Al Jazeera World

The story of how Israeli-made spyware Pegasus works, the hacking of journalists’ phones and its ominous consequences. In mid-2020, a mobile phone belonging to an Al Jazeera Arabic investigative team was hacked. Over the next few months, reporter Tamer Almisshal and the Canadian research group Citizen Lab investigated Pegasus, the sophisticated spyware used. Pegasus is manufactured by an Israeli technology company called the NSO Group and is among the most advanced spyware in the world. It can access and infiltrate a smartphone without the owner clicking a link, opening an email or even answering their phone – meaning it can go undetected. This investigation exposes how Pegasus works, how governments like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have bought the hugely expensive spyware and how it has been used beyond the stated intentions of the NSO Group of “developing technology to prevent and investigate terror and crime” – including to target journalists.

The history of Oman’s dramatic rise and fall as a trading and imperial power, its role in the Gulf and its regional diplomacy today.

In 1995, Mirko Graorac was arrested by the Croatian authorities and accused of being a guard at the Manjaca concentration camp in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was tortured and subject to humiliating treatment by the Croatian intelligence service. In 1996, he was put on trial for war crimes and sentenced to 20 years in prison, later reduced to 15. He served nine years but always insisted on his innocence. There is strong evidence to suggest that he may have been wrongly convicted. As early as 1998, Amnesty International published a detailed report arguing that his court proceedings amounted to a show trial. But Graorac and his legal team have so far failed to persuade any official body, including the Croatian Supreme Court, to order a retrial. Twenty-five years on, this documentary looks at the evidence being used to support his case and hears from former inmates of Manjaca concentration camp, as well as Graorac and his lawyers and supporters.

Pirate radio: A force for change or a transient subversive movement? The Voice of Peace and Radio Caroline were pirate radio stations that launched in the 1960s and 1970s, broadcasting from ships anchored outside national territorial waters, in an attempt to challenge the societies around them. Radio Caroline, moored off the east coast of England, was "The Boat that Rocked" and was hugely popular with young 1960s music fans. Along with other pirate stations of the time, it helped bring about a cultural change in British broadcasting that is still felt today. The Voice of Peace, based in the eastern Mediterranean, expressed an alternative, pacifist, political viewpoint outside of 1970s Israeli mainstream politics. This documentary intercuts the stories of these two stations, through a mix of archive, presenter anecdotes, journalistic analysis and historical context. In so doing, it sheds light on both 1960s European pop culture and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Moroccan nomads meet a geologist and a rare stone dealer as they search for meteorites, elusive extra-terrestrial rocks. Meteorites may be the only truly extra-terrestrial items it is possible to find, buy or own on Earth. Their rarity has created a global trade, fed by a fascination with these dark rocks from outer space. Most meteorites on the market come from Morocco, where the inky-black rocks are easier to spot in the arid mountain landscape. Nomads welcome these “gifts from the sky” and sell them to dealers and researchers. However, the prices obtained by Moroccan nomads in the High Atlas Mountains are a fraction of those in the fashionable rock and crystal shops in Europe.

The Samaritans are a tiny ethnic-religious community dating back almost 3,000 years – and they are a population in crisis. But perhaps not for long. Marriage agencies in Ukraine have arranged for more than a dozen women to marry into the Samaritan community in Palestine. Many Samaritans live in a mountain village near Nablus in the occupied West Bank and face a worrying numbers problem. There are only 800 surviving Samaritans, where once they were counted in their thousands. Men outnumber women by three to one. Their custom is that a young Samaritan man can only marry a woman from within the community if he has a sister who he can offer as a bride in return. Faced with a fight for survival, a Samaritan religious leader changed the rules to allow Samaritan men to marry women from abroad.

There is a dark underworld of Palestinian crime syndicates operating within Israel. Al Jazeera Arabic’s Tamer Almisshal examines this rarely reported but growing phenomenon. He meets victims, gangsters and those attempting to keep a lid on a spiralling trend of lawlessness directed at Palestinian citizens of Israel. He asks how the organised crime gangs work, who protects them, where they source their weapons, why murder rates are increasing and, importantly, what the Israeli police are doing to protect the Palestinian citizens of Israel? Some accuse Israeli authorities of turning a blind eye, or worse, colluding with and infiltrating the gangs for political reasons, while Benjamin Netanyahu announced a multimillion-dollar initiative to combat these crimes. But until little has changed and Palestinian victims add this problem to their already challenging lives in Israel.