Al Jazeera World

In Lebanon, there are thousands of stateless people like the Abu Eid tribe. They cannot access free public services like education and healthcare, have no freedom of movement, cannot own property, marry or work legally because of their lack of legal status. They can’t vote or run for public office.

One of Lebanon’s many political challenges is overdue reform of its citizenship laws, to address the problems faced by its many vulnerable communities. Not doing so might cause more problems than it solves.

Just a few months after journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, another Arab dissident says his life is also in danger.

Iyad el-Baghdadi is a pro-democracy activist and strong critic of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The UK's Guardian newspaper reported that Norwegian officials took him from his home in Oslo to a secure location.

There, he was told the CIA had warned Norway's government the Saudis had him "in their crosshairs".

El-Baghdadi gained popularity during the Arab Spring when he posted pro-human rights messages on social media.

The Palestinian activist was granted asylum in Norway four years ago after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for criticising Middle Eastern regimes.

In an exclusive interview, Iyad el-Baghdadi discusses an unlikely friendship with the murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and how continuing Khashoggi's work has made him a target of the Saudi government.

Just a few months after journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, another Arab dissident says his life is also in danger.

Iyad el-Baghdadi is a pro-democracy activist and strong critic of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The UK's Guardian newspaper reported that Norwegian officials took him from his home in Oslo to a secure location.

There, he was told the CIA had warned Norway's government the Saudis had him "in their crosshairs".

El-Baghdadi gained popularity during the Arab Spring when he posted pro-human rights messages on social media.

The Palestinian activist was granted asylum in Norway four years ago after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for criticising Middle Eastern regimes.

In an exclusive interview, Iyad el-Baghdadi discusses an unlikely friendship with the murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and how continuing Khashoggi's work has made him a target of the Saudi government.

Just a few months after journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, another Arab dissident says his life is also in danger.

Iyad el-Baghdadi is a pro-democracy activist and strong critic of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The UK's Guardian newspaper reported that Norwegian officials took him from his home in Oslo to a secure location.

There, he was told the CIA had warned Norway's government the Saudis had him "in their crosshairs".

El-Baghdadi gained popularity during the Arab Spring when he posted pro-human rights messages on social media.

The Palestinian activist was granted asylum in Norway four years ago after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for criticising Middle Eastern regimes.

In an exclusive interview, Iyad el-Baghdadi discusses an unlikely friendship with the murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and how continuing Khashoggi's work has made him a target of the Saudi government.

In 2014, a group of Yemeni men sold their kidneys in Egypt for $5,000 each.

But that was a tiny cut of the profit. The big bucks went to two unlikely members of the international organ trafficking network.

Take 15 mins to watch and find out more:

#AlJazeeraEnglish #Yemen #AJInvestigations

In 2014, a group of Yemeni men sold their kidneys in Egypt for $5,000 each.

But that was a tiny cut of the profit. The big bucks went to two unlikely members of the international organ trafficking network.

Take 15 mins to watch and find out more:

#AlJazeeraEnglish #Yemen #AJInvestigations

Iran's foreign minister discusses US sanctions, foreign intervention in the region, and his past resignation attempt.

In July 2015, after more than a decade of on-and-off negotiations, world powers reached a nuclear deal with Iran.

Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of enriched uranium and reduce centrifuges. In return, all UN Security Council and multilateral sanctions were lifted.

But not everyone was happy with the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the deal was a "stunning historic mistake", as well as US Republican presidential candidates at the time.

The campaign against the Iran nuclear deal succeeded when Donald Trump moved into the White House.

The US withdrew from the deal in 2018, and announced that it would reimpose sanctions on Iran.

Certainly, Iran does not want confrontation and escalation but we have not lived 7,000 years by escaping from those who want to bully us.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's minister of foreign affairs

Iran insisted it would remain in the nuclear deal and so did other signatories such as France, Germany, and the UK.

But tensions between the US and Iran have escalated; the US recent classified Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as "terrorists", and Iran responded in turn, labelling US troops in the Middle East as "terrorists".

Unilateral sanctions have also affected Iran's economy, and the US recently tightened them by ending sanction waivers for countries buying oil from Iran, threatening Iran's already struggling economy, whose oil production has decreased from 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 to as little as 1.3 million bpd.

In response, Iranian leaders have threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a major thoroughfare for oil shipments, but their economy remains vulnerable.

The country's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, says the US sanctions are "economic terrorism".

"They want to put pressure on the Iranian people in order to change their policy. That is the way the United States has acted for 40 years and, particularly since President Trump came to office, it violated a commitment by another US president, President Obama," he told Al Jazeera.

He said that the sanctions won't have any "political effect" and that Iran has developed various schemes with partnering countries to help protect themselves.

"One of them will be in the long run to the detriment of the United States and I think that is becoming increasingly popular and that is not to use dollars for your transactions. Second is an instrument that we are developing with the Europeans, we have already developed with our neighbours and we have developed them with the Chinese and that is not to engage in transfer of money across the borders which is where the United States would step in and will try to twist the arms of people who are engaged in it, illegally and unlawfully."

According to Zarif, the US has been swayed by foreign interests.

"I believe the United States is not serving US interests. More than the United States, it is serving Israeli interests. And unfortunately, there are a couple of people in our region who have aligned themselves with Israeli interests," he said, listing the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed.

"So this is a cabal ... who are pushing the United States and President Trump into conflict and into disastrous situations and they will be the first to suffer the consequences, unfortunately."

Iran has also been accused of destabilising the region, and criticised for its involvement in countries like Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

The US recently accused Iran-backed militias of killing more than 600 of its soldiers during the Iraq war, which Zarif says is a "baseless lie", stating that Iran's priority is stability in the region.

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Iran's foreign minister discusses US sanctions, foreign intervention in the region, and his past resignation attempt.

In July 2015, after more than a decade of on-and-off negotiations, world powers reached a nuclear deal with Iran.

Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of enriched uranium and reduce centrifuges. In return, all UN Security Council and multilateral sanctions were lifted.

But not everyone was happy with the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the deal was a "stunning historic mistake", as well as US Republican presidential candidates at the time.

The campaign against the Iran nuclear deal succeeded when Donald Trump moved into the White House.

The US withdrew from the deal in 2018, and announced that it would reimpose sanctions on Iran.

Certainly, Iran does not want confrontation and escalation but we have not lived 7,000 years by escaping from those who want to bully us.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's minister of foreign affairs

Iran insisted it would remain in the nuclear deal and so did other signatories such as France, Germany, and the UK.

But tensions between the US and Iran have escalated; the US recent classified Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as "terrorists", and Iran responded in turn, labelling US troops in the Middle East as "terrorists".

Unilateral sanctions have also affected Iran's economy, and the US recently tightened them by ending sanction waivers for countries buying oil from Iran, threatening Iran's already struggling economy, whose oil production has decreased from 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 to as little as 1.3 million bpd.

In response, Iranian leaders have threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a major thoroughfare for oil shipments, but their economy remains vulnerable.

The country's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, says the US sanctions are "economic terrorism".

"They want to put pressure on the Iranian people in order to change their policy. That is the way the United States has acted for 40 years and, particularly since President Trump came to office, it violated a commitment by another US president, President Obama," he told Al Jazeera.

He said that the sanctions won't have any "political effect" and that Iran has developed various schemes with partnering countries to help protect themselves.

"One of them will be in the long run to the detriment of the United States and I think that is becoming increasingly popular and that is not to use dollars for your transactions. Second is an instrument that we are developing with the Europeans, we have already developed with our neighbours and we have developed them with the Chinese and that is not to engage in transfer of money across the borders which is where the United States would step in and will try to twist the arms of people who are engaged in it, illegally and unlawfully."

According to Zarif, the US has been swayed by foreign interests.

"I believe the United States is not serving US interests. More than the United States, it is serving Israeli interests. And unfortunately, there are a couple of people in our region who have aligned themselves with Israeli interests," he said, listing the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed.

"So this is a cabal ... who are pushing the United States and President Trump into conflict and into disastrous situations and they will be the first to suffer the consequences, unfortunately."

Iran has also been accused of destabilising the region, and criticised for its involvement in countries like Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

The US recently accused Iran-backed militias of killing more than 600 of its soldiers during the Iraq war, which Zarif says is a "baseless lie", stating that Iran's priority is stability in the region.

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- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish

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- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

Filmmaker: Bashar Ghannam

Weddings are a cause for celebration everywhere in the world. For Palestinians, they can be a way of keeping their valuable traditions alive and helping to deal with life under Israeli occupation. But for the women in this film, that day may never come because their fiances are serving life sentences in Israeli jails.

"The positive side of being in prison is that it helped us become closer," says Ahlam Ahmed al-Tamimi, a former prisoner who was engaged to her cousin Nizar al-Tamimi in 2005 while they were both serving life sentences. They eventually married after being released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. But at the time, Ahlam describes how their very relationship was a symbol of resistance.

"I resisted the occupation with my love and my engagement to this prisoner. Through the engagement, the prisoner tells the occupier that his life continues," says Ahlam.

Ahlam al-Tamimi served eight years of a life sentence for her role in a bombing in 2001 that killed 15 people and wounded 130. She got engaged to her cousin, Nizar, while he too was serving a life sentence, for killing an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. The US now wants to extradite Ahlam from Jordan, where she now lives, because US citizens were killed in the 2001 bombing; and she is on an FBI 'most-wanted' list.

The two other women, Ghufran al-Zamal and Amna al-Jayousi, have more complex stories - and little chance of a similar outcome, yet they remain hopeful.

Amna was already legally married to Ahmed al-Jayoussi who was arrested for helping manufacture suicide belts, a week before their planned wedding ceremony in 2002. But despite pressure from her extended family to abandon Ahmed in prison, Amna's commitment to him is unwavering, even after 17 years.

"I booked an 'afterlife husband', a husband for life and for afterlife....Ahmed and I are not just a couple. We are one soul in two bodies," she says.

Ghufran, on the other hand, had never even met Hassan Salameh when she proposed marriage to him. He was in prison, serving 48 life sentences for his part in fatal attacks in Jerusalem in 1996. But inspired by Ahlam and Nizar's experience, she initiated the connection with Hassan through Ahlam. "It was difficult for me as a woman to take the first step, to discuss this subject and break social taboos by proposing to a man," she explains.

Ghufran was familiar with Hassan's case and in her letters she says, "As he considered his sentence part of a sacrifice, I said I wanted to share it with him and asked him not to deny me this happiness...I wrote that I would share his suffering, his pain and his life."

Initially, Hassan refused to allow Ghufran to get mixed up in his life and imprisonment - but he later agreed when Ahlam convinced him that "engagement would be a beam of light in a dark place."

While sometimes letters can take up to a year to arrive, Ghufran and Hassan have created their own world which she says transcends time and space: "We challenged our circumstances and, for us, prison didn't exit...we planned for our future life and thought about everything. We defied this reality," contends Ghufran.

"The prison management make fun of prisoners' engagement," explains Ahlam...or "prevent the detainee from getting the letter...Sometimes the security agent would tell me, 'your fiance fainted while in hunger strike' or that they beat him until bleeding, and it's all fake news."

"The purpose is to keep us under constant stress," she adds.

According to the Jerusalem-based human rights organisation B'tselem, in February 2019, there were over 5,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons. The idea of women committing to men in prison with long sentences is a little-known aspect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as an intensely personal and complex one.

Regardless of what the men may have done to be handed their multiple life sentences, Ahlam, Ghofran and Amna's unrelenting loyalty to them is inseparable from their desire for a Palestinian homeland, the personal and the political completely intertwined.

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe

- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish

- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera

- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

Filmmaker: Bashar Ghannam

Weddings are a cause for celebration everywhere in the world. For Palestinians, they can be a way of keeping their valuable traditions alive and helping to deal with life under Israeli occupation. But for the women in this film, that day may never come because their fiances are serving life sentences in Israeli jails.

"The positive side of being in prison is that it helped us become closer," says Ahlam Ahmed al-Tamimi, a former prisoner who was engaged to her cousin Nizar al-Tamimi in 2005 while they were both serving life sentences. They eventually married after being released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. But at the time, Ahlam describes how their very relationship was a symbol of resistance.

"I resisted the occupation with my love and my engagement to this prisoner. Through the engagement, the prisoner tells the occupier that his life continues," says Ahlam.

Ahlam al-Tamimi served eight years of a life sentence for her role in a bombing in 2001 that killed 15 people and wounded 130. She got engaged to her cousin, Nizar, while he too was serving a life sentence, for killing an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. The US now wants to extradite Ahlam from Jordan, where she now lives, because US citizens were killed in the 2001 bombing; and she is on an FBI 'most-wanted' list.

The two other women, Ghufran al-Zamal and Amna al-Jayousi, have more complex stories - and little chance of a similar outcome, yet they remain hopeful.

Amna was already legally married to Ahmed al-Jayoussi who was arrested for helping manufacture suicide belts, a week before their planned wedding ceremony in 2002. But despite pressure from her extended family to abandon Ahmed in prison, Amna's commitment to him is unwavering, even after 17 years.

"I booked an 'afterlife husband', a husband for life and for afterlife....Ahmed and I are not just a couple. We are one soul in two bodies," she says.

Ghufran, on the other hand, had never even met Hassan Salameh when she proposed marriage to him. He was in prison, serving 48 life sentences for his part in fatal attacks in Jerusalem in 1996. But inspired by Ahlam and Nizar's experience, she initiated the connection with Hassan through Ahlam. "It was difficult for me as a woman to take the first step, to discuss this subject and break social taboos by proposing to a man," she explains.

Ghufran was familiar with Hassan's case and in her letters she says, "As he considered his sentence part of a sacrifice, I said I wanted to share it with him and asked him not to deny me this happiness...I wrote that I would share his suffering, his pain and his life."

Initially, Hassan refused to allow Ghufran to get mixed up in his life and imprisonment - but he later agreed when Ahlam convinced him that "engagement would be a beam of light in a dark place."

While sometimes letters can take up to a year to arrive, Ghufran and Hassan have created their own world which she says transcends time and space: "We challenged our circumstances and, for us, prison didn't exit...we planned for our future life and thought about everything. We defied this reality," contends Ghufran.

"The prison management make fun of prisoners' engagement," explains Ahlam...or "prevent the detainee from getting the letter...Sometimes the security agent would tell me, 'your fiance fainted while in hunger strike' or that they beat him until bleeding, and it's all fake news."

"The purpose is to keep us under constant stress," she adds.

According to the Jerusalem-based human rights organisation B'tselem, in February 2019, there were over 5,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons. The idea of women committing to men in prison with long sentences is a little-known aspect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as an intensely personal and complex one.

Regardless of what the men may have done to be handed their multiple life sentences, Ahlam, Ghofran and Amna's unrelenting loyalty to them is inseparable from their desire for a Palestinian homeland, the personal and the political completely intertwined.

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe

- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish

- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera

- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/