Reporters Without Borders ranks the Middle East and North Africa last among world regions for press freedom. Every country in the region is in a “difficult” or “very serious” situation except Qatar.
Free press — RSF World Press Freedom Index, 2025Jordan fell 15 places to 147th in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, largely because of repressive legislation used against the press.
Free press — RSF World Press Freedom Index, 2025Freedom House rates only one country in the Middle East and North Africa as Free: Israel. Every other state in the region is rated Partly Free or Not Free.
Free elections — Freedom House, Freedom in the World, 2025Palestinians last voted in a national election in January 2006. There has been no presidential or legislative election in the West Bank or Gaza since.
Free elections — Freedom House, Gaza Strip report, 2025In Saudi Arabia no official at the national level is elected. The Consultative Council is appointed by the king, and political parties are banned.
Government chosen by citizens — Freedom House, Saudi Arabia report, 2025Lebanon had no president for 27 months. Parliament failed twelve times before electing Joseph Aoun in January 2025.
Government chosen by citizens — CNN, 2025Leaving Islam can be punishable by death in about ten countries, including Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
Freedom to change religion — Humanists International, Freedom of Thought Report, 2023Iraq’s Christian population has fallen from roughly 1.5 million in 2003 to an estimated 250,000, driven by sectarian violence and the rise of ISIS.
Protection for religious minorities — U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2019Iran bars members of the Baha’i faith, its largest non-Muslim minority, from higher education under a 1991 policy. Human Rights Watch calls the treatment of Baha’is a crime of persecution.
Protection for religious minorities — Human Rights Watch, 2024Under Iran’s passport law a married woman cannot obtain a passport or leave the country without her husband’s written permission, which he can revoke at any time.
Women’s freedom of movement — Human Rights Watch, World Report, 2025Across the region, male guardianship rules still let husbands and fathers restrict where women may travel, live, and work.
Women’s freedom of movement — Human Rights Watch, “Trapped”, 2023About 87 percent of Egyptian women aged 15 to 49 have undergone female genital mutilation, the largest number of any country in the world. Rates among teenagers are falling.
No FGM — UNICEF, 2024In Yemen 3.7 million children aged 5 to 17 are out of school. Girls who drop out face early marriage, and boys face recruitment by armed groups.
Girls’ education — UNICEF Yemen, 2024Iran executed at least 972 people in 2024, about 64 percent of all executions recorded worldwide. They included 30 women and four people convicted as children.
Due process — Amnesty International, 2025At least 551 protesters, including 68 children, were killed during Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom protests. A UN fact-finding mission found the crackdown amounted to crimes against humanity.
Freedom of assembly — UN News, 2024Iran’s 2024 hijab and chastity law added prison terms of up to 15 years and heavy fines for women who refuse to cover their hair. UN experts have called for it to be repealed.
No religious police — UN Human Rights Office, 2024Freedom House scores Iran’s internet freedom at 13 out of 100. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE all score below 30 and are rated Not Free.
Internet freedom — Freedom House, Freedom on the Net, 2025The death penalty is the legally prescribed punishment for consensual same-sex acts in seven UN member states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Sixty-four states criminalize it.
LGBT civil rights — ILGA World, 2025Neither Lebanon nor Israel allows civil marriage at home. Couples who cross religious lines often fly to Cyprus to wed, and both countries recognize the marriage on return.
Freedom to choose a spouse — Human Rights Watch, 2023Twelve states in the region, including Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, do not let mothers pass their nationality to their children on equal terms with fathers.
Equal citizenship — Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, 2025The Middle East and North Africa is the worst region in the world for workers, with an average rating of 4.68 on a five-point scale. Every country violated the right to organize and bargain collectively.
Workers may organize — ITUC Global Rights Index, 2025The Academic Freedom Index places Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in its lowest status group, the bottom fifth of all countries measured.
Academic freedom — Academic Freedom Index, 2025Human rights groups estimate that Egypt holds between 20,000 and 60,000 people solely or chiefly because of their political beliefs or activities.
Due process — U.S. State Department, Country Report on Egypt, 2022The World Justice Project ranks Egypt 135th and Iran 128th of 143 countries on the rule of law, which measures constraints on government power and civil and criminal justice.
Independent courts — World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, 2025Saudi women gained the right to drive in June 2018 and, from August 2019, the right to hold a passport and travel abroad without a male guardian’s permission.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2019In April 2016 Saudi Arabia stripped its religious police of the power to stop, question, or arrest anyone. Officers must now refer cases to the regular police.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2016Kuwaiti women won the right to vote and run for office in May 2005. Saudi women voted for the first time in December 2015, and 20 were elected to municipal councils.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2015Saudi Arabia bans every non-Muslim house of worship and all non-Islamic public worship. Officials say churches cannot exist in the land of Mecca and Medina, leaving about two million Christian workers with nowhere legal to pray.
Freedom of religion — U.S. State Department, Report on International Religious Freedom, 2023Egypt’s 2016 church law lets governors deny permits to build or repair a church with no right of appeal, and requires churches to be sized to a local Christian population that is never officially counted. The law applies to Christian buildings only.
Protection for religious minorities — Human Rights Watch, 2016Since 2011 Iran’s registered churches have been barred from worshipping in Persian, the language most Iranians speak. Joining a house church is treated as a crime against national security, with up to five years in prison.
Freedom of religion — Article 18, 2024Article 262 of Iran’s penal code sets the death penalty for cursing the Prophet of Islam. Courts have handed down death sentences under it for social media posts.
Free speech — Iran Human Rights, 2013Pew Research found blasphemy laws in 18 of the 20 countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and apostasy laws in 13. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, blasphemy can carry the death penalty.
Free speech — Pew Research Center, 2022Abu Dhabi’s Abrahamic Family House opened in 2023 with a mosque, a church, and the first purpose-built synagogue in the Gulf in 100 years. In 2021 Bahrain’s Jews prayed in public for the first time since 1947.
Progress — Vatican News, 2023Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years, a fine, and 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam” on his liberal website. He received 50 in public before doctors said he could not survive more, and served the full decade.
Free press — Amnesty International, 2015A UN investigation found Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a premeditated extrajudicial killing in 2018 for which the Saudi state bears responsibility. Fifteen state agents carried it out.
Free press — UN Human Rights Office, 2019Since May 2017 Egyptian authorities have blocked at least 562 websites, including 132 news outlets. No court orders it and no body admits to doing it.
Free press — Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, 2023The two Iranian journalists who reported Mahsa Amini’s death in custody were sentenced to 13 and 12 years for “collaborating with a hostile government.” They were later pardoned.
Free press — Committee to Protect Journalists, 2023At least 145 journalists and media workers have been killed in Syria since 2011, including six who died in government custody. In 2012 it was the deadliest country in the world for the press.
Free press — Committee to Protect Journalists, 2025A Saudi court sentenced doctoral student Salma al-Shehab to 34 years for her Twitter activity, the longest term ever given a Saudi woman for peaceful expression. Her following numbered about 2,000.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2022Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor was sentenced to 10 years in 2018 for “insulting the status and prestige” of the UAE. He has been held in solitary confinement since 2017 without books, radio, or television.
Free speech — Amnesty International, 2022Kuwait’s penal code sets up to five years in prison for anyone who publicly “objects to the rights and authorities of the emir.” Former members of parliament have been jailed under it for tweets.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2014Oman’s penal code criminalizes criticizing the sultan and “undermining the prestige of the state,” and the government imposes criminal penalties for dissent.
Free speech — Freedom House, Oman report, 2024Kuwait revoked the citizenship of about 42,000 people in a matter of months. A 2024 amendment allows forfeiture for “moral turpitude” or criticism of the emir.
Equal citizenship — France 24, 2025Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was declared winner of the 2021 election with 95.1 percent. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy said the vote was neither free nor fair.
Free elections — Euronews, 2021Qatar held its first legislative election in 2021 for 30 of 45 council seats. In 2024 a referendum abolished the elected seats entirely, returning the council to full appointment by the emir.
Free elections — VOA News, 2024Twenty of the UAE’s 40 council members are appointed by the rulers of each emirate. The other twenty are chosen by an electoral college whose members those same rulers select.
Government chosen by citizens — Federal National Council, UAE Government, 2025The sultan of Oman holds absolute power and the constitutional system excludes any change of government through elections. Political parties are banned.
Government chosen by citizens — Freedom House, Oman report, 2024A court dissolved Bahrain’s largest opposition party, al-Wefaq, in 2016. The main secular opposition group, Wa’ad, was dissolved the following year.
Free elections — Index on Censorship, 2017Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Court was created in 2008 for terrorism cases and is now used against peaceful dissidents and rights activists, in proceedings that violate fair trial rights.
Independent courts — Human Rights Watch, 2012An Egyptian court sentenced 683 defendants to death in a single 2014 ruling, weeks after condemning 528 others. None of the defendants was brought to court and the judge reviewed no evidence.
Due process — Amnesty International, 2014Military courts in Egypt have tried at least 7,420 civilians since a 2014 decree expanded their jurisdiction, including 86 children. Most were convicted in mass trials.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2016Bahrain has revoked the nationality of at least 738 people since 2012, leaving most of them stateless. They include human rights defenders, journalists, and religious scholars.
Equal citizenship — Human Rights Watch, 2018Amnesty found that between 2011 and 2015 groups of up to 50 people were hanged at Saydnaya prison every week, as many as 13,000 in five years. It called the killings extermination and a crime against humanity.
Due process — Amnesty International, 2017The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented 177,021 people still forcibly disappeared since 2011, including 4,536 children. At least 45,000 more died under torture in detention.
Due process — Syrian Network for Human Rights, 2025Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on one day in March 2022, its largest mass execution in modern times. Activists identified 41 of them as members of the Shia minority, and every case reviewed involved torture claims.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2022Egyptian forces killed a minimum of 817 protesters, and probably more than 1,000, while clearing the Rabaa sit-in on 14 August 2013. Human Rights Watch called it a likely crime against humanity. No one has been prosecuted.
Freedom of assembly — Human Rights Watch, 2014Security forces and militias killed roughly 600 people during Iraq’s Tishreen protests that began in October 2019, and injured more than 20,000. Six years on, no one has been held responsible.
Freedom of assembly — Amnesty International, 2024A commission appointed by Bahrain’s king concluded that state agencies followed a systematic practice of mistreatment that in many cases amounted to torture. It documented 46 deaths and 559 torture allegations.
Freedom of assembly — Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, 2011Egypt’s 2013 assembly law requires three days’ notice to the Interior Ministry for any public gathering of more than ten people, and lets the ministry move or postpone it.
Freedom of assembly — Human Rights Watch, 2013In most Iranian criminal proceedings the testimony of two women counts as that of one man. Some categories of case will not accept a woman’s testimony at all.
Equal rights for women — Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, 2025Iranian law sets the compensation paid for a woman’s death or injury at half the amount paid for a man’s. A 2019 workaround pays the difference from public funds rather than changing the law.
Equal rights for women — Center for Human Rights in Iran, 2019Saudi Arabia’s first codified Personal Status Law requires a woman to obtain a male guardian’s permission to marry whatever her age. Men need no such permission and may have four wives.
Freedom to choose a spouse — Human Rights Watch, 2023Yemen’s parliament abolished the minimum marriage age in 1999 and has never restored it. Researchers have documented girls married at eight, and about a third of women were married before 18.
Freedom to choose a spouse — Human Rights Watch, 2014Women’s participation in the labour force across the Middle East and North Africa averages about 19 percent, the lowest of any region on earth. The global average is 48 percent.
Equal rights for women — World Bank, 2024Egyptian police arrested 76 people in the months after concertgoers raised rainbow flags at a Cairo concert in 2017. Some were sentenced to up to six years for “debauchery.”
LGBT civil rights — Human Rights Watch, 2017Lebanon’s Article 534, inherited from the French mandate, punishes “sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to a year in prison. Courts have ruled against it repeatedly, but it remains on the books.
LGBT civil rights — Human Rights Watch, 2023Half of Syria’s school-age children, about 2.4 million, are out of school, and nearly 40 percent of them are girls. One school in three cannot be used because it was destroyed, damaged, or occupied.
Girls’ education — UNICEF Syria, 2025About 37.5 percent of women aged 15 to 49 in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have undergone female genital mutilation. In Erbil the figure is above 50 percent.
No FGM — UNICEF, 2025About 19 percent of Yemeni women aged 15 to 49 have undergone female genital mutilation, rising to 85 percent in Al Mahrah governorate.
No FGM — UNICEF, 2025Article 13 names Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians as the only recognized religious minorities. Baha’is, the largest non-Muslim group and a faith founded in Iran, are deliberately left out and have no legal existence.
Protection for religious minorities — Christian Solidarity Worldwide, 2024A UN investigative team found clear and convincing evidence that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis. Around 10,000 were killed or captured in August 2014 alone, and thousands of women and girls were enslaved.
Protection for religious minorities — UN Security Council, 2021Iran cut the entire country off from the internet for five days in November 2019 while security forces put down protests. Reuters reported roughly 1,500 people killed; Amnesty verified at least 304.
Internet freedom — Amnesty International, 2020Researchers traced military-grade Pegasus spyware to operators in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, used against activists, lawyers, journalists, and opposition politicians.
Internet freedom — Citizen Lab, 2018Under the kafala system, used across the Gulf and in Jordan and Lebanon, a migrant worker cannot change jobs or leave the country without their employer’s permission. The ILO links it directly to forced labour.
Workers may organize — International Labour Organization, 2025Oman and the UAE exclude domestic workers, most of them migrant women, from labour law protections. Workers have described 21-hour days, confiscated passports, and no rest days.
Workers may organize — Human Rights Watch, 2017In February 2022 Kuwait’s Constitutional Court ruled that the article criminalizing “imitating the opposite sex” was unconstitutional, finding it inconsistent with the personal freedom the constitution guarantees.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2022A Lebanese appeals court ruled in 2018 that consensual sex between adults of the same sex cannot be considered unnatural, the strongest in a series of rulings against Article 534.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2018Qatar passed a law in 2017 giving domestic workers limits on working hours, a weekly rest day, and paid leave, the first such protections in the country.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2017Regulations published in February 2025 curtailed male guardianship, restricted forced marriage, and strengthened women’s position in divorce and custody, building on earlier reforms.
Progress — LSE Middle East Centre, 2025A Saudi aid worker, Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, was sentenced by the terrorism court to 20 years in prison followed by a 20-year travel ban over an anonymous satirical Twitter account.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2021Khalid al-Juhani told the BBC he wanted democracy and free speech on Saudi Arabia’s planned day of protest in March 2011. He was arrested immediately and held for years.
Freedom of assembly — Human Rights Watch, 2012Years after Bahrain’s own commission documented systematic torture and recommended accountability, Human Rights Watch found torture and mistreatment of detainees continuing.
Independent courts — Human Rights Watch, 2015Journalists across the region work under criminal defamation, cybercrime, and “false news” laws that carry prison terms. Every country in the region except Qatar is rated difficult or very serious for press freedom.
Free press — Reporters Without Borders, 2025Israeli defense officials estimate 350 to 450 miles of tunnel beneath Gaza, a strip of about 140 square miles. New York’s entire subway runs 248 route miles.
Freedom from terror — The Times of Israel, 2024Asked on television why Hamas built 500 kilometres of tunnels and no shelters, politburo member Mousa Abu Marzouk said the tunnels protect Hamas from airstrikes. “We are fighting inside the tunnels.”
Freedom from terror — The Times of Israel, 2023In the same interview the Hamas official said that because most of Gaza’s residents are refugees, responsibility for protecting them lies with the United Nations, not with Hamas.
Freedom from terror — The Times of Israel, 2023Hamas won the 2006 legislative election, seized Gaza by force from Fatah in 2007, and has held no election since. Freedom House says it governs in an authoritarian manner and suppresses criticism.
Freedom from terror — Freedom House, Gaza Strip report, 2025The United States estimates Iran spends nearly one billion dollars annually backing Hezbollah, Hamas, and allied armed groups, including roughly 700 million on Hezbollah alone.
Freedom from terror — Radio Free Europe, citing the U.S. State Department, 2018UN Security Council Resolution 1701 says there should be no weapons in Lebanon without the government’s consent and calls for every armed group to disarm. Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the best-armed faction in the country and has refused for nearly two decades.
Freedom from terror — UN Security Council Resolution 1701, 2006Saudi Arabia designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization in March 2014 and banned Hezbollah in its entirety in March 2016. Neither operates openly in the kingdom.
Freedom from terror — Al Jazeera, 2014In November 2014 the UAE published its first official terror list, naming 83 groups including al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Bahrain backed the designations the same year.
Freedom from terror — Al Jazeera, 2014The United States designated Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. It governs southern Lebanon in place of the state, and fired thousands of rockets and drones into Israel from October 2023, none of it authorized by the Lebanese government. UN Resolution 1701 requires it to disarm.
Freedom from terror — Council on Foreign Relations, 2025Iran has jammed Persian-language satellite broadcasts since 2003, which breaches Article 45 of the International Telecommunication Union constitution. Eutelsat traced the interfering transmissions to inside Iran.
Free press — Center for Human Rights in Iran, 2012Article 6 of Saudi Arabia’s cybercrime law carries five years in prison for producing or sending material that impinges on public order, religious values, public morals or privacy. None of those terms is defined.
Free speech — UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 2007Egypt’s 2018 media law requires a licence for any website, with 500,000 Egyptian pounds payable for the company and 50,000 more for each site. Publishing without one is illegal.
Free press — Reporters Without Borders, 2018Qatar raised the penalty for insulting the emir from five years to seven in 2024. A separate publishing law punishes criticism of the emir with prison and a fine.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2024Iran’s Guardian Council vets every candidate before an election and barred large numbers of reformists and sitting members of parliament in 2024, including a former president. Turnout hit a record low of 41 percent.
Free elections — International Crisis Group, 2024In May 2024 the emir dissolved parliament and suspended parts of the constitution for four years, taking legislative power for himself and the government. Kuwait had the Gulf’s most powerful elected assembly.
Government chosen by citizens — Library of Congress, 2024Jordan’s king appoints and dismisses the prime minister and cabinet, names all 65 senators, appoints the entire Constitutional Court, and may dissolve parliament at will.
Government chosen by citizens — Freedom House, Jordan report, 2025A retired teacher, Mohammed al-Ghamdi, was sentenced to death in 2023 over posts on two anonymous accounts with ten followers between them. The crown prince later called the sentence shameful and blamed bad laws.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2023Egypt keeps critics inside indefinitely by charging them in a fresh case whenever a release order or acquittal arrives, a practice known as rotation. One man was re-arrested hours after 11 years in detention.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2025The UAE charged at least 84 people in 2023 for forming an advocacy group, and in July 2024 sentenced 43 of them to life. Many had already served 11 years after an almost identical trial a decade earlier.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2025Iraqi courts have sentenced people to death after ten-minute hearings with no lawyer present, on the word of an anonymous informant or a confession extracted under torture. UN experts said this may amount to a crime against humanity.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2019Iran’s civil code permits the marriage of a girl under 13 with her father’s consent and a judge’s approval. More than a million child marriages were registered in eight years, 13,500 of them to girls under 13.
Freedom to choose a spouse — Iran Open Data Center, 2023Until September 2020 Kuwait had no law setting out protection from domestic violence and no shelters at all. The new law created shelters, a hotline and emergency protection orders for the first time.
Equal rights for women — Human Rights Watch, 2020Saudi Arabia criminalised domestic abuse for the first time in August 2013. The law set no enforcement mechanism, and a woman may still need a male guardian to file a complaint, who may be the abuser.
Equal rights for women — Human Rights Watch, 2013Women hold 5.2 percent of the 5,591 board seats across 752 listed companies in the Gulf, against a global average near 27 percent. Qatar sits at 1.8 percent and Saudi Arabia at 2.
Equal rights for women — GCC Board Gender Index, 2024Saudi law bars non-Muslims from entering Mecca, enforced by checkpoints on every road into the city where visitors must show identification stating their religion.
Freedom of religion — U.S. State Department, 2023Iran sentenced Kurdish Sunni cleric Mamousta Khazrnejad to death in 2023 for a speech at a memorial. At least ten Kurdish Sunni clerics were jailed, exiled, flogged or stripped of clerical status in six months.
Protection for religious minorities — Amnesty International, 2024Bahrain treats anyone over 15 as an adult, holding them in adult prisons. Human Rights Watch documented officers beating four boys aged 15 to 17 and threatening them with rape.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2021Kuwait denies its stateless Bidun population birth, marriage and death certificates, and bars their children from free government schools. Most drop out or depend on charity schooling.
Equal citizenship — Amnesty International, 2023Foreign nationals make up about 88 percent of the population in the UAE, 86 percent in Qatar and 73 percent in Kuwait. None of them can vote, and most can be deported without a hearing.
Workers may organize — Institute for National Security Studies, 2023More than 6,500 migrant workers from five South Asian countries died in Qatar between 2010 and 2020. Most were recorded as natural causes or cardiac arrest with no autopsy, which also left families ineligible for compensation.
Workers may organize — Amnesty International, 2021Of 19 countries assessed across the Middle East and North Africa, only Tunisia and Israel have outlawed corporal punishment of children in all settings. In some countries more than 90 percent of children face physical or verbal punishment each month.
Girls’ education — Human Rights Watch, 2021Egypt’s computerised identity system recognised only Muslims, Christians and Jews, leaving Baha’is unable to get documents for school, banking or hospital care. From 2009 they could enter a dash instead.
Progress — Human Rights Watch, 2007Muhammad was the single most popular name given to boys born in Israel in 2024, with 1,740 newborns. A Jewish state’s most common boy’s name is the name of the founder of Islam.
Free in Israel — The Times of Israel, 2025Tel Aviv Pride is the biggest LGBT event in the Middle East and Asia. About 150,000 people marched openly through the city in 2023.
Free in Israel — The Times of Israel, 2023Israel’s High Court ordered the state to register same-sex marriages performed abroad in 2006. Since January 2022, same-sex couples can also have children through surrogacy.
Free in Israel — Library of Congress, 2021Uzi Even became the region’s first openly gay legislator in 2002. In December 2022 Amir Ohana became Speaker of the Knesset, the first openly gay person to lead a parliament in the Middle East.
Free in Israel — The Times of Israel, 2022Israel’s military lifted all restrictions on gay and lesbian service in 1993, the same year the United States adopted “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Studies found no effect on unit cohesion or readiness.
Free in Israel — NPR, 2010Israel has voted in 25 Knesset elections since January 1949. Governments have changed hands many times, always through the ballot box.
Free in Israel — The Jerusalem Post, 2023In June 2021 Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas, became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, holding the balance of power and winning billions in funding for Arab communities.
Free in Israel — The Times of Israel, 2021Former president Moshe Katsav went to prison for rape in 2011. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert went to prison for bribery in 2016. Both were convicted in ordinary criminal trials.
Free in Israel — Al Jazeera, 2016Salim Joubran, an Arab Christian, sat on Israel’s Supreme Court from 2004 to 2017. He was on the panel that sent former president Katsav to prison, writing that he had fallen “from the loftiest heights to the deepest depths.”
Free in Israel — The Times of Israel, 2023In 2023 Israelis protested their own government’s judicial plan every Saturday for more than 30 weeks in a row, the largest street protests in the country’s history. The plan was paused.
Free in Israel — NPR, 2023The Baha’i faith, whose members are persecuted in Iran, keeps its world headquarters and its two holiest shrines in Haifa and Acre. UNESCO listed the sites as World Heritage in 2008.
Free in Israel — UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2008Israel counted about 34,000 Christians in 1949 and 180,300 at Christmas 2024, a community that keeps growing while Christians leave most of the region.
Free in Israel — Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024Israel’s 1967 Protection of Holy Places Law guarantees free access to the sacred sites of all religions and makes desecrating any of them a crime punishable by seven years in prison.
Free in Israel — Jewish Virtual Library, 1967Israel was the first country in the world to conscript women, in 1949, and remains the only one in the region that does. Women have flown combat aircraft since 2001.
Free in Israel — The Jerusalem Post, 2021Golda Meir became prime minister on 17 March 1969, a decade before Britain elected Margaret Thatcher and long before most democracies were led by a woman.
Free in Israel — History.com, 1969Polled in late 2023, 72 percent of Palestinians said Hamas’s decision to launch the 7 October attack was correct, and 22 percent said it was wrong. Support was higher in the West Bank, at 82 percent, than in Gaza, at 57 percent.
Freedom from terror — Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 2023During the 2014 war Hamas forces summarily executed at least 23 Palestinians as alleged collaborators. Six were shot outside al-Omari mosque before hundreds of spectators, including children. At least 16 had been in Hamas custody since before the war began.
Due process — Amnesty International, 2015During and after Israel’s 2008–09 offensive, Hamas security forces and masked gunmen killed at least 32 Palestinians and maimed dozens more by shooting them in the legs. Eighteen were executed as alleged collaborators. Hamas investigated one case.
Due process — Human Rights Watch, 2009Human Rights Watch documented that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza routinely arrest and torture peaceful critics, using beatings, whipping of the feet and solitary confinement to punish a critical article or a Facebook post.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2018Palestinian Authority security officers stormed Nizar Banat’s home at 3:30 a.m. on 24 June 2021 and beat him with steel batons. He died in custody. A year on, no one had been held to account.
Free speech — Human Rights Watch, 2022In February 2021 Hamas’s Sharia Judicial Council ruled that an unmarried woman may not travel without her male guardian’s permission, registered at the court. The head of Gaza’s judiciary called the ruling “balanced”.
Women’s freedom of movement — The Times of Israel, 2021Mahmoud Ishtiwi, commander of a Hamas battalion, was held for more than a year, tortured, and shot by his own movement in February 2016 after an internal investigation accused him of theft and of having sex with a man.
LGBT civil rights — The Irish Times, 2016In August 2019 Palestinian Authority police banned the group al-Qaws from holding any activity in the West Bank, said such events violate “the values of Palestinian society”, and promised to arrest organisers. The ban was later walked back.
LGBT civil rights — NBC News, 2019About 90 LGBT Palestinians live in Israel on protective permits after fleeing death threats at home. In June 2022 Israel told its High Court they could also work legally. Ahmad Abu Markhiya, 25, who had lived in Israel for two years, was found beheaded in Hebron four months later.
Free in Israel — The Times of Israel, 2022
