Saudi Arabia has executed 213 people so far in 2024, more than it has in any other calendar year on record, as the kingdom competes for a seat at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). According to the London-based rights group Reprieve, which documents the death penalty worldwide, the largest recorded figure prior to this year was 196 in 2022, followed by 184 in 2019.

“As the world's attention fixates on horror elsewhere in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is clearing death row with a bloodbath,” Reprieve’s deputy director, Harriet McCulloch, told MEE.

“The Kingdom smashed its own grim record for most people executed in a year in the first nine months of 2024,” she added. “With 213 executions and counting, death row prisoners are at greater risk than ever before, their families desperately awaiting news of their fate in the news.”

The executions are taking place under the government of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, the kingdom’s prime minister and de facto leader, who pledged in a 2018 interview to minimise capital punishment.

Hweihi was forced to hastily flee the tent the family set up in the courtyard of a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp.

This was because Israeli troops had suddenly begun to fire live bullets inside the school ahead of storming it during a devastating three-week assault on the camp in May.

Duaa, who was unable to speak or move, was left behind inside the tent because her father couldn’t carry her.

After the soldiers entered the school under the cover of heavy fire, men and women were separated.

Moments later, a soldier poured gasoline on dozens of tents in courtyards before setting them on fire.

His voice drowned out by the hammering blast of tanks and heavy gunfire, Hweihi stood watching silently and hopelessly.

“She was burnt alive while we couldn't move,” he said.

Last week, several pro-Palestinian Telegram channels were blocked in European countries, including the “Palestine Archive ??” channel with more than 15,000 followers and the “Resistance News Network” (RNN) with more than 166,000 subscribers. The exact justification of the ban are not known. While Telegram did not respond to a journalistic request, the RNN said that there was no reason for the closure. Anyone who tries to open up the channel in the affected countries now will receive the notification that they cannot be not displayed because they “violate local laws”. RNN and the online outlet The Cradle have spoken of an EU-wide ban.

While the legal basis for the blocking remains unclear, the political reasons are obvious. RNN itself explained to Peoples Dispatch: “We believe RNN was banned because we shed light on the reality of resistance on the ground, which upends the mainstream zionist narrative.“

Reuters spoke with 24 volunteers who manage kitchens in Sudan's central state of Khartoum, the western region of Darfur and parts of the east where millions of people have been driven from their homes since fighting erupted between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

International humanitarian agencies, which have been unable to get food aid to parts of Sudan at risk of famine, have ramped up support for such groups. But that has made them more of a target for RSF looters, 10 of the volunteers told Reuters by phone.

"We were safe when the RSF didn't know about the funding," said Gihad Salaheldin, a volunteer who left Khartoum city last year and spoke from Cairo. "They see our kitchens as a source of food."

Both sides have also attacked or detained volunteers on suspicion of collaborating with their opponents, a dozen volunteers said. Most of the volunteers spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

It's early morning, and Zelda Montes walks briskly through the crisp New York air as they head to Google's headquarters on Manhattan’s 9th Avenue. Montes, who self-identifies as they, fumbles with their ID card at the entrance, blending in with the steady stream of Googlers swiping through the security barriers as if it were just another day at the office.

Armed with an oversized tote bag, Montes pulls back their purple hair and heads to the 13th-floor canteen to order their usual: a dirty chai and an egg, avocado, and cheese sandwich with a bowl of raspberries.

Their hands tremble slightly as they grip the coffee cup.

Locking eyes with two others, they get the signal that the coast is clear, head down to the entrance, and sit. The three Googlers unfurl their banners and begin chanting to demand that Google do one thing: Drop Project Nimbus.

But this will be the last time they sit inside Google's New York office as Googlers, as Google itself refers to its own employees. "Getting fired felt like a possibility but never a reality," remarked Montes, one of 50 employees fired by Google for staging a 10-hour sit-in at one of its American offices in April.

For the last three years, Montes has been one of several activists calling for Google to drop Project Nimbus, a partnership Google and Amazon have with the Israeli government reportedly worth $1.2bn.

On 5 October 2024, a 4.5-magnitude seismic event occurred in Iran’s Semnan province, sparking speculation that Iran has tested a nuclear weapon for the first time.

Such a seismic event is typically the result of an earthquake, but speculation has arisen on social media suggesting the event was instead an underground nuclear test carried out by the Islamic Republic in response to Israeli threats to bomb Tehran’s nuclear energy and oil facilities.

According to Iranian sources speaking with The Cradle, the possibility that a nuclear test was indeed conducted is being discussed at high levels in Iran.

The speculation that Iran carried out a nuclear test comes just days after the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in the US, published a report stating that “Iran can produce nuclear weapons far more rapidly than expected.”

Published on 1 October, the report noted that in late April 2024, a senior Iranian lawmaker stated that there is only a “one-week gap from the issuance of the order to the first test” of a nuclear bomb.

In a 25-minute video commemorating the one-year anniversary of the 7 October Hamas-led attacks on Israel, in what the group and other Palestinian fighting factions have dubbed "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood", al-Qassam Brigades spokesperson Abu Obeida said he could not rule out more deaths among the remaining Israeli captives due to “the danger of crossfire”.

“You could have reclaimed all your captives a year ago,” he added, saying that the intention has always been to keep them alive in Gaza and exchange them for Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.

This is a fight meant to drain Israel of its resources, Abu Obeida said.

“[We face] an entity whose age is less than that of the shoes in mosques and churches in Gaza, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron, and Jaffa, and Nablus, and Sidon and Tyre and Beirut,” he said.

In its relatively short life as a nation, he added that Israel has not lived a year without constantly being reminded it has “stolen Arab land” and that it occupies “our country”.

“What did the world do for our people in the West Bank?” Abu Obeida said. “Those who are subject to displacement and slow, systematic extermination?”

“This enemy only understands the language of power,” Abu Obeida said. “And the weapon is only confronted with the weapon.”

Israel has expanded attacks on southern Lebanon and pounded the capital Beirut’s southern suburbs as the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah has claimed a series of missile attacks on northern Israel, including near the city of Haifa.

A Lebanese security source said an Israeli strike on Monday hit the al-Kokoudi area, a few kilometres from Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport and close to Hezbollah’s stronghold in the suburb of Dahiyeh, which has been repeatedly targeted over the past few weeks.

The attack came after the southern suburbs were hit by more than 30 strikes overnight, the heaviest bombardment since September 23, the day Israel began a significant escalation in its assault on Lebanon, the NNA said.

The targets included a petrol station on the main highway leading to the Beirut airport and a warehouse for medical supplies, the agency said.

Ukraine’s military has said it struck a major oil terminal in occupied Crimea that provides fuel for Russia’s war effort as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the war has entered a key phase.

“At night, a successful strike was carried out on the enemy’s offshore oil terminal in temporarily occupied Feodosia, Crimea,” the Ukrainian military said in a post on social media on Monday.

Both Moscow and Kyiv are facing the issue of how to sustain their costly war of attrition – a war that started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – that shows no signs of a resolution.

The Abandon Harris movement that sprouted late last year out of the widespread outrage over the Biden-Harris administration’s support for the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza has officially endorsed the Green Party’s Jill Stein for US president.

The endorsement is the first of its kind for Stein and the Green Party, with the Abandon Harris campaign being the first major Muslim-led political group to endorse her campaign this election cycle. Last month, a smaller group, the Muslim American Public Affairs Council NC, also endorsed Stein.

“We are not choosing between a greater evil and a lesser evil. We are confronting two destructive forces: one currently overseeing a genocide and another equally committed to continuing it. Both are determined to see it through,” the Abandon Harris campaign said in a statement released on Monday.

Israel reportedly targeted and killed several local policemen who were securing aid deliveries in two separate attacks, along with some of their family members and unrelated bystander. And on the next day, the Israeli military killed 12 people, among them officials representing tribal committees, who were coordinating aid distribution efforts.

Two days later, Israel’s favored aid provider, World Central Kitchen, fell victim to the same policy: over the course of several minutes an IDF drone pursued a 7-member WCK team driving along a designated route, and, in three different airstrikes several kilometers apart, targeted and killed every single one of them.

The right wing Makor Rishon newspaper concluded, on the basis of conversations with drone operators involved in the assassination of the aid workers, that Mendel was only implementing the official policy jointly set by Blinken and the Israeli cabinet back in October: “The mission order made it clear that the IDF is instructed to thwart an attempt by Hamas terrorists to take over the aid trucks that entered Gaza. The IDF received this instruction from the Security Cabinet at the beginning of the war, sometime around October 18, 2023, following heavy pressure from the United States.”

Follow-ups by U.S. press in the next few months revealed the State Department was happy to have the investigation conducted by the president and CEO of one of Israel's largest arms manufacturers. The ultimate culprit for the killings—the policy that Blinken had brokered—was not amended

On Friday, the Israeli military said two explosive-laden drones had targeted its forces in the Golan early the previous morning. Two officers from the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion were killed, it said, and 24 other soldiers were wounded.

Yet, the leaders of the three factions that are continuing to target Israel, as well as Iraqi officials, challenged the Israeli account and said they did not strike the Golan that day.

“Since October of last year, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has carried out more than 160 operations targeting the Israeli interior and the occupied areas in the Golan Heights."

“The resistance announces the operations it carries out as soon as they happen. The resistance did not announce this operation or claim responsibility for it as was reported,” he added. If we had carried it out, we would have announced it.”