Category World News

Cameroon will hold presidential elections on Sunday, October 12, with the vote expected to go in favour of Africa’s second-longest-serving leader, Paul Biya, 92, who is seeking an eighth term.

The cocoa and oil-producing Central African country has been beset by challenges in recent years, including the rising cost of food, high rate of youth unemployment, armed attacks in the far north and a secessionist conflict in the country’s southern Anglophone regions.

Some 8.2 million people aged 20 and above are eligible to vote, although voter apathy is on the rise. Many people question the point of voting in a system they believe is rigged in favour of the governing party.

While opposition candidates are mounting challenges to Biya, who has held power since 1982, analysts say the president is likely to extend his rule for another seven years, and possibly rule until he is 100 years old.

Cameroon’s demographic is young, with about 60 percent of the 30 million population under the age of 25. More than half of the country has never known a president other than Biya.

French and English are the national languages. Yaounde is the Cameroonian capital, while coastal Douala is the largest city and main seaport.

Here’s what to know about the elections and Biya’s rule:

Who is running?

There are 12 presidential candidates. The winner requires a simple majority to win the election. Notable candidates include:

• Paul Biya – The 92-year-old is the candidate most expected to win. He has been president since 1982, and was prime minister prior to that. He is the leader of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC), which enjoys the strongest support from voters across the country. His biggest rival, Maurice Kamto, who won 14 percent of the vote in the 2018 elections, has been barred from running, as a splinter group from the Manidem party in his alliance had already registered a candidate.
• Akere Muna –  A barrister, 73-year-old Muna is running as the candidate for the Univers Party. He is a technocrat and has held senior positions at the African Development Bank and Transparency International. He attempted to run in the 2018 elections, but later withdrew his candidacy and instead joined forces with Kamto under the Cameroon Renaissance Party. Muna, nicknamed “Mr Clean” for his perceived transparency, is promising to end corruption and put a stop to the Anglophone crisis.
• Cabral Libii – Journalist Libii, 45, is running as a candidate for the Cameroon Party for National Reconciliation (PCRN). He has also promised to target corruption.
• Joshua Osih – The 56-year-old Anglophone politician is running for the Social Democratic Front party. Osih is campaigning to end the violence in the region and to “liberate” Cameroon from Biya.
• Hermine Patricia Toimaino Ndam Njoya – A longtime parliamentarian and the mayor of Foumban, 56-year-old Njoya is only the third woman ever to run in a Cameroonian presidential election. She is the candidate for the Democratic Union of Cameroon party.
• Bello Bouba Maigari – The 78-year-old candidate for the National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP) is from the Far North region, which is plagued by violence and attacks by the armed group, Boko Haram. He was previously in Biya’s government for a long time, but resigned as tourism minister a few months ago.
• Issa Tchiroma Bakary –  Another member of the old guard, the 76-year-old is running as a candidate for the Front for the National Salvation of Cameroon. He was the employment minister between 2019 and June this year, but is now promising to deliver change. He has traversed Cameroon in energetic canvassing campaigns, promising to end economic stagnation and security crises.

What is Biya’s legacy?

Under Biya’s rule, Cameroon has struggled with myriad challenges, including chronic corruption and resulting poor economic growth, despite being rich in resources such as oil and cocoa.

The president, who has managed to clinch landslide wins in heavily contested elections held every seven years, is renowned for his absenteeism, as he reportedly spends extended periods away from the country. He and his entourage are often away, on private or medical treatment trips to Switzerland, with a media investigation in 2018 finding that Biya had spent an estimated 1,645 days (nearly four and a half years) in the European country – excluding official visits – since being in power.

Manu Lekunze, a lecturer in international relations at Aberdeen University, told Al Jazeera that Biya has managed to hold onto power for so long through tactical control of his own party – by using a divide-and-rule approach – as well as within opposition camps to discourage any major challengers.

Biya has also managed to cement complete support from the military to avoid any risk of a coup, Lekunze said, and uses state security apparatuses to crack down on dissent or protests.

Cameroon’s feared gendarmerie responded forcefully to 2016 protests by lawyers and other professionals in the southern Anglophone regions, which were protesting against a lack of opportunities for English speakers. However, the violent response spurred a secessionist conflict in the region that is continuing, and has seen hundreds killed and 638,000 displaced, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2024.

“He believes he is going to rule for life,” Lekunze said, adding that Biya has the support of leaders of several ethnic groups, combined with allegiance from his own Beti-Sawa majority.

Biya made his first and possibly only appearance in the election campaign on Wednesday this week, when he appeared in the Far North region, where the emergence of two new candidates appears to be splitting his usually comfortable base.

Under Biya, opposition politicians have frequently accused electoral authorities of colluding with the president to rig elections. In 2008, parliament voted to remove the limit on the number of terms a president may serve.

Analysts say his absolute hold on power could lead to instability when he eventually goes.

“There are tensions within his party around who will be president next, and there are also increasing ethnic tensions,” Lekunze said, referring to how ethnic discourse has heightened differences in the election campaign. “That’s a recipe for political instability,” he added.

What are the key issues for this election?

Inflation

On paper, the World Bank said gross domestic product was projected to grow by 3.5 percent to 3.9 percent in 2025, up from 3.5 percent in 2024, due to higher cocoa prices globally, higher cotton production and improved electricity for businesses.

However, analysts say government mismanagement and corruption are driving stagnation in the country’s economy.

Cameroonians complain bitterly about high food and fuel prices, especially since the COVID-19-induced recession.

High transport costs from food-producing regions, as well as conflict, have disrupted supply chains and fuelled inflation.

According to the World Bank, poverty reduction has stagnated in the past 20 years, with 23 percent of the population now living in extreme poverty.

Jobs

While the official unemployment rate is low at 3.8 percent, according to the World Bank, many young people say they are struggling to find jobs.

Insecurity and conflict

Since 2015, armed attacks by Boko Haram have become more and more frequent in the Far North region of the country.

Alongside this, there have been nine years of secessionist conflict in the two Anglophone regions of Northwest and Southwest Cameroon.

In the affected regions, more than one million people were displaced in August, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

Claims that a study conducted by South Korean researchers “proves” a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and an increased risk of up to six types of cancer have gone viral in recent days. These claims caused a wave of misinformation, with prominent figures and platforms using their professional titles to lend credibility to them.

So how did this happen?

Who claimed the study showed a link between vaccines and cancer?

Social media accounts cited a study titled “1-year risks of cancers associated with COVID-19 vaccination: a large population-based cohort study in South Korea”, published in Biomarker Research, an open access academic journal. The study used statistics from the South Korean health insurance database and found a pattern: individuals who received the vaccine were also more likely to be diagnosed with certain types of cancer within one year. This statistical correlation was quickly misrepresented as definitive “proof” of a direct risk.

A misinformation campaign focused on spreading specific, alarming numbers to stir panic, with influential figures using their professional credentials to amplify the message.

For instance, the platform Vigilant Fox, which defines itself as a media company founded by a “healthcare specialist turned independent journalist”, promoted the study, claiming it showed a 27 percent overall increase in cancer risk. It further listed exaggerated increases for specific cancers, such as a 53 percent rise in lung cancer and a 69 percent increase in prostate cancer.

COVID vaccines linked to a 27% INCREASE in overall cancer risk, South Korean study finds.

“There’s a one in a thousand chance that this result arose by chance,” Dr. John Campbell noted.@ChildrensHD reports:

The study used data from 2021-2023 for over 8.4 million people in… pic.twitter.com/kDZ56rCV6w

Then, Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, who identifies himself as an “epidemiologist”, went further, falsely claiming that the vaccine increases the risk of “seven types of cancer”, linking the study to others without justification to assert that these cancers “all increased significantly after vaccination”.

🚨COVID-19 “Vaccines” Increase Your Risk of SEVEN Cancer Types

2 Landmark Studies tracked 8.7 MILLION people in Italy and South Korea — comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated.

Breast, bladder, lung, prostate, thyroid, gastric, and colorectal cancers ALL surged after vaccination. https://t.co/M03HJoUZOu pic.twitter.com/txQF0HRKIY

Peter A McCullough, MD, PhD, whose tweet supporting the claim received more than half a million views, and Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and activist, both reinforced these claims.

BREAKING: Large Population Study Finds COVID-19 Vaccines Increase Risk of 6 Major Cancers

South Korea study of 8.4 million adults finds higher risks of overall, lung, prostate, thyroid, gastric, colorectal, and breast cancers — across both mRNA and viral-vector platforms.… pic.twitter.com/2PLFn6u9HQ

Malhotra stated that the South Korean study was “important and concerning”, thus adding undue “medical” weight to the unfounded allegations.

I’m afraid one of Britain’s most eminent oncologists Professor Angus Dalgleish may well be right on the covid ‘vaccines’ fuelling cancer. This study published in a very respected high impact journal is significant and concerning https://t.co/oCc3zmovv1 pic.twitter.com/4fxSQtu7rQ

Additionally, the Children’s Health Defense organisation, which campaigns against childhood health epidemics, adopted this misleading narrative and published a report titled All COVID Vaccines Increase Cancer Risk, New Study Concludes.

What did they get wrong?

Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency, Sanad, examined the original study and discovered that the promoters of this misinformation were omitting a key phrase from the excerpts they cited: “epidemiological association without causal relationship”.

In scientific terms, an “epidemiological association” indicates a statistical relationship or common pattern between two events, without implying that one causes the other.

To illustrate, if ice cream sales rise in the summer while drowning incidents also increase, there is an epidemiological correlation, but this does not mean that ice cream causes drowning; the common cause is warm weather causing people to eat ice creams and go swimming.

The manipulation occurs when this correlation is twisted into “definitive causality”, the trap influencers fell into. They ignored the scientific warnings and promoted the claim that vaccines “increase the risk”.

The true explanation likely lies in a phenomenon known as “surveillance bias”. People who were more inclined to receive the vaccine were often more diligent about medical check-ups and regular screenings, meaning cancer was diagnosed earlier – not caused by the vaccine.

What did the South Korean study actually say?

Contrary to the claims circulating, the Korean researchers emphasised the limitations of their conclusions and denied offering any evidence of causality.

In their conclusion, the study’s authors stated: “Given the limited availability of real-world data, our population-based cohort study in Seoul, South Korea suggested epidemiological associations between the cumulative incidence of cancers and COVID-19 vaccination, which varied by sex, age and vaccine type. However, further studies are warranted to elucidate potential causal relationships, including the underlying molecular mechanisms related to COVID-19 vaccine-induced hyperinflammation.”

This quote clearly shows that the study presented only “epidemiological associations” and called for further research to explore potential causal links. Therefore, any claim that vaccines “cause” cancer is a direct distortion of the facts.

Is there any evidence that COVID vaccines do cause cancer?

No. Beyond the controversy surrounding the South Korean study, global medical and scientific authorities have unequivocally affirmed the safety of the vaccines and have denied any link to cancer.

Experts from BMJ, the medical journal, have stated that there is no evidence supporting claims that mRNA vaccines are linked to cancer, noting that global epidemiological tracking data shows no surge in cancer cases following vaccine rollouts.

The Global Vaccine Data Network (GVDN) described the idea of a “cancer epidemic” caused by vaccines as a myth that contradicts biology and physics. They emphasised that there is no plausible biological mechanism through which mRNA vaccines could cause cancer, as these vaccines do not contain live viruses and do not enter the cell nucleus.

In a separate study, Fox Chase Cancer Center, the research institute, found that mRNA vaccines are safe, even for individuals undergoing active cancer treatment, with side effects comparable with those seen in the general population. The charity, Blood Cancer UK, also urged patients to continue receiving seasonal vaccinations, stressing that there is no large-scale, controlled study showing an increased cancer risk after vaccination.

When I spoke to singer and actor Meesha Shafi in July this year, it had been six years since our first meeting. Then, Meesha had been in Karachi for a taping of Pepsi’s Battle of the Bands, where she performed and was one of the judges, and we met once she had wrapped up filming. A few months earlier, Meesha made headlines when she alleged that one of the music industry’s biggest stars, Ali Zafar, had sexually harassed her — allegations that he has always denied. She faced considerable backlash online and in the media. I wanted to know how the experience had impacted her.

Her hotel room was dimly lit, and Meesha remained in the shadows, with only a lamp in a far corner of the room switched on. It was quiet, the sounds from the busy road nine floors below muffled by the closed windows. Meesha had wedged herself into the corner of an overstuffed sofa. Shooting had wrapped that day, and, after a week of 1am finishes, Meesha had got off early. I remember thinking that I’d expect a pop star to be out with friends, not alone in a hotel room after an early wrap. But for the past few months, as Meesha would tell me, she had been feeling “broken”.

In April 2018, Meesha, in a tweet, accused actor and singer Ali Zafar of multiple instances of sexual harassment. It was the first such high-profile case in Pakistan since the #MeToo movement of 2017 forced a reckoning with claims of sexual harassment and abuse that had gone unchecked for decades in almost every industry in countries across the world. For months, accusations against Hollywood producers, beloved actors and comedians made headlines.

Both Meesha and Zafar are stars in Pakistan, and while she made her Hollywood debut in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) opposite Riz Ahmed, Zafar was forging a career in Bollywood.

In her tweet, Meesha claimed there had been multiple incidents of “harassment of a physical nature” by Zafar. He denied the claims, and in June 2018, he filed a defamation case against Meesha for damages of 1 billion rupees (more than $3.5m at the current exchange rate but estimated to be over $8m seven years ago). Meesha filed a complaint regarding the alleged harassment before an ombudsperson overseeing such issues in the workplace, and it was rejected on technical grounds that she and Zafar did not have an employer-employee relationship (an appeal is pending). In January 2019, Meesha was placed under a court-ordered gag that restrained her from making any statements that could be deemed defamatory against Zafar while his case against her was heard. She could not speak about Zafar’s alleged harassment.

In the months after she tweeted her allegations against Zafar, a torrent of abuse and ridicule targeted Meesha on social media. “Why her, when he could be with anyone he wanted?” many asked online. Her looks were mocked, and she was called “shameless”, a “whore”, a liar, and publicity-seeking.

“I felt like in speaking out, I had lit my life on fire, and it had been meaningless,” she says during our conversation this July, recounting those “rapid fire” attacks on her character. If I remember correctly, she asked, “What was the point?”, repeating the question almost a dozen times during our last meeting. Now, six years later, Meesha has released an album, Khilnay Ko, meaning “To Bloom”, that answers the question.

‘I was that bad news’

We are on a Zoom call, as Meesha is now based in Canada. It is early in the day for her, and her children are on their summer break. She tried to make sure they are occupied while she’s on this call, but her 11-year-old son comes looking for her. She mutes our chat while she fields his questions. Her face is bare, her hair pulled back, her blush pink sleeveless shirt giving a glimpse of the small M&M tattoo on her arm – a nod to her husband’s and her initials. When she speaks, her sentences are measured, with pauses as she reflects on what I’ve asked. I quickly learn not to interrupt.

Meesha, her husband, and their two children migrated to Canada in 2018 – a plan that had been in the works since 2016, but online, a narrative was spun that she “fled” the country after Zafar filed his case. In making the new album, Meesha has looked closer at the stories that were told about her. “It was so easy to villainise me,” she says.

She feels the suspicion and the disbelief that her allegations were met with came partly from an idea that the public had of her as a powerful, outspoken woman who had successfully carved a niche for herself as a solo performer in the music industry. She was known for her power anthems and pop-rock sound, and her playful style that melded desi fashion with biker jackets, tattoos and a signature red lip. “But this persona dehumanised me,” Meesha says. “My perceived strength was used to attack me.”

Many asked how “someone like her” would put herself in a position where she might be harassed. Why had she “allowed” the harassment to occur more than once?

Meesha’s home address in Lahore – where she and her husband lived with their children, then seven and four – was shared on television during the media frenzy that followed her accusation. As the online attacks against her grew, Meesha deactivated her social media accounts. The trolling was almost enough to drown out the voices of other women who tweeted similar allegations (and who subsequently withdrew their claims or were also sued for defamation by Zafar). Zafar claimed the social media accounts were fake or linked to Meesha. “They are trying to make me out to be Pakistan’s Harvey Weinstein,” he said in a television interview.

When actress Iffat Omar appeared in court as a character witness for Meesha, she was trailed by a crowd of Zafar’s fans chanting, “We support Ali Zafar” and “Stop lying”.

The case became a litmus test in Pakistan for how we understand consent and what constitutes “inappropriate” behaviour or sexual harassment. Because Meesha’s original tweet did not spell out the nature of the alleged harassment, a guessing game ensued, with social media users debating what might have happened. Meesha recalled that when she returned to shoots after her tweet, some people on set joked that they didn’t know if it was OK to even shake her hand.

When I spoke with Hasham Ahmad, one of Zafar’s lawyers, in 2021, his comments echoed the sentiments online and in the media. There was a limited understanding about how assault or harassment is experienced, and why many are unable to speak about it. “If you don’t react to something, how would someone know if you’re allowing it or not?” he asked. If a woman does not consent to something – especially in a situation involving a friend – Ahmad explained, “You just have to say [to the perpetrator], ‘You went a little overboard, so you better behave.’ That’s it.”

Many were suspicious of Meesha’s motivations, implying she had something to gain. “You better have something [to back up your accusations], not only your greed,” one prominent TV anchor said on his show, referring to Meesha. One news channel ran a segment where actors and singers weighed in on the case. They debated who the “guilty” party might be.

“We rarely have the TV on at home – the news, on a good day, is noisy and bad,” Meesha says. “But now, I was that bad news.”

‘Something to hold on to’

Meesha started writing the songs on this album in March 2019. Melodies and snatches of lyrics came to her while she was doing laundry or washing the dishes.

It was her way of “processing”, and a return to the reason she first started singing at the age of seven. “While I was praised for my talent, I wasn’t singing for that affirmation,” Meesha explains. “Music and singing always soothed me.”

Music was a balm, the comforting soundtrack to her childhood in Lahore. Every afternoon, Meesha’s nani, her maternal grandmother, would complete her chores and retire to her room. The blinds were lowered, the house silent save for the ceiling fan, and in that cool quiet, her nani would lie down, a small radio nestled in a palm cupped to her ear. The radio crackled to find a station with the Bollywood tunes Meesha’s nani listened to as a girl. The grown-ups slept, the music from the radio tinny and low, as Meesha padded into the kitchen and climbed onto a countertop to open the cabinet where the ketchup bottle was kept. She would sip that sweet, bright sauce for a hit of sugar and listen to the music as it echoed through the house.

“Making the album gave me something to hold on to and reclaim an essential part of my sense of self,” Meesha says. “At night, when all the day’s work was done and my family was sleeping, I turned to my music – just like my nani all those decades ago.”

She wrote at her kitchen table, the lights dimmed, a bay window shadowed by an ornamental pear tree. The seasons changed, and she kept writing: moonlight reflected off a blanket of snow, the tree burst into white blooms, the flowers wilted. Every night at the same time, a train would go past the house, its chug and whistle piercing the dark quiet. A recording of that train plays on the album’s Interlude I, with a muffled audio note where Meesha, her voice quavering, tells someone, “It was very overwhelming … the pressure on my very immediate wellbeing was very big. I was very, like, I was very overloaded …”

“My discomfort or pain had become a public spectacle,” Meesha says. The song Sar-e-Aam (In Public), one of the first that she wrote, addresses this spectacle. The lyrics include some of the words that were used to describe her online: “shameless”, “floozy”. In the video, Meesha’s frame is engulfed in a black and white jacket, covered with scribbles, that balloons over her shoulders. “That is how big my shoulders had to become,” she explains. “I was carrying so much.”

The song’s languid, bluesy melody would be perfectly at home playing low, late at night, the chatter of friends rising above it. But as Meesha sings, Deep was the night / my eyes wet with tears / Just me, and me alone / Not many friends in sight, it turns melancholy. It is a song about being alone in a crowd.

She had been forbidden from speaking about her experience while Zafar gave interviews and tweeted. “I felt silenced right after I had found the courage to use my voice,” she says. “My daughter asked me at that time why I didn’t laugh any more,” Meesha recalled. “I was working on this album while my problems were very much present. It’s not as if I was past the worst of it. I was processing everything as I was writing, and the work was coming together as I was experiencing the fallout of speaking up.”

Meesha recalls listening to the finished track for Sar-e-Aam for the first time. “One line in, and I started crying.” It felt like a release. “It was like puncturing a place where pressure had been building up within me.”

Online, Zafar and his supporters had used the hashtag #FaceTheCourtMeesha, implying that Meesha was too scared to do so. While the album’s music and lyrics gave vent to Meesha’s emotions, its visuals answer such accusations: for the video for the song Azaab (Torment), director Awais Gohar trailed Meesha during a day of hearings.

There are some sonic throwbacks. The familiar staticky crackle of a radio sets the tone for Nirmal (Pure), a song that Meesha describes as “a lullaby, a tune of disassociating” that disintegrates into a sonic crash, all electronic clanging and menacing, sawing cello strings, as if the song’s gears have been forced to grind to a halt. “Nirmal is all rainbows and unicorns, expressing a desire to see the world with a soft gaze, but that is illusory – a child’s view of the world that I have retreated to from time to time as an adult until reality intruded.”

I ask Meesha how she felt about sharing all of this with a public that had attacked her in a previous moment of vulnerability. “I spent my life avoiding being vulnerable or sharing private feelings as it made me uncomfortable,” she acknowledges. “And now, an action of mine – that tweet – had rendered me vulnerable.”

The album helped her “digest the experience”. She did not focus on what reviews might say. “I made it for myself. I did not give a damn how it would be received or interpreted, because it gave me something to hold on to at a time when I couldn’t control anything that was happening.”

‘Carrying my experience’

The Urdu language and poetry, she explains, helped her feel comfortable with expressing herself. “Poetry felt like protection,” she says. “This was not prose, an interview or a conversation. I was creating a poetic work, and that enables you – depending on your agility as a writer and Urdu-speaker – to say anything you need to in a beautiful, clever way.”

After years of feeling “humiliated” and exposed in the spotlight, Meesha’s lyrics allowed her to hint at what she was going through without yielding private details. I see the concealment that poetry offered when listening to the titular track, Khilnay Ko: To bloom / light is essential / yet the seed asks for darkness. I think of that reference to “darkness”, to a desire to retreat, when Meesha talks about difficult days. “Panic attacks were part of my new reality,” she says. “You go from being unable to [take] a driving test because you refuse to be behind the wheel, to refusing to leave the house, to refusing to leave your room, to being unable to leave your bed.”

What was muscle memory – in her case, performing – slackened with fear. In 2022, for instance, Meesha shot a video with her brother, Faris, for Coke Studio. She had written the song, Muaziz Sarif, and it was her 12th time performing on the show. It should have been easy. “But night fell, and I could not get my performance right. I was flying to Lahore the next day for cross-examination in court, so we only had that day to film. The video was a one-take shot, and every time I messed up, we needed to reset the shot. I felt so embarrassed before the crew.”

She had written the lyrics that thumbed a nose at critics – How can you quell a rebellious spirit? – but now she could not say them. If you watched the video – as 11 million people have, to date – all you saw was Meesha descending from a red-carpeted staircase in a crisp white collared shirt paired with a sari. Her bejewelled nails flash, her headpiece twinkles and with a wink of an eyelid speckled with glitter, she kicks off the chorus. She dazzles, bright as the light glinting off a shard of glass. When I rewatch the video after we speak, I view it differently. I’m reminded of a lament Meesha makes on Azaab: Cloaked in shadows / I’m afraid I might forget / I was made of light / I’m at risk of turning to dust.

But with time, and with the album’s release, the panic attacks subsided. Meesha passed her driving test last year. “I had been carrying my experience for so long that it felt good to set the weight of it down,” she says. She travelled back to Pakistan to launch the album in Lahore, her hometown, as “an act of reclamation”.

The director Sarmad Khoosat moderated a Q&A at a screening of music videos from the album, and his first question was, “Where is the angry song?” It’s a question that Meesha’s co-producer, Abdullah Siddiqui, asked her many times: “Where is the anger?” But as she explains, “Anger eclipses what lies beneath: shame, resentment, bitterness. I had to deal with those feelings. I let it all come to light.”

‘I was made an example of’

Khilnay Ko makes meaning of Meesha’s experience over the last seven years. After listening to it, I thought of her question to me all those years ago: “What was the point?” I wonder if the “point” of her experience was to lay bare the culture of silence that persists in Pakistan when it comes to claims of sexual harassment or abuse. In these seven years, we have witnessed how women continue to be attacked online when they share their experiences, and how the legal system can be used to target such women. “You cannot expect survivors to come forward [if] the next thing the accused does is weaponise defamation laws to silence them,” Nighat Dad, a rights activist and Meesha’s lawyer, told Time magazine in 2020.

In 2021, I spoke with Bahzad Haider, a lawyer representing Leena Ghani, an activist who accused Zafar of inappropriate behaviour in 2018 after Meesha made her allegations, and who is also being sued for defamation by him. Haider quoted an Urdu saying to explain that defamation cases in particular can be challenging, dragging out for years: “To go to court, you need shoes made of iron, and hands made of gold.” It is an expensive, challenging process.

“I was made an example of,” Meesha says. “But speaking out is always an act of war.” Perhaps the point was to remind us of this. And the album offers solace: there is relief and freedom to be won in that war, even when it comes at great cost.

The bodies of 135 Palestinians have been pulled from beneath the rubble across the Gaza Strip, as Israel’s ceasefire-mandated halt in its two-year genocidal war allowed rescue workers to reach devastated areas.

Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that at least 135 bodies were recovered on Saturday.

Dozens more were retrieved from several hospitals across Gaza, including 43 bodies taken to al-Shifa Hospital and 60 to al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, with others arriving at hospitals in Nuseirat, Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis.

Separately, medical officials said another 19 people were killed in Israeli air strikes on Friday, while one person succumbed to earlier injuries. Sixteen members of the Ghaboun family were killed when their home, south of Gaza City, was bombed in the early hours. Another Palestinian was killed in Sheikh Radwan, while two more died in strikes near Khan Younis.

It remains unclear whether any of the attacks occurred after the truce took effect at noon local time (09:00 GMT).

The return to ruins

As Israeli forces withdrew from parts of the decimated enclave and the coastal al-Rashid Street reopened, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians began the long and painful journey back to the ruins of their homes.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Nuseirat, described scenes of “children, women, elderly, cars, vans, donkey carts loaded with furniture” heading towards Gaza City. “Families removed their makeshift tents to take and reset them over the ruins of their destroyed homes,” he said.

“This return is seen as historic but it needs to be accompanied by concrete steps to alleviate the humanitarian crisis,” Abu Azzoum added.

Almost nothing remains of Gaza City after months of relentless Israeli bombardment. The destruction is total: no functioning infrastructure, no clean water, no electricity – just the skeletal remains of what once were homes.

“There is now an urgent need for makeshift tents and mobile shelters for returning families,” said Al Jazeera’s Moath Kahlout from Deir el-Balah. “Carrying what little they have, they march toward the unknown.”

Despite unimaginable loss, Palestinians are determined to return.

Naim Irheem, packing his makeshift tent into his car, told Al Jazeera: “I’m going to Gaza City even though there are no conditions for life there – no infrastructure, no fresh water. Everything is extremely difficult, truly difficult, but we must go back.

“My son was killed, all my daughters were wounded. Still, I want to return. We’ll pitch a tent and live in it, however it can be done,” he said.

For many, returning to Gaza City means facing nothing but ashes. Yet Kahlout noted, “For generations, Palestinians have shown remarkable resilience under Israeli occupation. Each step back is not just a return, but an act of defiance and hope.”

Aisha Shamakh, another survivor of Israel’s genocidal war, said: “We want to go see our homes, our homes that were destroyed at the start of the war. Floors have fallen on our children, but I can’t even describe to you the joy [of the ceasefire].”

Life amid loss

In Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalil reported “exhausted faces filled with both grief and joy” as people returned. “Many told me they don’t know if their homes are still standing or reduced to rubble, yet they return clinging to hope,” he said.

Ahmed Abu Shanab, who made the difficult journey north, told Al Jazeera: “We suffered a lot. We didn’t have enough space and we literally could not sleep.”

Another resident, Maryam Abu Jabal, voiced the fear many shared: “We returned to the unknown, and we don’t know if our homes still exist. We hope to God that our home is still standing.”

Mohammed Sharaf, returning to the obliterated  Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, said: “Everything has changed. We have returned to a disaster we cannot comprehend. We thought we would leave for a few days, now we’re back and we have found nothing.”

Even amid the death, mourning and destruction, the will to return remains a potent reminder of a people refusing to be erased or expelled from their land by Israel.