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Doha's relations with India have soured, after a Qatar court handed down the death sentence to eight Indians arrested in August 2022.

Abu Dhabi International Airport is to be renamed Zayed International Airport, after the UAE’s founding president, the late Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahyan.

Saudi Arabia hosted fresh talks in late October between President General Abdel-Fattah Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Lieutenant General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (often known as Hemedti).

Iran’s consul general in Jeddah Hassan Zarnegar Abarqouie left Tehran early November to take up his post, eight months after Saudi Arabia and the Islamic republic agreed to restore diplomatic ties in a China-brokered deal. 

Qatari Sheikha Sara Bint Hamad Al-Thani, a little-known daughter of Father Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, graduated with a master’s degree from the Joaan Bin Jassim Academy for Defence Studies.

The Bahrain Defence Force (BDF) said on 26 October that a fifth serviceman, Major Mohammed Salem Mohammed Anber, had died one day earlier.

Sheikh Theyab Bin Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, son of UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, travelled to Muscat in early November.

British Conservative Party member of parliament Bob Stewart was found guilty of racially abusing a Bahraini human rights activist, in a case at Westminster Magistrates Court early November.

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani removed Lieutenant General Abdulwahab Al-Saadi as Counter Terrorism Service chief on 1 November.

Even before the new Gaza war shattered comfortable assumptions about regional security, the global economic climate had been hostile, as shown in analysis of the International Monetary Fund's new reports on the global outlook and regional economic performance.

The 'Axis of Resistance' bloc of state and non-state actors, Shia and Sunni militias, has been long in the making, as Iran's revolutionary elite has sought to project its influence via a disparate group of organisations ranged across the Middle East. Its components are of differing sizes and capabilities, and their links to Iran also vary.

The potential for Iran’s 'Axis of Resistance' militia network to destabilise the wider region has been manifest in an alarming acceleration of attacks on bases hosting United States troops in Iraq and Syria by IRGC-backed militias.

There have been public protests in a number of countries around the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) in support of Palestinians and against Israeli actions in Gaza, but in many countries they have been limited in scope. Huge crowds have taken to the streets in capitals from Rabat to Baghdad, but there have been no major events in the countries where the public space is most tightly controlled, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Governments across the region are trying to ensure the war between Hamas and Israel doesn’t escalate, with potentially disastrous expansion to other fronts. Meanwhile the monarchies and others are trying to assuage the anger many of their citizens feel towards Israel’s actions in Gaza, in a conflict that has profoundly upset recent comfortable assumptions about the regional status quo.

KIO allegations: Finance minister Fahd Al-Jarallah has referred the Kuwait Investment Authority’s London outpost, the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), to the public prosecutor over a series of alleged offences including the illegal disclosure of confidential information between 2018-22. The move was announced by the Ministry of Finance on 16 October.