Malaysia’s king has warned that any attempt to challenge his order granting jailed former Prime Minister Najib Razak house arrest could amount to defying his decree, a day after authorities delayed Najib’s transfer.
The 73-year-old Najib was jailed for his role in one of the largest-ever global plunders of a sovereign wealth fund, the now-defunct 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
But King Sultan Ibrahim granted him a conditional pardon in September, allowing him to serve out the rest of his sentence at home provided he paid a $12m fine.
On Friday, the country’s attorney general blocked the former prime minister’s transfer to house arrest after the fine was paid, saying his office needed more clarification on the pardon.
The king said on Saturday there was nothing to clarify, calling the pardon “clear, evident and without any ambiguity”.
“There should be no confusion in interpretation,” King Ibrahim said in a statement, adding it was not tied to any other cases against the former leader.
“Given that all conditions in the conditional pardon order have been fulfilled, any argument questioning the order leads towards denying the order of His Majesty the King.”
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Najib’s lawyers thanked the monarch on Saturday, saying there was “no basis” for authorities to keep Najib in prison “a moment longer”.
“They must transfer him immediately to his residence at Jalan Langgak Duta to serve his house arrest, as His Majesty has ordered,” lawyer Farhan Shafee said in a statement.
The Attorney General’s Office issued its own statement shortly afterwards, denying it was challenging the king’s authority while giving no indication if it intended to immediately release Najib.
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“This step is not aimed at delaying or denying the implementation of the Conditional Pardon Order, but to avoid any conflict in the implementation of the orders in force and to ensure no sentence is implemented unlawfully,” it said.
Hours later, the prime minister’s office said the attorney general was seeking an audience with the king to “seek pardon” and express an intent to comply, while insisting that legal questions remained that only a court could decide.
The house arrest order applies only to Najib’s first conviction.
He faces an additional 15 years in prison after being found guilty last year in another 1MDB-linked case, with the sentence set to begin after his stint in house arrest ends. Najib is appealing the verdict.
The king, a position held in rotation by Malaysia’s nine regional sultans, plays a largely ceremonial role but has the authority to grant pardons under discretionary powers granted by Malaysia’s constitution.
Malaysians hold the monarch and the country’s other sultans in deep respect. Negative remarks about the royalty can be prosecuted under the colonial-era Sedition Act.
Paraguay’s former President Santiago Pena has been charged after spending the morning at the attorney general’s office in Asunción for questioning, a day after being impeached over his alleged involvement in a banking scandal that has left nearly half the country unable to access their savings.
The former president, who was placed under house arrest on Friday, was charged over the scandal. The Reuters news agnecy reported that Pena was charged with breach of trust and administration for personal gain.
The scandal centres on Pena’s ties to Ueno, a digital bank that grew rapidly during his presidency, partly through an injection of more than $800m in public funds, and attracted millions of customers.
The bank’s collapse has prompted days of protests across Paraguay, with thousands taking to the streets demanding access to their savings. Some demonstrations have turned violent, with protesters clashing with police.
Pena, who held a stake in Ueno’s parent company until March 2025, has denied wrongdoing, arguing that the bank’s problems were a regulatory matter.
What is Pena accused of?
Among the allegations against Pena are that he used his political influence to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds into Ueno while shielding the bank from regulatory scrutiny as concerns grew over its risky lending practices.
They point to his appointment of Carlos Carvallo, a former executive at the company that later became Ueno, as head of Paraguay’s central bank in 2023. On Saturday, Carvallo was charged with breach of trust, producing false public documents and administration for personal gain.
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Pena is further accused of allowing Paraguay’s state pension fund to deposit $355m at Ueno, above legal limits.
Pena had offered his resignation on Thursday, but lawmakers rejected it and pressed ahead with impeachment proceedings to prevent him from having the political immunity he would have gained had he stepped down.
An arrest order was issued shortly after he was removed from office.
On Saturday, after announcing the charges, prosecutors are also seeking pretrial detention for both Pena and Carvallo.
Bank collapse sparks political crisis
The scandal erupted after regulators took control of Ueno on Tuesday over concerns about its solvency, leaving nearly three million people unable to access their savings or use their bank cards.
Paraguay’s central bank said Saturday that 1.2 million customers had already received partial or full reimbursement of their insured deposits.
But that has done little to quell public anger, with many still waiting for their money back. Some protesters have also expressed frustration over Pena’s replacement, Pedro Alliana, who belongs to the same conservative Colorado Party and is himself under investigation in connection with the bank’s collapse.
Alliana, who was sworn in as president on Friday, has pledged to help those affected.
A Kenyan court has sentenced starvation cult leader Paul Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murder of 190 children and one adult.
The sentence was comprised of 100 years for murder by starvation and 100 years by direct homicide, Justice Diana Kavedza said on Friday, as she read out the judgement. The 191 victims were starved to death on his orders and buried in a forest.
Twenty-eight accomplices, who were convicted alongside Mackenzie last month, were also sentenced to various prison terms.
The self-proclaimed pastor and his Good News International Church organised a Christian doomsday sect in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their children to death, so they could go to heaven before the world ended and “meet Jesus”.
His accomplices threatened and beat victims to ensure they followed his orders.
Mackenzie, wearing a grey polo shirt and black trousers, smiled as he entered a tent set up outside the court where the hearing was held.
He had denied murder charges, saying he did not force the victims to starve, but the court in Mombasa rejected his defence.
Shallow graves
Police arrested Mackenzie in 2023 after receiving a tip-off. After several weeks, authorities began uncovering bodies in the Shakahola Forest near the coast in southeastern Kenya.
Emaciated bodies were found scattered in shallow graves and dumped in latrines. Some had been buried alive.
More than 400 people died in the Shakahola tragedy, according to Kenyan authorities, making it one of the country’s deadliest cult-related disasters.
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The scale of the killing is comparable to that of the doomsday cult that killed more than 700 people in Uganda in 2000, and the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana when an American cult leader killed more than 900 people by ordering them to drink poison.
Investigations into the Mackenzie affair uncovered mass graves and evidence of severe malnutrition, triggering nationwide scrutiny of religious violence and the government’s failure to detect the group’s activities earlier.
Since the bodies were discovered three years ago, there have been calls for the government to impose tougher regulations on religious organisations. It also emerged that Mackenzie was arrested twice in the past, but then released.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel – On election day, Lama Yassin, 31, drove to polling stations in her hometown of Arrabeh, where Palestinian citizens of Israel make up an overwhelming majority, inspired by what she was witnessing.
“You would see families coming to the polls together, grandparents and grandchildren,” she said. “It was the first time in a really long time that I felt there is hope – hope of a change.”
The overwhelming Arab turnout in the October 27 Israeli election won the Arab parties a record 19 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
Thabet Abu Rass, an expert on Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, had predicted the Arab parties would be impossible for Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc to ignore: Their seats push it past the 61-seat threshold for a ruling coalition.
Instead, Yassin and others saw Israeli channels invite “Jews to talk about Arabs and Arab voter turnout”, she recalled, with almost no Arab guests.
“The whole conversation was about how dangerous these Arab voters are.” The “most disgusting term” she saw online, however, was the repeated refrain of “election terrorism” on Channel 14, the hard-right, pro-Netanyahu station.
Within a day of the vote, Likud and figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir accused the Arab parties of stealing the election through “bribery, threats, violence, forgeries”. The accusations have continued even after the Central Elections Committee and the Israeli police said they found no sign of organised tampering.
Distraught, Yassin posted an Instagram video that went viral among Palestinians, capturing the doublespeak of Israelis they so often hear:
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“Eating hummus with us? ‘Brothers and friends’.
Seeking political power? ‘Terror supporters’.
Helping someone in distress? ‘Brothers and friends’.
Voting in large numbers? ‘Terror at the ballot box’.”
“When it suits you, we are brothers and friends. When it suits you, we are a symbol of coexistence. When it suits you, you go around the world boasting about our integration into Israeli society.
“But the moment we demand to have influence, to shape policy, and to take part in decision-making – suddenly, our very presence becomes a threat.”
When voting becomes ‘a danger to the state’
More than a week after the election, Jaffa’s Ajami neighbourhood offers both the history leading up to – and the fraught circumstances of – this moment that Abu Rass calls Israel’s “political crossroads”.
Faded Arabic signs on abandoned buildings hint at the Palestinian community that thrived in Ajami before 1948. On Ajami’s streets, posters of children killed during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza hang metres away from campaign posters for Ra’am and the Joint List.
From the back office of his cluttered hardware shop, Omar Siksik, once a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city councilman who now co-chairs Kulna Yaffa, a grassroots, Arab-Jewish civic initiative in the city, weighs this moment of unprecedented representation – met by renewed delegitimisation efforts – against Ajami’s own history. It is a struggle, he says, for basic existence.
Omar Siksik, once a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city councilman, now co-chairs Kulna Yaffa [Al Jazeera]
Before 1948, Jaffa had about 100,000 Palestinians. After the Nakba, fewer than 4,000 remained – with those left fenced inside Ajami under military rule. “We called it the Ajami ghetto,” explained Siksik. Born there in 1957, he grew up sharing a toilet and kitchen with newly arrived Jewish immigrants who took the homes of expelled Palestinian neighbours.
Over time, the fence surrounding Ajami was torn down, martial law ended, and the Palestinians who remained there were granted Israeli citizenship. But later, when Siksik became the head of the Rabita Association, a nonprofit for the Palestinian residents of Jaffa, he remembered “sleeping under the bulldozers” that were razing the houses of Palestinians in the area, a practice that Rabita had fought in court.
For Siksik and others, election day is the only occasion that’s different for Palestinian citizens of Israel. “This is a democratic election,” he said. “It’s the only thing where we’re equal with the Jews. The only thing.
“When we came and expressed our dissatisfaction with this government, the Arab vote became a danger to the state,” said Siksik. “It’s not normal.”
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Many Palestinian citizens of Israel believe they’ve been allowed to remain out of necessity, not equality. “The bus drivers are Arabs, the doctors in the hospitals are Arabs, the construction workers are Arabs,” Siksik notes.
But even those “essential worker” roles are being stripped away. After October 7, Israel revoked tens of thousands of work permits for Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to enter Israel, and the essential jobs they filled are being replaced by short-term labourers brought from abroad. Yassin notes fabricated stories over the summer on Israeli social media that Arab doctors were poisoning Jewish patients at Rambam Hospital in Haifa.
“If they could give up on anything Arab, they would,” says Yassin. “It’s not because they like us [that they let us remain]… It’s not because they want to; it’s because they have to.”
Facing ‘the whole Israeli system’
Yassin herself went through that struggle for acceptance in Israeli society. After growing up in Arrabeh, she learned Hebrew so well at Ben-Gurion University that “no one knew I was an Arab any more.” She took a job at a regional council near Jerusalem, in an entirely Jewish workplace, to prove she was “fully Israeli”.
“I did not speak Arabic in public. I even voted for [left-wing Zionist party] Meretz and favoured them over Arab parties,” said Yassin. “I wanted to be ‘the good Israeli’.”
But she could never escape that sense of otherness. At the council, colleagues asked if they could call Yassin – whose first name, Lama, means “why” in Hebrew – “Yasmine” instead, because she reminded them of Jasmine from the movie Aladdin. She was Yasmine for a year and a half. “It was another demand of giving up on another part of my identity – one that defines me literally.”
Posters at ‘Gaza’s Children Square’ in Ajami [Al Jazeera]
And then, the Sunday after the October 7 attacks, her colleagues would not say hello back to her.
She came to realise that “shared society cannot be built over inequality.”
After becoming director of public policy at the Abraham Initiatives, which advances the rights of Palestinian citizens in Israel, Yassin testified at Knesset committee meetings regarding unchecked crime and violence affecting their communities. She describes being dismissed or silenced outright, despite prior approval to speak. “If you say one more word,” she recalled the National Security committee chairman saying, “I will ask you to leave.”
Yassin sees that derision of a Palestinian political voice carrying over into the rhetoric – and investigations – surrounding the post-election talks. In Jaffa, that wider climate was felt on November 3, when, about midnight, about 15 security officers, a few of them masked, raided the Jaffa home of Abed Abou Shehadeh, a journalist and activist, arresting him in front of his two children. Accused of having “contacts with a foreign agent”, a court has ordered him held until November 8.
The ‘loyalty test’
In the south, meanwhile, police arrested seven Bedouin men on suspicion of planning to pay people to vote for Ra’am, which calls them party activists and denies the allegations. Arab political leader Ayman Odeh now faces investigations as well by the Shin Bet intelligence service, which is run by the Netanyahu-aligned David Zini, over allegations that he received money from foreign sources to influence voter turnout. Odeh denies the allegations, calling them “political persecution”.
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“We are now facing the whole Israeli system,” says Abu Rass. “I think we are facing the deep state also.”
Before the election, Abu Rass had predicted to Al Jazeera that 15 to 17 seats would have Israeli party leaders knocking on the Arab parties’ doors. But despite the Arab parties exceeding even those high expectations, that success has not yet borne such fruit.
With 67 members of the Knesset, including those from the Arab parties, recommending Eisenkot to the president to form a government, the anti-Netanyahu bloc has signalled agreement to remove Knesset speaker Amir Ohana and halt the judicial overhaul legislation. The Arab parties also plan to back a state inquiry into the October 7 security failures. But Abu Rass does not mistake this for a lasting partnership.
“[Eisenkot is] counting on us only for the coming months,” he says, “to help him stabilise his government, to pass this stage of removing the government and Netanyahu.”
And while Eisenkot campaigned on two pillars – removing Netanyahu, and mandating military service for ultra-Orthodox Haredim who largely do not serve – even Avigdor Liberman, long a fierce opponent of Haredi draft-dodging, now signals he would work with the Haredi parties to form an anti-Netanyahu government without the Arabs, who have repeatedly offered to support Eisenkot from outside the coalition to unseat Netanyahu.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, tasked with choosing a leader to try to form a government, this week condemned “the coarseness and racist expressions that we have heard recently”. But according to Israeli media, during meetings with party leaders, he asked Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas whether he considers Hamas a terrorist organisation. “You cannot constantly put us to this test,” said Abbas, who has repeatedly condemned the October 7 attacks, according to Israeli media.
Yassin has felt and seen these loyalty tests play out before in Israel. “Even if the two million Arabs who live here … say ‘we condemn Hamas,’ the day after, we will have another loyalty test,” she says. “It’s never-ending, and whoever wants to deny our rights in this country does not really need a reason to.”
A Jewish-only coalition, she says, would mean “we went a few stairs down in the whole democracy approach, the so-called democracy in Israel.”
Israeli soldiers drag a handcuffed Palestinian during an arrest campaign in Qalqilyia city, West Bank [Al Jazeera]
‘We don’t have the privilege of giving up’
Most people in working-class Ajami have swiftly come down from their election-night highs. “I am not optimistic,” said Nadia, a middle-aged woman sitting behind the counter of a clothing store. “If we raise our voice in the streets, we are arrested. If we raise our voice in the ballot, we are dismissed.”
Siksik fears: “I see catastrophic things coming here.”
But Nadia noted she would vote again if it means keeping Ben-Gvir and Smotrich out of government.
As Yassin puts it: “We don’t have the privilege of giving up. If we don’t do this work, no one will.”
After the sense of power the 19 seats gave people, she says, “it’s going to be hard to give it away.”
Sitting in a liberal Tel Aviv cafe, Yassin overheard a conversation at the adjacent table turn to Gaza and “how they killed the children” – apparently in reaction to what she had been saying.
As the opposition bloc appears to be pursuing every avenue to avoid including Arab parties in any position of power, she finds herself looking at even “liberal” Israelis differently.
“I was looking at every one of them and wondering if they would support an Arab or Arab parties being part of the coalition,” she said.
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“Because if they don’t want my representatives, it also means that they don’t want me.”
![Omar Siksik, once a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city councilman, now co-chairs Kulna Yaffa [Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/Omar-Siksik-1794039780.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C578&quality=80)
![Israeli soldiers drag a handcuffed Palestinian during an arrest campaign in Qalqilyia city, West Bank [Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/Israeli-soldiers-drag-a-handcuffed-Palestinian-during-an-arrest-campaign-in-Qalqilyia-city.-Photo-by-Mohamad-Nazzal-1794039516.jpeg?w=770&resize=770%2C514&quality=80)