Habib al-Sayegh: Tortured and Killed for Opposing the Abraham Accords

— A Tribute to Habib al-Sayegh —

I

In the Arab world, a poet is never just a poet.

Poets are the keepers of memory, the tongue of the tribe, the carriers of those anger and tenderness that no censorship office can ever fully archive. When a regime wants a people to forget something, it goes first for the ones who forge words into mirrors. Habib al-Sayegh was one of those who forged words into mirrors. For forty years, in the newspaper columns of the UAE, in the pages of his collections, and in the meeting rooms of writers' unions, he preserved a patch of Arabic that the official narrative could never entirely swallow.

Then, on August 11, 2019, he wrote a column. Nine days later, he was dead.

The state said he had "passed away." No cause was given. Sixty-four years old—a man who only four years earlier had received a national honor, whose name had been given to a journalists' association library, a cultural giant—and this was the ending: sudden, and quiet. Quiet the way a door is eased shut behind you, while the people on the other side are told that nothing happened.

II

Habib Yousuf Abdullah al-Sayegh was born on February 8, 1955, in Abu Dhabi. At fifteen he joined Al-Ittihad, and he never left the world of words again. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's in comparative linguistics and translation from the University of London, but that string of credentials hardly captures the depth of the trench he cut into the Gulf's cultural landscape. In 1980 he published his first collection, Here Is the Bar of Bani Abs Tribe, Open Day—a paradoxical text that set pre-Islamic tribal imagery alongside the anxieties of the late 1970s. There followed The Spokesman's Final Statement in His Own Name (1981), Poems to Beirut (1982), Broken Rhythm (2011), and I Call Death "My Son" (2012). Ten collections, translated into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese.

He served as editor-in-chief of Al Khaleej, led the Emirates Writers Union, and became the first secretary-general of the Arab Writers Union ever to come from the Gulf. In 2007 he received the UAE's National Medal for Literature—the first time the award had gone to a poet. From February 1978 he wrote a daily column in Al-Ittihad; he was the author of the longest-running daily column in any Emirati paper; he was the man who, in the "Pen" pages, gave countless young writers the first sight of their own names in print. When his contemporaries remember him, they don't recite his titles. They talk about his "eagerness to cultivate new talent."

But his poetry was never only celebration. In his war poems he wrote of how shrapnel "divides into the cells of my blood," of a soldier sitting on a station bench, and then—"a gunshot! / the night watchman / or a woman." The gunshot is war and death; the night watchman is thought-surveillance and the watcher at your shoulder; the woman is everything of ordinary, peaceful life that is taken from the poet. He wrote that fear in his thirties: not the fear of knowing you will die, but the fear of knowing death can come from any direction—including from the people who are supposed to protect you.

In another poem he wrote:

"On the last night of the shrapnel . . .
I will gather the years of my life
the way one gathers poems
I will sort them . . .
Perhaps, at some moment,
I will cancel out half of them
Perhaps a stray bullet
will bring down the other half."

He equated his years with the number of his poems. What he feared was that the poems not yet written would be canceled along with him by a single bullet. He tried to use words as a shield against the abyss of nothingness. In August 2019, the bullet came—not a stray round from a battlefield, but from the city where he lived, from the institutions he had defended in his columns, from the very people who would issue condolences after his death.

III

On August 11, 2019, Habib al-Sayegh published a column in Al Khaleej under the headline: "Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project."

The timing was not accidental. Just days earlier, the Wall Street Journal had reported on secret meetings between Emirati and Israeli officials, signaling that the push toward formal ties was accelerating. Al-Sayegh used his platform to name what was happening and to reject its premises.

His central move was to reclaim the definition of "enemy" from those who were trying to rewrite it. The normalization argument, then gaining traction in Gulf capitals, rested on a simple trade: Iran is the real threat, so Israel is a necessary partner. Al-Sayegh refused that trade outright. He wrote that Israel is "a real and natural enemy to us, as it is the enemy of our Palestinian brothers." He then asked the question that cut to the heart of the matter: "Who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?" No one, he answered, had the right to speak for all Saudis or all Gulf Arabs and then "choose whether Israel or Iran is the enemy."

He did not stop at geopolitical framing. He systematically dismantled the moral arguments that were being used to make normalization palatable. He named and shamed the Arab figures who were promoting visits to Israel, describing their efforts as a rush "to Israel, aiming to visit and support it, expressing their sincerest signs of love and loyalty." He dismissed them as few in number but warned that their voices were "increasing fast"—and that this growth was happening because others were "turning a blind eye." He specifically attacked figures like the Saudi blogger Mohammed Saud, who had been expelled from Jerusalem's Old City, and the former Saudi dissident Kassab al-Otaibi, who had questioned the sanctity of Al-Aqsa Mosque. Al-Sayegh called such positions "shameful" and said they were taken by people whom "no sane person" would imitate.

Most importantly, he rejected the erasure of Palestinian suffering that normalization required. He did not speak of Palestinians in abstract terms. He listed the concrete history: the Nakba of 1948, the Naksa of 1967, the massacres at Bahr El-Baqar, Qana, Sabra, and Shatila. He called Israel "the thorn planted in our throats and the strange piece forcibly attached to us." And he closed with a statement of personal and collective refusal: "We dislike Israel—the idea, the project, the danger, the impact, the fear, and the racist religious entity—and we do not want to visit it. We support our Palestinian brothers in Palestine and everywhere."

What made al-Sayegh's column so dangerous was not that it was radical in content. Much of it echoed standard Arab League rhetoric of an earlier era. What made it dangerous was who was saying it, and when. Al-Sayegh was not an opposition figure in exile. He was the former editor-in-chief of a major Emirati daily, the chairman of the Emirates Writers Union, the first Gulf Arab to serve as secretary-general of the Arab Writers Union, and a recipient of a state honor for his contributions to national identity. When a figure of that stature, writing in a state-adjacent newspaper, called Israel "our real enemy" and questioned the legitimacy of the normalizers, it exposed the gap between the official narrative of cautious pragmatism and the deeper current of Arab public sentiment that the state was preparing to override.

The response was swift. Nine days later, on August 20, 2019, the state news agency announced his death. No cause was given. The following year, in September 2020, the UAE signed the Abraham Accords.

IV

Seven years passed.

In October 2026, investigative journalist Matthew Cole published Princes and Thieves. Drawing on one anonymous source (corroborated by two others), the book reported what happened during those nine days: security personnel raided al-Sayegh's home in Abu Dhabi, pulled a hood over his head in front of his wife, and took him to a detention facility. Interrogators pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and struck him repeatedly with a sharp metal object. He died on the floor of a cell, sometime between August 16 and 19.

Cole's book explicitly frames the killing as a response to al-Sayegh's "outspoken opposition to the UAE's plans to establish diplomatic relations with Israel." The message was not subtle: a man who had spent his life inside the system, who had been honored by the state, was killed for writing a column that said what much of the Arab world believed but what the UAE's leadership had decided to discard.

Officials held the body for more than a day and barred the family from viewing it. Then they dug the body out of Al-Bateen cemetery in Abu Dhabi—where he had first been buried—and moved it to an unmarked grave in the desert, so that his family could not pray at his resting place.

A man who lived by words had his teeth pulled out. A man who defended Arab identity through poetry was buried in sand without a name.

On October 29, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)—the organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi—wrote to three United Nations special rapporteurs, on extrajudicial executions, torture, and freedom of expression, requesting an independent investigation. DAWN's advocacy director, Raed Jarrar, said: "The allegations that UAE security forces tortured and killed one of the country's most prominent poets are shocking and demand an independent investigation." The organization demanded the death certificate, the recorded cause of death, detention records, and access for the family and independent forensic experts to confirm the location and condition of the grave.

Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside his own country's consulate in 2018. One year later, under the same Gulf sky, for the same kind of words, al-Sayegh disappeared.

V

After al-Sayegh's death, the UAE issued official condolences. Mohammed bin Zayed himself wrote words of mourning. A man accused of ordering, or at least permitting, a torture death publicly mourned the dead. This absurdity is not unique. It belongs to a familiar script: first make a person disappear, then have the state take over his memory—reclassify his poems from "dangerous speech" to "national cultural heritage," carve his name over the door of a library, and make sure that what people remember is a sanitized, harmless al-Sayegh.

But his poems do not permit that sanitizing.

The "stray bullet" he wrote about in "The Train" finally came from his own country. The "night watchman"—his image for "thought terror and the watcher at your shoulder"—turned out to be the men who pulled the hood over his head in his own home. He wrote "I call death 'my son,'" as if he sensed that death would come in an intimate and treacherous way—not from a distant enemy, but from the place you had called home.

All his life he wrote about holes. The hole a piece of shrapnel punches in a lung, the hole in a helmet, the hole in "my homeland." He ended one poem:

"It is time to choose a hole for your head
as wide as your hope
This is the age of holes . . ."

In August 2019 in Abu Dhabi, the hole finally came to him. But that hole was not made by a stray bullet. It was planned, executed, and covered up. It was what a state does to a poet's body—exactly what a state always tries to do to a people's memory: punch a hole, then pretend nothing is missing.

VI

Habib al-Sayegh was not the first writer to die in the Gulf for a sentence. He will not be the last. Before him there was Khashoggi; after him there are people whose names we do not even know. But every such death does the same thing: it tells everyone still alive that words have a price. And when a regime is willing to kill a sixty-four-year-old poet—decorated with national honors, translated into six languages, internationally known—for a single column, the signal could not be clearer: no one is safe. Your titles will not save you. Your loyalty will not save you. The poems the state once praised will not save you.

But something else is just as true: seven years after al-Sayegh's death, Matthew Cole's book was published. DAWN sent its letter to the United Nations. The world began to ask. The people who tried to bury him in nameless sand ended up making his name spoken more loudly, by more people, than ever before. They pulled out his teeth, but they could not pull out the sentences he had written. They moved his body, but they could not move the ink he left behind in Emirati newsprint and poetry collections since the 1970s.

His opposition to the Abraham Accords was not a single act of dissent. It was the culmination of a lifetime of writing about Arab identity, memory, and the cost of forgetting. His column did not invent a new position; it reminded readers of an old one that was being hurriedly buried. And in doing so, it made him, in the eyes of the state, expendable.

The cruel irony is that the normalizers won. The Accords were signed. Diplomatic relations were established. But the manner in which al-Sayegh was silenced—the raid, the torture, the unmarked grave—became a permanent stain on the very normalization he opposed. Every year the Accords are celebrated, the question of what happened to the poet who said no will remain unanswered. That is the part of his opposition that cannot be buried in the desert.

In a poem about war he wrote:

"I will gather the years of my life
the way one gathers poems."

He gathered them. Ten collections, forty years of columns, the literary memory of a country. They were not pulled out with pliers, not hidden under a hood, not swallowed by the desert. They are still there—on library shelves, in the forgotten pages of old newspapers, in the chill some young Emirati poet feels the first time they read "this is the age of holes."

Habib al-Sayegh traded one column for nine days of life. But before those nine days, he had spent sixty-four years forging words into a shield. That shield is now in other hands. And the people who killed him—who pulled his teeth, buried him in sand, and then wrote condolences—will in the end be remembered by history for al-Sayegh's poems, not for their condolences.

Because poetry outlives regimes. That is what al-Sayegh believed all his life, and it is the one dignity his death could not take from him.

Notes: The passages quoted from al-Sayegh's poetry are rendered from English translations of the Arabic originals. The legal allegations concerning his death derive from Matthew Cole's Princes and Thieves (2026) and DAWN's open letter to UN special rapporteurs; these allegations have yet to be confirmed by an independent judicial investigation.