UAE security forces tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization: Report
The Cradle | October 31, 2026
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause.
The UAE normalized relations with Israel a year later, alongside Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) praised Sayegh after his death. However, a source told Cole that MbZ would not tolerate criticism of the decision to normalize with Israel.
Since 2020, the UAE has proved to be a close ally of Israel, both in its bid to project power in the Horn of Africa and in the war on Iran begun by the US President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February.
In response to the book’s allegations, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) sent a letter to three UN agencies asking that an investigation be opened into Sayegh’s death.
“The allegations that UAE security forces tortured and killed one of the country’s most prominent poets are horrifying and demand an independent investigation,” said Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director.
“Habib al-Sayegh wrote that Israel was the enemy, and nine days later he was dead with no cause given. One year later his government, notorious for their intolerance for dissent, normalized relations with Israel. Those facts are not in dispute. What happened in between is the question, and only an independent investigation can answer it,” said Isabelle Hayslip, Advocacy Associate at DAWN.
Cole’s book generated controversy last week over its claim that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, secretly gained access to $2 billion in slush money from the governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia during Trump’s first administration in exchange for advancing their political interests in Washington.
Kushner denounced the book, claiming the author failed to provide evidence to substantiate its claims.
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Book Review
The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
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