The Guardian: Dubai: Princess Haya's flight to UK threatens diplomatic crisis

Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein’s flight to Britain is threatening to provoke a diplomatic crisis as her husband, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and a key UK ally in the Gulf, faces mounting criticism over his family’s treatment of women. [...]

The most notorious disappearance involved the 33-year-old Princess Latifa, Sheikh Mohammed’s daughter, who allegedly escaped Dubai before being seized off the coast of India by commandos last year and forcibly returned home. Emirati authorities dismissed the claims at the time as fiction.

In 2000, another of the sheikh’s daughters, Princess Shamsa, fled from her father’s estate near Chobham, Surrey. She was last seen in August that year on the streets of Cambridge from where she was reportedly abducted by the sheikh’s staff. Cambridgeshire police investigated the incident. [...]

She is believed to be under the protection of a private security firm though there are suggestions that, because of her fears of being kidnapped, a formal request has been made for police protection. Scotland Yard said it did not comment on security details.

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statista: Lebanon Has By Far The Most Refugees Per 1,000 Population

Turkey hosts the most refugees of any country worldwide with 3.7 million in total at the end of 2018, ahead of Pakistan (1.4 million) and Uganda (1.2 million). As a share of the population, however, Lebanon hosts the most by far with 156 per 1,000 of its inhabitants. Jordan comes second with 72 per 1,000 of its population while Turkey rounds off the top three with 45 per 1,000 of its people. Prior to the war in Syria, Lebanon only hosted 8,000 refugees and the huge influx has pushed its socio-economic absorption capacity to the very limit.

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Al Jazeera: How do Palestinians see the Syrian war?

Throughout their long struggle against Zionism, Palestinian political factions have found support in Syria, often maintaining headquarters on its territory. Traditionally it was leftist, nationalist and Baathist movements in Palestine that were closest to Damascus, but as Hamas and Islamic Jihad came to prominence in the early 1990s and developed close relations with Iran, they also started receiving Syrian support. Syria would give Palestinian groups logistical assistance, training, and political backing to the level that no other Arab country would.[...]

This led to a crisis in relations between the Palestinian authorities and the Syrian regime which ultimately ended with the death of Arafat and the rise to power of Mahmoud Abbas. Since then, Syria has pressed for rapprochement, fearing that the Palestinian Authority could move closer to Jordan and Egypt, curbing its influence over the Palestinian issue. [...]

Hamas took a very different position. After much internal deliberation, it chose to leave Syria as a way to demonstrate its rejection of the Syrian regime's brutal crackdown on popular protests. It joined the axis of the Syrian opposition supported by Gulf states, cutting its relations with the regime and angering Iran.

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Haaretz: Saudi King Tells U.S. That Peace Plan Must Include East Jerusalem as Palestinian Capital

The Saudi position was expressed by King Salman during a number of recent communications with senior U.S. officials, as well as in conversations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other Arab leaders in the region. It contradicts many media reports over the past year about a Saudi willingness to adopt Trump’s peace plan even if it is unacceptable to the Palestinians.  [...]

But things have changed in recent months, partly because of the Jerusalem decision that included the moving of the U.S. Embassy to the city — events that were opposed and denounced by Saudi Arabia. [...]

Meanwhile, Jordan and Egypt have also encouraged the administration to only present its peace plan if that plan is fair to the Palestinian side. The Jordanians warned the administration that a plan tilted toward Israel could create unrest in Jordan, forcing Amman to strongly reject it.

“The Trump administration has invested too much in thinking that the Saudis can somehow deliver Middle East peace,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department and Pentagon official who worked on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the Obama administration. The Saudis, Goldenberg added, “don’t have that much leverage over Abbas,” and it was never realistic to expect them to force him into accepting the American peace plan.

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The Atlantic: Jared Kushner’s Middle East Fantasy

The first fantasy is the notion that the obstruction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—who refused to meet with Kushner on his latest trip—can be countered by taking the peace plan “directly to the Palestinian people.” Kushner suggests that Abbas is avoiding him because he’s “scared we will release our peace plan and that the Palestinian people will actually like it.” That’s not likely. Abbas is indeed unpopular with most Palestinians—his approval rating hovers just above 30 percent—but it’s hardly because he’s too hardline on Israel. In our own extensive discussions with Abbas and his negotiating team as White House Middle East advisers during the Obama administration, we found them deterred most of all by the fear they could not sell further concessions to their people, who were seething about years of continued Israeli settlement expansion, land confiscation, and increased limits on Palestinian movement. And that problem is even greater today. In fact, more Palestinians now oppose a two-state solution than support one, and a majority—57 percent—say that such a solution is no longer practical because of Israeli settlement expansion, which now extends deep into the West Bank. Over 35 percent of Palestinians now support a one-state solution—in other words, a single country with an Arab majority and equal rights for all—a solution increasingly appealing to Palestinians under the age of 30. [...]

But Trump has abandoned even the veneer of objectivity. Just last month, he unilaterally gave Israel one of its most coveted prizes in negotiations, recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, without getting anything in return. To make it worse, he then celebrated the unilateral move of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—a move opposed by 128 countries at the United Nations—with a big ceremony organized just one day before Palestinians observe the nakba, the catastrophe of their expulsion in 1948. The embassy ceremony was attended by dozens of Republican-only members of Congress and included speeches by evangelical pastors known primarily for bigoted remarks against Mormons, Jews, and Muslims, suggesting the whole thing was more about domestic politics than Middle East peace.

While dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed in clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces, the Trump administration chose neither to express sympathy for the Palestinians killed nor to join international calls for Israeli restraint. Trump has, on the other hand, cut financial assistance for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) out of pique that the Palestinians have not given him the requisite “appreciation or respect,” as if humanitarian aid, even when it serves U.S. national interests, should be awarded in return for flattery. His administration has offered unconstrained support for settlements, with an ambassador who has fought against use of the word “occupation” and refers to “Judea and Samaria,” as favored by Israeli settlers, instead of traditional U.S. references to the West Bank. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Palestinians stopped talking to the administration. It is hard to see how the United States under Trump will ever be seen as an honest broker, or be able to go around Abbas, when two-thirds of Palestinians oppose the resumption of contacts with U.S. negotiators and 88 percent view the United States as biased in favor of Israel. [...]

Finally, there is the problem that Israelis under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will almost certainly never agree to the sort of deal that would be necessary to make Palestinian or Arab acceptance even remotely feasible. In the past few years, Netanyahu has stopped even talking about support for the two-state solution, which he first accepted in a highly caveated way in a 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University. A majority of members of the current Israeli cabinet do not even support the creation of a Palestinian state, much less the concessions Israel would need to make to achieve it. And with Netanyahu and his wife the subject of several serious corruption inquiries, the prime minister likely sees his only hope as to keeping that hardline cabinet together to stave off or delay potential indictments. It is far from clear that the Israeli people themselves are prepared to make the major compromises required for peace, including the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank. But it is quite clear that the current Israeli government is not ready to do so. In his interview, Kushner questions whether Abbas has the ability or the willingness to “lean into finishing a deal.” But neither does Netanyahu, and the fact that Kushner only calls out one side is telling. It is itself part of the problem.

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Al Jazeera: How Saudi tried to bully Jordan and failed

Unfortunately for Riyadh, most of its actions have failed to achieve their goals, and in almost all cases they have backfired. These include the Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led calamitous war in Yemen, the failed siege of Qatar, the unravelling of Saudi-backed rebels in Syria, and the embarrassing forced detention and "resignation" of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. [...]

The presumed tripartite Saudi message was this: Amman and Ramallah should lighten up their criticisms of Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital; not join the Organization of Islamic Cooperation emergency summit that convened in Turkey last week; and, support Saudi Arabia's desire to promote an expected Israel-Palestine "peace plan" that is being developed by the White House. [...]

Jordan and Palestine - like Qatar, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon before them - instantly rejected Riyadh's wishes, defied its threats and intimidation, and pursued policies that more closely aligned with the sentiments and interests of their own people. King Abdullah and President Abbas attended the summit in Turkey, strongly denounced the US move on Jerusalem, and for good measure also placed themselves next to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the ceremonial summit photo.

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Deutsche Welle: UNHCR: Widespread rape of Syrian boys and men

The study was based on information mainly gathered in late 2016 and provided by several dozen informants and through discussions with around 196 refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. It found that sexual violence towards boys and men is much more common than had been believed. The report found that children and elderly men were also victims, but that gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals were particularly vulnerable.

Victims have accused armed groups within Syria of carrying out mass rapes, with sexual violence often occurring in detention or prison facilities. One focus group of refugee women in Jordan estimated that between 30-40 percent of the adult men in their community were victims of sexual violence while in detention in Syria. A Syrian refugee called Sami, told UNHCR, "A man would never speak of this. Why should he? We know that everyone in jail is raped — it is normal." [...]

However, outside Syria, there is a danger of opportunistic abuse in refugee camps or through informal employment opportunities in countries of refuge. The report noted that there is concern that the high rate of child labor among Syrian refugee boys, which, for example, is 94 percent in Jordan, leads to sexual exploitation and rape. Refugee boys and men have reported that some employers refuse to pay wages until sexual acts are performed.

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Haaretz: For Many Sunni Muslim Countries, Iran Is Not Necessarily a Threat

If Iran is such a great threat that it justifies Saudi Arabia’s crude intervention in other Mideast countries’ internal affairs – see, for example Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s recent resignation – then why hasn’t Riyadh imposed sanctions on Pakistan? There are two answers to that. First, Saudi Arabia needs Pakistan in its “Sunni” coalition. But no less important, for the time being, it can’t do without Pakistani workers. Lebanon, in contrast, is just a pawn.

One could pose a similar question to Riyadh about its close ties with Turkey, another economic and strategic ally of Tehran. Two years ago, Turkey joined Saudi Arabia’s Sunni alliance (after initially being ostracized by it) without being required to sever its ties with Iran – something Riyadh has demanded of Qatar, though not of the United Arab Emirates, whose trade with Iran is even more extensive. Evidently, the Saudis recognize the limits of their war against Iran. [...]

Egypt, for instance, is Israel’s ally in the war against Sunni terrorist organizations in Sinai and the Gaza Strip, and it defines Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Yet it also opposes Saudi Arabia’s aggressive stance against Iran and Hezbollah. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri is visiting several Mideast countries this week in an effort to persuade Riyadh and its allies to use diplomacy rather than military threats. Egypt also “rebelled” against Saudi dictates last year when it supported a Russian United Nation resolution on Syria, to which Iran was a party, and suffered Saudi economic sanctions as a result. [...]

Thus the “Sunni axis” is really a “Saudi axis.” This isn’t a group of Sunni countries driven by religious hatred of a Shi’ite country; rather, the common denominator that unites its members is their dependence on Riyadh or their desire to be its economic ally. Moreover, the claim that there’s a risk of Shi’ite Islam spreading in Sunni states portrays Sunni countries as being weak and on the defensive – as if the sweeping Sunni majority, comprising some 90 percent of all Muslims, were actually afraid of the power of the Shi’ites, who comprise only about 10 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. 

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Haaretz: Saudi Arabia: Israel's Dream State

Israel has no better ally than Saudi Arabia. It fights Hezbollah and overthrew the Lebanese prime minister who had lived in peace with that organization for a year. There is no other country in the world, including the United States, that acts with such resolve against Iran. Saudi Arabia even went to war in Yemen, not for the Yemenis, who as far as Riyadh is concerned could die of starvation, but to block Iran’s influence. [...]

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to try to form an Arab coalition made up of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for this purpose. After all, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never fails to boast of the quality of the relations that he (of course, he) has managed to develop with Arab countries, even those that have no peace treaty with Israel. The alliance with Egypt is working well along the southern border and there is quiet and excellent cooperation with Jordan, while the UAE has recently become a silent partner. On the face of it, there could be no better combination of forces for the State of Israel. 

The problem is that even an alliance of interests with Saudi Arabia has a fatal flaw. It requires that Israel pay too heavy a political price. Israel believes it is permitted to cooperate with Arab states against common enemies, but not in return for a chance at real peace. The enormous security and economic benefits that would derive from a diplomatic process that has the participation of anti-Iranian Arab states is apparently worthless in Israeli eyes. It prefers to pay the economic and security costs of taking care of half a million settlers, not to mention the collapse of Israeli democracy. An alliance with Saudi Arabia or other Arab states? Only if it’s free. 

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Al Jazeera: Jordan's King Abdullah in rare visit to Palestine

Jordan's King Abdullah II has begun a rare visit to the occupied West Bank to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, amid shared tensions with Israel over the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. [...]

The king's West Bank visit, his first in five years, comes two weeks since a surge in violence in Jerusalem after Israel installed metal detectors at entrances to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound - Islam's third holiest site.

Jordan serves as the custodian of the site, which houses the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine. The western wall of the compound is sacred to Jews. [...]

"They say there is a habitual encroachment by Israeli forces on the Al-Aqsa compound. And they want to work closer together to deal with future crises, which they say are inevitable because of the way Israel is dealing with the issue.

"Moving forward, they are going to form a committee. They also said they will better coordinate and come up with a better plan when it comes to communications over the Al-Aqsa compound."

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Independent: Laws that allow rapists to marry their victims come from colonialism, not Islam

In Jordan, it’s easy for a convicted rapist to simply walk free from court; all he has to do is to subject his victim to yet another terrible ordeal.

Article 308 of the Jordanian penal code means that a rapist can escape punishment if he agrees to marry his victim. Only if the marriage lasts for less than three years does he have to serve his time. Between 2010 and 2013, a total of 159 rapists walked free in this way. [...]

Similar legislation has been abolished in Egypt, Morocco and just last week in Tunisia, while activists in Lebanon have seen their demands for abolition endorsed by the government and are now awaiting parliamentary approval. [...]

Article 308 is a remnant of the Ottoman rule, but its origin is even more distant – historically and geographically – as the Ottomans had imported it from the French penal code. In countries that were under French colonial rule, such as Lebanon and Tunisia, laws like Article 308 are a direct hangover.

The roots of these laws lie in the cultural impact of centuries under colonial rule, where subjugation was ultimately secured by a true “gentlemen’s agreement”. While foreign powers took control of the state, in exchange they offered local men complete control of their homes.

The colonialists fed and legitimised the misogynist voices within the colonised, and so many of the barriers that women face in the region stem directly from this strategy of using patriarchy as a tool of oppression.

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Haaretz: The Palestinians Won the 2017 Battle for Temple Mount. That’s Good for Israel

Israelis largely regarded it as an appropriate technical response to the incident and most were taken aback at the widespread fury among Palestinians and Muslims worldwide. They regarded the anger as purely political and even hypocritical (apparently mosques in Mecca and Medina already have metal detectors and security cameras).  Doubtless, last Friday’s announcement that they have been removed was seen by many as a humiliating defeat, a capitulation to threats and violence for which Israel will have to pay heavily.

On the contrary. It may be a humiliation for the Prime Minister, but it is a clear (if rare) victory for peace, which is a victory for Israel.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Netanyahu’s government will follow it up with anything constructive. Rather, as we see in the ostentatiously public welcome for the security guard at the Israeli embassy in Jordan who killed an attacker and which deeply angered Jordan’s King Abdullah, Bibi feels he must make up ground "lost" to Israel’s foes and, also, at least as important, placate Israel’s right wing. Otherwise, Israel will be seen as "weak." [...]

It is common wisdom that it was the perception of the Yom Kippur War as a victory by Anwar Sadat that allowed him the political leeway to make peace with Israel in 1977. Similarly, though much less dramatically and not at all surprisingly, Israel’s beginning the Oslo Process and recognizing the PLO in 1993 allowed Jordan’s King Hussein (although initially blindsided) to sign a peace treaty with Israel the next year.

Israel has always assumed that driving its adversaries faces into the dirt, i.e., humiliating them, is an essential part of convincing them they could not win, and that Israel is here to stay. 

This strategy has never worked; to the extent peace has been maintained it has been in spite of the humiliation rather than because of it.

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Haaretz: This Is Why Arab States Are Conspicuously Silent on Temple Mount Crisis

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engages in boastful rhetoric about the meetings he holds with Arab leaders – including the recent revelation of a secret meeting five years ago with the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister – he seemingly ignores Islamic forces looking on at these diplomatic moves. The recent tensions over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount make it clear that any diplomatic or security move is also immediately gauged from a perspective that transcends the religious importance of the holy sites.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, like the Kaaba in Mecca and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, is an Islamic site that is inseparable from the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They are sites that, when harmed, spark public outrage that can put the regimes in Arab and other Muslim states on a collision course with Islamic movements in their countries.

It also puts them in conflict with a sensitive Muslim public that can delegitimize closer ties between Israel and Arab countries, and places them in conflict with a secular Arab public that views the events as a deliberate attempt by Israel to take over Palestinian sites. [...]

Saudi Arabia, whose king, Salman, did lobby the United States to pressure Israel to reopen the Temple Mount compound to Muslim worshippers, refrained from making statements on the matter – and the silence was not only on the part of senior Saudi officials. It was also impossible to find detailed news reports in Friday’s Saudi press on the sequence of events on the Temple Mount. [...]

These comments contain a hint of a Jordanian expectation of a gesture on Israel’s part that will give the Jordanian monarch ammunition that will convince Abbas to agree to new security arrangements on the Temple Mount. It is possible Netanyahu received similar messages from the Egyptian president.

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FiveThirtyEight: Does The United States Really Need To Improve Its Image Abroad?

And when residents of other countries are asked essentially the same question, their views of the U.S. president tend to closely track with what Americans think they think. The Pew Research Center asked people in a wide range of countries how much confidence they had in the U.S. president “to do the right thing” when it comes to global affairs. Looking at 14 of those countries, we can see a low point in confidence around 2008 and then a restoration of confidence after Obama’s election, followed by a slow slide downward again.1 All these countries had more trust in the American president toward the end of the Obama administration than they had toward the beginning of the Bush administration. And almost all have a higher opinion recently (in 2015 or 2016) than they did in 2008, at least by a couple of percentage points. (The only exception: Russia, which went from 22 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2015.)

Things get complicated when it comes to asking residents of other countries about their perceptions of the United States in general, as opposed to the American president specifically. The trend varies a lot more from country to country. In Germany and France, there was a surge in U.S. favorability ratings after Obama’s election. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s opinion of the U.S. fell a little. Of the 14 countries I looked at,2 five — Germany, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Russia and Turkey — have less favorable views on America now (or in 2015) than they did in 2002. And four — Jordan, Russia, Lebanon and Kenya — lowered their opinion of the U.S. during Obama’s term. But it’s reasonable to say that the world still likes us; in 2015, Pew found that the median favorability rating among 39 countries from that same survey was 69 percent.

Judging by these measures, you could say that promises to restore America’s rightful place are both a political statement and a reflection of reality. Obama’s and Trump’s calls for renewal are legit — each really did inherit a presidency in need of image rehabilitation abroad, although Trump maybe has less restoration work to do than Obama did. On the other hand, both have probably overstated how poor our reputation as a country is. That is, unless, they were both talking about Russia.

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Vox: This map should change the way you think about foreign aid

Critics of foreign aid often argue that it's ineffective at generating sustainable economic development or truly helping the world's poor. But as this great map from the cost information website HowMuch.net reveals, one reason for that is that promoting development and helping the poor isn't actually what motivates a lot of America's foreign aid:

As you can see, the biggest recipient by a long way is Israel (this is fiscal year 2014 data, but nothing's changing), and two other big ones are Egypt and Jordan, which both have aid packages that are tied up with their peace treaties with Israel. None of these are poor countries (indeed, Israel is downright rich), and the point of the money is to advance an American foreign policy agenda — not to help the poor. Pakistan and Afghanistan, which round out the top five, actually are pretty poor, but, again, the main American interest in them is clearly foreign policy rather than poverty.

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Social Europe: Migration Cannot Be Cast In Terms Of Individual Rights

Well, first of all, I’m very glad that the German government is indeed now giving very serious attention to African economic development. I think that’s the right thing to do and now is a good time to do it because Africa faces rather challenging economic circumstances and so it’s important that we do what we can to help. I think it’s unfortunate that it’s cast as a strategy to prevent migration. I’ve been working for 40 years on trying to help Africa to catch up with the rest of the world and I think that’s a vital first order matter. [...]

So brain drain is not a myth in that context. 

Yes, that’s right. And in fact it’s not just a matter of Africa; it’s also true of the poorer countries in Europe. There was a study by the IMF just last month which concluded that emigration from Eastern Europe had delayed catch-up. But, of course, the people themselves benefit and the host countries benefit. But there are many people left behind and the solution cannot be that a whole country empties. Obviously, that is not an appropriate or a feasible solution. And so policies have to be driven primarily by the idea of what helps the people who stay in the country to catch up as fast as possible. [...]

It’s still there in a placid piece of Eurocentrism. In 1967 it was declared to be a global convention. It isn’t a global convention, it never has been and it never will be. Most refugees are in ten haven countries, none of the governments of those ten countries were signatories to the convention. So it’s irrelevant. Modern refugees are overwhelmingly not persecuted individuals, they are groups fleeing disordered state breakdown, famine, that sort of thing.

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Business Insider: You may be surprised by the 10 countries that hold over half the world's refugees

Ten countries, accounting for just 2.5 per cent of global GDP, are sheltering 56 per cent of the world’s 21 million refugees, according to a report published on Tuesday.

The rights group criticised the wealthiest countries for showing “a near absence of leadership and responsibility” while the refugee crisis escalates. [...]

The report highlights the contrast in the number of refugees from Syria taken by its neighbours and by other countries with similar populations.

The UK has taken fewer than 8,000 Syrian refugees since the country’s civil war began in 2011, while Jordan, which has a population almost 10 times smaller than the UK and just 1.2 per cent of its GDP, hosts more than 655,000 Syrian refugees. [...]

“It’s disgraceful that the UK hosts less than one per cent of the world’s refugees when our size and prosperity mean we should do so much more. Desperate families are forced into the hands of traffickers precisely because countries like ours have pulled up the drawbridge. Smaller, poorer neighbouring countries are left to try and cope, and when they can’t, more people are forced to try to move on, seeking a basic level of safety

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Independent: Robert Fisk: For the first time, Saudi Arabia is under attack by Sunni and Shia leaders

The Saudis step deeper into trouble almost by the week. Swamped in their ridiculous war in Yemen, they are now reeling from an extraordinary statement issued by around two hundred Sunni Muslim clerics who effectively referred to the Wahhabi belief – practiced in Saudi Arabia – as “a dangerous deformation” of Sunni Islam. The prelates included Egypt’s Grand Imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar, the most important centre of theological study in the Islamic world, who only a year ago attacked “corrupt interpretations” of religious texts and who has now signed up to “a return to the schools of great knowledge” outside Saudi Arabia.

This remarkable meeting took place in Grozny and was unaccountably ignored by almost every media in the world – except for the former senior associate at St Antony’s College, Sharmine Narwani, and Le Monde’s Benjamin Barthe – but it may prove to be even more dramatic than the terror of Syria’s civil war. For the statement, obviously approved by Vladimir Putin, is as close as Sunni clerics have got to excommunicating the Saudis. [...]

As Narwani points out, the bad news kept on coming. At the start of the five-day Hajj pilgrimage, the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar published online a database which it said came from the Saudi ministry of health, claiming that up 90,000 pilgrims from around the world have died visiting the Hajj capital of Mecca over a 14-year period. Although this figure is officially denied, it is believed in Shia Muslim Iran, which has lost hundreds of its citizens on the Hajj. Among them was Ghazanfar Roknabadi, a former ambassador and intelligence officer in Lebanon. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has just launched an unprecedented attack on the Saudis, accusing them of murder. “The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers...” he said in his own Hajj message.

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