist, in principle, to defend exactly this: the right to question, to publish, to follow evidence wherever it leads, regardless of whose doctrine it offends. If that commitment means anything, it should extend to the man now imprisoned for practicing it in public.

In October 2025, Egypt joined Horizon Europe, the European Union’s roughly €95 billion research and innovation funding program, becoming only the second African country admitted, despite concerns over academic freedom. Reporters Without Borders ranks Egypt thirteenth from the bottom worldwide, between Cuba and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, foreign universities are already embedded in Egyptian higher education through private institutions. The German University in Cairo is a private Egyptian university backed academically by German public universities such as Ulm and Stuttgart. The British University in Egypt has its degrees validated by partner UK universities. The American University in Cairo regularly receives U.S. government funding.

Every one of these institutions claims to stand for the values Gaber has risked prison for: free inquiry, the right to question inherited belief, the right to follow an argument wherever it leads. None have condemned his arrest. They should, and they should do so loudly.

Before he disappeared, Gaber mourned his channel’s original aspirations in his last YouTube video:

“I wanted to travel the world with you, to explore it all through my camera, and to show you how beautiful this world really is. I wanted to take you to museums, show you the fossils, and have you all see that there is much to the world that we don’t fully understand.”

Instead of exploring the museums of the world, that young man is likely sleeping tonight in an overcrowded Egyptian prison cell, facing the possibility that the years he hoped to spend discovering the world will instead be spent behind bars.

It sounds absurd, but last week the mainstream pro-Israel establishment and parts of the radical pro-Palestine movement actually agreed on something. They had found a common target.

The film is NAZA, an 80-minute investigative documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land. Drawing on testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, many of whom carried out their roles remotely, the film examines the technological and bureaucratic system behind Israel’s war in Gaza and how, the filmmakers argue, it turned mass civilian death into an operational feature of the war rather than an accident. NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere and later won the festival’s Special Jury Prize.

The backlash began almost before the applause died down. And it came from two camps that rarely find themselves on the same side of the Israel-Palestine debate. Yet both are attacking a film they haven’t actually seen.

Israeli politicians and journalists responded with a wave of attacks on the film and its directors. Naftali Bennett, former prime minister and now a leading candidate in Israel’s 2026 election, called it “a horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters.” Avigdor Lieberman, former defense minister and head of Yisrael Beiteinu, called the directors “Israel’s enemies” who “took the war that was forced upon Israel after the October 7 massacre and turned it into a spectacle of slander and blood libels against the State of Israel, against the IDF, and against our magnificent fighters!” Culture Minister Miki Zohar went further, accusing the two directors of treason against the state and threatening to strip them of their Israeli citizenship.

It is hard to ignore the trend toward radicalism in Israeli society since October 7th. It is harder still to ignore how little space the current political spectrum leaves for that conversation. From Netanyahu’s coalition and the religious extremists within it to the opposition itself, none of them seem willing to discuss the war crimes and serious accusations leveled against the army for its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.

Some go further, treating the very acts behind those accusations as something to celebrate. Five Israeli reservists accused of sexually abusing and torturing a Palestinian prisoner, after a leaked video appeared to show the assault, were publicly embraced by some supporters. Others have called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza or starving its roughly 2 million residents. Meanwhile, the government has pursued plans for what it calls the “voluntary migration” of Gazans, which critics describe as a euphemism for making conditions in the Strip so intolerable that Palestinians have little choice but to leave.

Netanyahu’s opposition, for their part, rejects accusations of war crimes or crimes against humanity outright. Some have gone further, invoking one of history’s most notorious antisemitic tropes, the blood libel, to discredit Jewish, Zionist Israelis who want to entertain this conversation at all.

In doing so, the political establishment imagines a world that stopped on October 7, and that what happened that day justifies everything that followed. But what does it say about a democratic state when politicians threaten to strip dissidents of their citizenship because they are angry about what their own army has done? At minimum, threatening citizenship over political dissent is the reflex of an authoritarian state, not a democratic one.

On the other side, radical figures in the pro-Palestine movement attacked the directors for criticizing Hamas. Ali Abunimah, who runs The Electronic Intifada, went after Yuval Abraham after Abraham criticized Hamas. Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, who has expressed support for Hamas in social media posts and called October 7th "a spectacular moment that shocked the world," argued that the filmmakers had done nothing to deserve Palestinian gratitude simply because they had not pulled the trigger themselves.

For Bennett, Liberman, and the pro-Israel establishment, the offense is that the film exists at all, that two Israelis would stand in Venice and accuse their own army of the deliberate mass killing of civilians, and that the conversation should center solely around the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th.

For Abunimah, the offense is closer to the opposite: decrying that an Israeli who condemns both Hamas and the occupation is being given a platform at all. The simple fact of condemning Hamas, a terrorist group that has committed myriad horrors against Palestinians and Israelis alike, is enough to discredit Yuval in his eyes.

For Abulhawa and others in the radical pro-Palestine movement, the criticism centers on the directors’ identities as Israelis, and on the sense that the world listens to Israeli voices in a way it has never listened to Palestinian ones.

It is worth saying plainly, from a Palestinian and pro-Palestinian perspective, that the atrocities of October 7 were horrific and inflicted real harm on Israelis. Saying so takes nothing away from what has happened since. There is now an extensive record of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank, and the scale of death, displacement, and destruction in Gaza has far exceeded that of October 7. One atrocity does not cancel out another. NAZA, through the testimony of Israelis who participated in the war, adds another account to that record.

It is also worth confronting figures like Abunimah and Abulhawa from within the pro-Palestinian movement. Their history of antisemitic rhetoric and expressions of support for Hamas have undermined the Palestinian cause they advocate for, both politically and strategically. Their response to NAZA follows the same pattern, defending Hamas and enforcing ideological purity rather than engaging with a film centered on Palestinian suffering and the testimony of Israelis who took part in the war.

There is one argument from the pro-Palestine side worth taking seriously: that Gaza’s residents have been saying for years what this film now documents, that they were being targeted as civilians rather than treated as collateral damage. Yuval, the film’s director, has already acknowledged as much himself.

But survivors’ testimony alone has never been enough to move the needle. It requires the testimony of the people who carried it out, and Palestinians have never had access to those people—until now.

If the objection to NAZA is ultimately about who made it, there is a basic tension here. The film puts Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on the record describing what they witnessed and participated in, and it brings those accounts of Palestinian suffering to an international audience. Dismissing that work because its directors are Israeli risks discounting the testimony itself.

That is especially difficult to justify when neither the pro-Israel critics nor the pro-Palestinian figures attacking NAZA have actually seen the film.

For the pro-Palestinian movement, the response also exposes the limits of boycott politics and ideological purity tests. There are liberal Israelis, including the filmmakers behind NAZA, willing to confront what their own military and government have done and to support Palestinian self-determination. Treating them as unacceptable partners because they are Israeli narrows the space for political cooperation. So does defending Hamas despite the atrocities it committed against Israelis and Palestinians, or allowing antisemitic rhetoric into a movement advocating for Palestinian rights. Abunimah and Abulhawa have both faced criticism on those grounds, and their attacks on a film they have not seen only sharpen that contradiction.

There is no path out of this conflict that does not eventually require Israelis and Palestinians to work with people on the other side. That means Palestinians need Israeli partners willing to confront what their government and military have done, just as Israelis need Palestinian partners willing to condemn the killing of innocent civilians and reject groups like Hamas.

That cooperation will always be uncomfortable. People will disagree about history what justice should look like. But if the standard is that no Israeli can be an ally to Palestinians, or that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is a betrayal of Israel, then there is nowhere to go.

The filmmakers behind NAZA have chosen to listen to Palestinians, examine the actions of their own side, and put testimony from Israeli soldiers before the public. Palestinians do not have to agree with them on everything to recognize the value of that work. Israelis do not have to accept every conclusion in the film to engage seriously with what those soldiers have said.

Whatever comes next will require more people willing to do that across the divide, not fewer.

Last week, Palestinians received news that the upcoming legislative election previously scheduled for November of this year would be postponed once more.

Jibril Rajoub, the newly elected secretary-general of Fatah, announced the move. Speaking in Ramallah, he told journalists: “There will be no elections... We will proceed to elections after holding a comprehensive Palestinian national dialogue to reach consensus on the mechanisms for conducting them.”

He then suggested that a presidential election could be held first on the basis that “they are easier” and “less costly.”

The last Palestinian legislative election took place in 2006, and the one before that in 1996.

Right now, there is no functioning Palestinian parliament. After Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, the parliament ceased meeting and has not resumed.

Since then, many attempts have been made to revive the democratic process. This is not the first time in recent years that elections have been postponed.

Most recently, elections were scheduled for May 2021, to be followed by a presidential election in July. However, Mahmoud Abbas postponed the process just weeks before the vote was set to take place. The official reason given at the time was Israel’s failure to guarantee that Palestinians in East Jerusalem would be permitted to participate in the election. But many thought that this was a highly dubious explanation. Hamas was in a position to win. Fatah had fractured into three competing factions, while Hamas remained comparatively unified.

But today, we do not see a similar situation. And still, elections have been canceled. In the most recent electoral poll of Palestinians from the Jerusalem Center for Media and Communications, Fatah led with 27.4 percent of those polled. Meanwhile, Hamas was at 7.6 percent. 40.2 percent of those polled said that they would not vote at all.

So Fatah is ahead. Unlike in 2021, fear of losing to Hamas cannot explain why the vote was called off.

Of course, Hamas’s participation is itself controversial. Hamas does not recognize Israel and has never accepted the political framework of the Palestinian Authority which was adopted via the Oslo process during the 1990s. In other words, Hamas is seeking power through institutions created by agreements it does not accept.

This is a fundamental contradiction, and we have seen how badly it has played out in the past.

Allowing an armed group that rejects the peace process and coexistence with Israel to participate in a democratic system has given it the power to derail that very process.

In July of this year, Hamas formally dissolved its de facto government, while agreeing to hand over civilian governance to the new National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. But it has yet to disarm. At the end of July, Hamas and the other armed factions agreed to a Board of Peace roadmap under which power would ultimately be transferred to the new administration and Hamas’ weapons decommissioned. More than a month later, however, that process remains incomplete, and Hamas continues to possess its arsenal.

Palestinians who want to make peace with Israel need to be tougher and more resolute. For the Palestinian Authority to continue canceling elections is unacceptable and is a national shame for Palestinians.

The demise of the Hamas government in Gaza is an opportunity to revive the peace process and rejuvenate Palestinians’ national aspirations on the basis of coexistence alongside Israel.

While achieving a peaceful solution may have become much more difficult in recent years, there is still hope for a negotiated solution.

That same poll from the Jerusalem Center for Media and Communications revealed strong support for a two-state solution, with 47.9 percent of those polled backing it. Meanwhile, 21.7 percent favored a binational Palestinian-Israeli state, while only 18.1 percent favored a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”

Peaceful negotiations with Israel were the preferred path, backed by 55.8 percent of respondents. Another 17.8 percent favored nonviolent resistance, while just 13.3 percent supported an armed intifada.

Any negotiated solution needs a Palestinian government with the democratic legitimacy to speak for its people and the credibility to negotiate peace. Mahmoud Abbas was last elected more than twenty years ago. Palestinians deserve the chance to choose who represents them now.

That means holding elections, without another postponement.

The PA has its own crisis of legitimacy after years without national elections, and public distrust runs high. In an August poll, 83 percent of Palestinians said they believed corruption existed within PA institutions. They should have the opportunity to judge Fatah’s record for themselves at the ballot box.

But elections alone are not enough. Candidates seeking to lead institutions created through the Oslo process should accept the framework those institutions are built on, including recognition of Israel. We have already seen what happens when armed groups exploit democratic institutions while rejecting the agreements underpinning them.

Palestinians have waited twenty years for this election. They should not be asked to wait any longer.

Twenty-five years after al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington and killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, I keep coming back to a question that should be easier to answer by now: where are we?

Administrations have come and gone, each overseeing wars across the region and promising a different future. Terrorist leaders have been killed, and governments have fallen. Yet we are still trying to build a more peaceful relationship between the United States and the Middle East, one in which the next war does not always seem to be around the corner.

For those of us now in our thirties, September 11th 2001 changed everything. That day reshaped the world we grew up in and much of what came after. For me personally, I experienced the US invasion of my home country, Iraq, even though there was no evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to the attacks—and the war that followed has come to define my life and my life’s work.

As an Iraqi-American, I find it impossible to separate what Americans experienced in those years from what people across the Middle East did as a result of the wars and foreign policy decisions that followed.

Meaningful progress has been made since then. Al-Qaeda is not the organization it was in 2001, and weakening terrorist organizations is important. But weakening them is not the same as eliminating the threat. Al-Qaeda’s network has become more decentralized, with powerful affiliates operating far beyond the country that once served as its principal sanctuary; they now have a presence in Mali, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. Not strong enough to destroy the United States, but still strong enough to take many innocent lives, including in Europe—not to mention their pesky habit of disrupting global trade.

The War on Terror forced terrorist groups to change their tactics, but it did not eliminate their ambitions. They are now scattered across the region, wreaking havoc not only on their enemies abroad but on the lives of millions of people who simply want to live in peace.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan is once again being governed by the Taliban. After two decades of the American-led war, the movement that was forcibly removed from power following September 11 returned with a vengeance in August 2021. Anyone who hoped a second chance would moderate the Taliban need only look at what it has done to Afghan women and girls. Girls have been excluded from secondary education, women from universities, and restrictions on their rights and freedoms have been brutally enforced at nearly every turn. Afghanistan is once again becoming a breeding ground for extremist groups that share al-Qaeda’s ideology and would carry out another 9/11-style attack if given the opportunity.

But not everything accomplished during those twenty years was meaningless, despite what the pundits might say.

For a while, it seemed possible that a more amicable relationship between the West and the region was developing. The Abraham Accords opened diplomatic channels I didn’t think I would see realized in my lifetime. Whatever their limitations, they offered something worth taking seriously: countries that once considered trading with one another taboo began doing business together.

Before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, I thought a plausible path existed toward a different and renewed Middle East. Not a democratic paradise or a region suddenly free of authoritarianism, sectarianism, or unresolved conflicts. But one in which investment, technology, trade, and development might gradually become more important than permanent confrontation, or what I liked to refer to as a “post-ideological Middle East,” where trade and business come first, and ideologies and lofty ideals are either irrelevant or become secondary.

October 7 shattered my confidence in that trajectory.

Hamas bears responsibility for its atrocities. Nothing about Palestinian suffering excuses the deliberate murder of civilians or the taking of hostages. But recognizing that responsibility does not require pretending that every Israeli decision afterward was necessary, wise, or compatible with a peaceful regional future.

The devastation in Gaza and the political fallout from Israel’s response have dealt a serious blow to the prospect of reconciliation. People across the region have lost trust in the United States and its allies, and the polling reflects it. Arab Barometer’s recent findings describe a serious erosion of Western credibility across the region, with Gaza being the primary influencing factor.

October 7th reminded us harshly that we cannot build a durable regional peace while treating Palestinian lives and political aspirations as an inconvenience. Peace is also impossible so long as armed movements believe they have the right to sabotage it. Both realities have to be acknowledged, even though recognizing one is still too often treated as dismissing the other.

The consequences now extend well beyond Israel and Palestine. The war with Iran has exposed Gulf countries to attacks and forced uncomfortable questions about their security relationships. Iranian retaliation against regional infrastructure has driven a reassessment of what dependence on American protection actually means.

Iran and its armed proxies are responsible for the attacks they choose to carry out, and criticizing American strategy does not absolve them. But their responsibility does not remove Washington’s obligation to think seriously about the consequences for its partners.

In February, Israel and the United States struck Iran. Iran responded by launching missiles and drones at Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria. For people across the region, that hardly inspires confidence in the security the United States is supposed to provide. When America enters another war in the Middle East, people have learned to expect that their own lives may soon get worse.

We shouldn’t abandon our alliances. But rebuilding trust will take a long time.

Neither American party has offered a convincing account of the past twenty-five years, much less a compelling vision for the next twenty-five.

The Obama administration’s nuclear deal, in my view, helped Iran more than it helped the United States or the region at large. It imposed real restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, and international inspectors confirmed that the regime was implementing its commitments. But Iran received nuclear-related sanctions relief without first being required to dismantle its regional proxy networks or abandon its support for armed groups.

My objection is not that diplomacy should never have been attempted. It is that the bargain gave Tehran economic breathing room without securing a corresponding retreat from its regional ambitions. Obama himself acknowledged that the deal was not contingent on Iran changing its regional behavior. Washington could point to limits on centrifuges while Tehran could keep supporting the forces destabilizing its neighbors. That was a narrow arms-control achievement, not the strategic success the United States needed.

And the Republicans have not supplied a viable alternative. Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018; Biden subsequently tried and failed to restore it. The succession of diplomatic initiatives, sanctions, and pressure campaigns did not produce durable results.

Just because the targets are legitimate doesn’t mean military action is always the best choice.

Destroying a missile launcher can be necessary, and killing a dangerous commander can prevent further violence. But we never have an answer to the political questions that inevitably follow. Who governs? What incentives change? What arrangement makes another war less likely? What, exactly, would allow us to say the mission was accomplished? We’re seeing this play out in Iran right now. Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated along with other notorious IRGC commanders. What has actually changed for the better since then?

My concern about American and Israeli policy is not that force can never be justified. It is that visible military achievements are too easily presented as substitutes for a sustainable political outcome. It’s all posturing without proper planning. Governments compete to declare victory while their citizens suffer the consequences of wars launched without a serious plan for what comes next.

There is also something misleading about describing all of this as a conflict between America and “the Muslim world.” There is no single “Muslim world” with one set of interests. The people seeking an education, building businesses, or resisting religious coercion are not interchangeable with the governments and armed movements claiming to speak for them.

Treating them as one camp concedes far too much to the extremists.

I worry that the era that began when my generation was in school will continue throughout our lives. We may spend our middle age discussing new versions of the same questions, with different leaders assuring us that this negotiation or final round of pressure will settle everything.

I would rather be wrong.

There are reasons to believe the region can move in a better direction, and they deserve far more attention. The economic agreements announced between the United States and Gulf countries involve trillions of dollars in proposed investment and economic exchange. The Trump administration deserves credit where it advances that kind of cooperation. These economic relationships are good and should be encouraged. They do not make the failures elsewhere any less real.

Americans and people in the Middle East have more reasons than we realize to care about one another’s success. A more peaceful Middle East means fewer American lives lost to wars in the region, while people who live there have more freedom to build their lives without the constant threat of another conflict.

Investment agreements alone won’t get the job done.

That is why the people working every day to make their communities more peaceful and prosperous deserve far more of our attention and support.

That means investing in educators who give young people access to knowledge their governments or religious authorities would deny them. It means standing behind independent journalists willing to challenge propaganda, and entrepreneurs creating livelihoods that cross borders. It means giving writers, translators, and local organizations the resources to defend individual freedom and make the case for coexistence in their own communities and their own languages.

Not every scholarship will steer someone away from extremism, and not every job will prevent violence. But when more people have something to lose and can build a future for their families, extremist groups have fewer grievances and fewer desperate circumstances to exploit. Over time, that makes peaceful societies easier to build and harder to tear apart.

For Americans, I’m not suggesting blind charity toward a troubled region. A more peaceful Middle East is good for the people who live there, and it is good for Americans, too.

Twenty-five years ago, I was just a kid in Iraq. I had no idea that the attacks in New York and Washington would help set in motion events that would impact every aspect of my life. I grew up under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and through the invasion that followed. After that came years of violence. Al-Qaeda and other militias moved into neighborhoods like mine. People I loved were killed. I eventually left Iraq and came to the United States as a refugee.

I have spent my entire adult life trying to make sure the next generation does not grow up the same way.

That is why I care so much about education and economic opportunity. It is also why I care about giving people access to ideas that extremists and authoritarian governments would rather keep from them. I learned early that military force can remove a threat, but it cannot build the society that comes afterward.

Twenty-five years after September 11, we owe the victims more than remembrance. We also owe ourselves an honest accounting of what followed, and what our responsibility is moving forward.

Military force was sometimes necessary, and some of it worked. But defeating an enemy and making it harder for the next one to take its place are different jobs. We invested enormously in the first… and never took the second seriously enough.

I have spent most of my life watching what happens when that second part is neglected. I do not want another generation of kids in Iraq or America growing up thinking war is simply the natural order of things. If the next twenty-five years are going to be better, far more attention has to go to the people already building something else, even when the odds are stacked against them.

Israelis will go to the polls on October 27, in what may be one of the most consequential elections in the country’s history.

Four issues are likely to decide how the ballots are cast: security, the question of Haredi conscription (should ultra-Orthodox Jewish men be required to serve in the Israeli military), the cost of living, and the continuing fight over the government’s efforts to give elected officials greater power over the judiciary. For Palestinians watching from Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora, the calculus is entirely different. What matters to us is where each party stands on a Palestinian state, how it intends to handle the settlements and settler terrorism, and what it has in store for Gaza in a post-war scenario.

Since October 7 and the war that followed, Israel’s parties have settled into three broad camps on Palestinian statehood. Two are held by the parties competing for power. The third belongs to a small minority: the Standing Together movement and the four Arab-led parties running for the Knesset.

The first camp sees the very idea of a Palestinian state as a threat and says so plainly. This is where Likud sits as the standard bearer of the right. It is also where Gadi Eisenkot has positioned his new centrist party, Yashar, which has topped several recent polls as the largest single faction in the Knesset, exceeding the Likud, and Eisenkot himself led Netanyahu for the Prime Minister position in many polls. After the United Arab List’s Mansour Abbas called for an end to the occupation and the recognition of a Palestinian state, Eisenkot answered on X: “There is no Palestinian state, and in the government we will form, no Palestinian state will arise.”

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s joint list, Beyachad, occupies the same camp, though the two men arrived there by different paths. Bennett has spent years building a public record of opposition to Palestinian statehood and has said he stands “against giving away an inch of land.”

Lapid has at times loosely gestured toward a two-state solution, but when the two merged their parties this year, aides made clear that the Palestinian question simply isn’t on the table. What unites them is a shared refusal to address it.

The religious Zionist camp needs no such hedging. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism reject Palestinian statehood, full-stop. They support extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and expanding the settlements there.

The second camp opposes the occupation but avoids explicitly endorsing a two-state solution or offering a viable alternative.

This is the terrain occupied by Yair Golan’s Democrats, what is left of Israel’s organized left. Golan, a former IDF general and a sharp critic of Israel’s conduct during the war, opposes annexation of the West Bank and has built a career distancing himself from the settler right.

But even he has grown careful with the term “two-state solution.” When European governments began recognizing Palestine last year, Golan called the move “destructive” and “extremely damaging” to Israel.

The only parties that support a Palestinian state without qualification are the ones led by Palestinians themselves. Hadash, Israel’s Marxist party, along with Balad, Ta’al, and the Islamist Ra’am, hold a combined handful of seats in a 120-member Knesset, and they are the only voices in Israeli politics still willing to say, plainly, that a Palestinian state should exist.

Netanyahu can no longer present opposition to Palestinian statehood as something that clearly separates him from his main rivals. He is campaigning in an election in which his challengers have adopted part of his position while his coalition partners demand that he take it further.

On Gaza, the coalition and the opposition find rare agreement: there will be no Israeli withdrawal before Hamas disarms.

Others like Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, the Religious Zionism party, and Ofer Winter’s newly launched Amcha Yisrael all speak of what they call “voluntary migration.” Winter, a former IDF general who entered politics just weeks before this draft was written, has said there will be “voluntary emigration from Gaza” and that no Palestinian state will ever exist. What these parties describe as voluntary is, in practice, a policy of making life in Gaza so unbearable that its people leave of their own volition, clearing the path for settlement expansion.

Expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank has been a major priority for the current coalition since it took office in 2022, driven by ideological, religious, and political goals.

In less than four years, the government has authorized more than 100 settlements and moved to reestablish settlements dismantled in 2005, including Homesh, Sa-Nur, Ganim, and Kadim. It has also advanced plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, a strategically located area east of Jerusalem where construction could further divide Palestinian territory and make a contiguous Palestinian state more difficult to establish.

This expansion has coincided with an unprecedented wave of settler violence against Palestinians. Settlers have shot and killed people, set homes, mosques, and vehicles on fire, besieged families in their homes, and kidnapped Palestinians and international activists. There have also been reports of sexual violence, elderly residents being beaten with clubs, and attacks on animals.

The government, for its part, did nothing but issue more support to the settlement enterprise, with the Finance Minister driving its expansion. The National Security Minister went further, expanding gun license eligibility to settlers across dozens of West Bank settlements since 2023, with over 240,000 permits issued under his policy by 2026, even as the same settlements produced a documented average of five attacks against Palestinians a day the previous year.

After drawing widespread condemnation from European and Arab capitals and calls for sanctions from European officials, the government opted to issue soft condemnations but made no policy changes. No one was arrested, financial support continued, and more outposts were awarded to the settlement enterprise, further reinforcing settlers’ sense of impunity.

The difference between the current coalition’s plans and the opposition is that the coalition promises to establish more settlements and fully annex the West Bank. The far-right parties have also called for dismantling the framework established by the Oslo Accords, the 1990s agreements that created limited Palestinian self-government in parts of the West Bank and were intended to lead toward a broader Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

Opposition figures like Gadi Eisenkot and Bennet oppose annexation and projects like the E1, but they have no intention of stopping settlement expansion or evacuating existing settlements. From their point of view, there should be a crackdown on violent settlers because of the damage they cause to Israel’s reputation.

Israelis will spend the coming weeks arguing over who is fit to lead them through a security crisis, a rising cost of living, a fight over the future of the judiciary, and a debate over who serves in uniform.

For anyone watching from Gaza, the West Bank, or the Palestinian diaspora, the stakes are different. We are watching to see how the next Israeli government intends to govern their lives and what political future, if any, it leaves open to them.

Israeli voters are entitled to weigh their considerations as they see fit. But no name on that ballot, from the settler right to the war generals now running as centrists, has any intention to diplomatically address the Palestinian question or the settlement enterprise.

For Palestinians, there are no good options. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank cannot vote in this election, yet its outcome will help determine whether settlements expand, whether annexation advances, what happens to Gaza, and whether any path toward Palestinian statehood stays open. An election in which they have no say will determine their fate.

DAMASCUS, Syria — Earlier this month, a Syrian court sentenced former dictator Bashar al-Assad to death, along with his brother Maher and his cousin Atef Najib. The Assads heard nothing of it; they are still in Russia. Najib was in the room. The man Syrians associate with the arrest and torture of the schoolboys of Daraa in 2011 sat in the courtroom and listened as the judge condemned him.

There were celebrations outside the courthouse and in Daraa, and the families of the dead had earned every minute of them.

Then everyone went quiet.

I expected an argument. Whatever else we disagree about, I assumed a death sentence issued against Assad would set off at least a week of back and forth—not only on social media but in the streets here in Damascus, the taxis, the coffeehouses. People who wanted to see him get the rope. People who oppose the death penalty on principle. People worried about what a rushed trial does to a country that has barely started rebuilding its court system. Instead, the verdict landed like something we had all heard before. Expected. Distant. Almost beside the point.

I cannot even remember how I heard about it. I must have been scrolling through some website or another. And this is Syria, a country famous for its talkative taxi drivers, where a death sentence against Assad is a perfect occasion to strike up a conversation with an expat. Not one of them did. When I tried to start one myself, the drivers were dismissive. It is good, they would say. Then back to silence.

This isn’t because people are afraid. Most of them approved of the sentence. People are indifferent. Assad is living with his family in a luxury apartment in Moscow, and the odds of a Syrian verdict prying him out of it are close to zero. And anyway—how is any of this going to lower prices, create jobs, or stop the crime wave rolling across the country?

That reaction tells you more about the state of the transition than the death sentences do.

People here are busy. Prices are punishing. Garbage sits uncollected. Clinics that limped along last year are worse now. The electricity shortage is becoming a financial burden: a two-month statement can swallow a large piece of a public employee’s salary, and the metering errors have generated demands that families have no conceivable way to pay. The United Nations puts roughly nine out of ten Syrians below the poverty line. That is the audience the verdict was delivered to.

Meanwhile, the public sector has been emptied in waves—ghost workers, regime remnants, administrative dead weight, depending on which justification was on offer that month. Corruption went out the door. So did most of the people who knew how the ministries actually worked. The vacancies have gone to loyalists of the new authorities, many of them sincere, few of them prepared, all of them expected to learn how to do the job while the state tries to survive the week.

We are past the point where improvisation will cut it.

The trial was one example. The charges were historic, but the proceedings were sloppy. Legal monitors flagged thin evidence, a defense that barely functioned, and procedures unequal to the gravity of what was being adjudicated. Human rights groups objected to the death penalty and to the fact that Syria still has no concrete framework for transitional justice at all. We got the showmanship of a historic reckoning without the institutional weight to carry one out.

Which is not to say these men should not have been prosecuted. They should have been prosecuted years ago. But a verdict cannot be made credible by being popular. If due process is treated as optional where guilt is obvious, it will be worth nothing where guilt is contested—and it will be contested soon enough, in cases with murkier defendants that carry far more political weight.

To be fair, the new authorities inherited a wreck: a destroyed economy, hollowed-out institutions, millions of displaced people, a contested map, foreign armies and foreign agendas, and fourteen years of war stacked on top of half a century of dictatorship. Nobody rebuilds in twenty months what the Assads spent decades dismantling. And the government has accomplished real things abroad—recognition, sanctions relief, investment commitments that looked impossible in December 2024.

But the difficulty of the task at hand does not excuse the absence of a plan. A transition means moving deliberately from one political order toward another. It needs a destination, public mileposts, a sequence of reforms, and some standard by which Syrians can judge whether we are getting closer to it or further away. We have a provisional constitutional timetable. We do not have a credible, publicly owned account of what we are transitioning into, or how we are meant to get there together.

Without that, the transitional authorities are just tinkering. Change a tariff. Dismiss a director. Absorb a faction. Reverse the decision. Announce a commission. Improvise a trial. Hope something sticks. And some of it does. But an enormous share of the government’s energy now goes into managing the fallout of its own earlier improvisations turned mistakes.

The problem is not a shortage of good intentions. I think many of these officials are serious people who want the country to succeed. Wanting it is not a vision, though, and gravity of manner is not competence. The ideological blinders they wear are noticeable from Mars. What worries me more is how few of them can say out loud that they are out of their depth, or that they need Syrians from outside their own camp—secular technocrats, independent professionals, political figures with no desire to become anybody’s clients—to help.

I watched a veritable stream of such people come back to the country after Assad fell, some for the first time since the revolution began in 2011, some for the first time in decades. Highly qualified experts in their respective fields, all of them. Most trickled back to their host countries within a few weeks or months. I see very few of them around today.

I am not sure I can come back on a permanent basis myself. So far my interest has been less in paving the way for a return than in spending time with my aging mother. And I expect my fellow expatriates who came home hoping to invest in reconstruction to trickle out the same way, before long.

In less than four months, Syria will celebrate the second anniversary of Assad’s fall. There will be festivities, and the occasion warrants them. But the real test began the next morning, and nearly two years later, we still do not know what Syria is becoming. We have a collection of survival tactics, a handful of diplomatic wins, and a bet that time, money, and international patience will somehow pull a coherent state out of perpetual improvisation.

We are wagering on a miracle, and the transitional authorities currently lack the moral authority to see it come to fruition. I hope I am wrong. But more on that next week.

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…

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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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2 months 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.