Humanity is "under attack" from a predatory world order in which powerful states trample international law with near-total impunity, Amnesty International has warned in its annual assessment of global human rights on Tuesday.
The organisation said 2025 was marked by widespread violations, systemic injustices and a collapse of accountability, with the Middle East and North Africa offering the starkest illustration of a world "falling into lawlessness", according to Secretary-General Agnès Callamard.
Speaking at an Amnesty event in London on Monday to launch the report, Callamard told The New Arab that the Middle East now best reflects a "predatory world order" in which war has replaced diplomacy and entire populations are dehumanised.
The region’s current crises, she said, stem from years of failure to hold the United States and Israel to account for repeated breaches of international law, creating a system where "war is normalised" and some people’s lives, particularly in the Middle East, are treated as expendable "collateral damage".
Callamard described the recent confrontation involving Israel , the US, Iran and Hezbollah as emblematic of this breakdown, pointing to Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon, mass displacement and the planned annexation of Lebanese homes and land.
While she said the latest round of violence was triggered by an unlawful US-Israeli attack in breach of the UN Charter, she stressed that the deeper problem is an international community "unable to respond effectively" after years of eroding the very norms meant to prevent atrocities. Predatory powers and the collapse of accountability The report identifies the US and Russia as "predators" whose actions are reshaping the global order, Callamard said. These states, she argued, rely on blackmail, threats, looting and aggression.
Their behaviour, she added, is driven by a racialised vision of humanity in which some populations can be dispossessed or destroyed with few consequences.
Callamard also accused the American president of openly signalling disregard for international humanitarian law, including by calling for the "annihilation" of Iran and its people.
Such rhetoric, she noted, comes as Iranians themselves endure brutal repression at home and as Palestinians in Gaza face an ongoing genocide alongside the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank. Genocide and apartheid against Palestinians Amnesty's report devotes extensive attention to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, concluding that Israel committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza in 2025.
The organisation says the genocide continued even after a ceasefire with Hamas in October 2025, as Israel maintained a siege that blocked adequate humanitarian aid, forcibly displaced almost the entire population and devastated civilian homes and infrastructure.
The report reiterates Amnesty’s finding that Israel operates a system of apartheid against all Palestinians under its control. In the West Bank , including East Jerusalem, Israeli forces carried out high-intensity military operations while state-backed settler violence surged, driving Palestinians from their land.
In 2025, UN agencies recorded hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks that severely restricted Palestinian movement, while settler attacks forced scores of families from their villages.
Beyond Gaza and the West Bank, the report documents Israeli military operations and strikes in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen and Qatar.
In southern Lebanon, Israel is accused of destroying or damaging thousands of civilian structures and agricultural areas over just a few months, contributing to mass displacement.
Amnesty also highlights the role of irresponsible arms transfers in fuelling these abuses, even as mounting activism and legal challenges have pushed some governments to halt or curb weapons sales to Israel.
Crucially, Amnesty accuses the world’s most powerful states of failing to take meaningful action to stop the genocide or end Israel’s unlawful occupation and apartheid system. Their complicity or silence, the report warns, has allowed "crimes under international law" to be committed on a vast scale. Authoritarianism entrenched across the region Away from headline conflicts, the report portrays a MENA region where authoritarianism is hardening and dissent is relentlessly crushed.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, told The New Arab that 2025 saw the "solidification of authoritarianism" in countries that once appeared to buck the trend, particularly Tunisia, which emerged from the Arab Spring as a rare democratic success story.
In Tunisia, authorities deepened their assault on civil society by targeting human rights groups and NGO staff, and jailing government critics after politically motivated trials under counter-terrorism and cybercrime laws.
Across the Gulf, repression remained severe. In Saudi Arabia and neighbouring states, governments imposed harsh limits on free expression and association, handing out lengthy prison terms after unfair trials, imposing arbitrary travel bans and stepping up executions.
Iran recorded its highest number of executions in decades, while Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE also continued to rely heavily on the death penalty. Silencing dissent and criminalising civic space The report says governments across the region are weaponising technology to tighten their grip, using unlawful surveillance, online harassment and repressive cybercrime laws to track and silence critics.
In Egypt , authorities maintained a relentless campaign against independent media and civil society, with security forces arbitrarily detaining journalists, researchers and political opponents and subjecting them to enforced disappearance, incommunicado detention and torture.
Morayef warned that Tunisia’s rapid drift into authoritarianism has been under-reported, even as Gulf monarchies and other governments in Algeria, Iraq and Jordan maintain or expand their own arsenals of repressive laws.
Dozens of activists and opposition figures across the region faced unfair trials, often in special or emergency courts that disregard basic due process.