The al-Huwaitat are one of the great tribal confederations of the Arabian Peninsula. Their territory spans the mountains, wadis, and coastal plains of northwestern Saudi Arabia, with branches extending into Jordan, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and across the broader Levantine region. They predate the Saudi state. They predate the House of Saud. T. E. Lawrence documented their fighters and their land during the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918, when they controlled the passes and watering points that determined the movement of armies across the Hejaz. For centuries, the Howeitat held their territory not by title deed but by continuous presence — the kind of tenure that international law recognises as indigenous, and that Saudi domestic law does not.
In October 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced that their ancestral lands would become NEOM, a $500 billion megaproject that would house 9 million people in a 170-kilometre mirrored city, a mountain ski resort, a floating industrial platform, and a 400-metre cube. By April 2026, the project had spent $50 billion, produced 2.4 kilometres of foundation, and suspended construction. The Howeitat had been displaced. The city had not been built. The tribe paid the price for a civilisation that exists only in architectural renderings.
This is the account of how 20,000 people were removed from land they had occupied for centuries to make way for a project that its own internal audit has estimated would cost $8.8 trillion and take until 2080 to complete.
The Acquisition
The land grab preceded the announcement by six months. In April 2017, the Public Investment Fund secretly acquired title to Red Sea lands encompassing the villages of al-Khuraybah, Sharma, and Gayal — the core settlements of the Howeitat territory within what would become the NEOM zone. Property transactions and licence renewals in the area were simultaneously suspended without notice or explanation. The Howeitat, who had no representatives in the negotiations because no negotiations occurred, learned of the title transfer only when the consequences arrived.
Justice Ministry committees issued emergency land acquisition orders in February 2018, formalising a process that had no legal framework for the scale of displacement it contemplated. Saudi expropriation law provides for compulsory acquisition in the public interest, but it requires compensation at fair market value and a process that includes notification and appeal. The Howeitat received neither fair value nor meaningful process. What they received was a set of compulsory eviction notices and, when those proved insufficient, security forces.
The acquisition covered not just the land but the community’s relationship to it. Properties were seized. Grazing rights were terminated. Agricultural plots that families had cultivated for generations were redesignated as state land. The physical infrastructure of daily life — water access, electricity connections, road use — was methodically disrupted. The objective was not simply to acquire title. It was to make the land uninhabitable for those who refused to leave, so that the eviction could be framed as voluntary departure from a place that no longer functioned as a home.
The Promise and the Switch
The initial approach was conciliatory, at least in form. Howeitat communities were told they would be “part of NEOM” — that the megaproject would bring prosperity to the region, that their communities would benefit from the development, that the transformation would elevate their economic standing. The assurances were general, verbal, and unaccompanied by written commitments. They were also temporary.
The switch came on 1 January 2020, when the Tabuk Emirate announced compulsory eviction of residents from al-Khuraybah, Sharma, and Gayal. No prior consultation. No transition period. No negotiated resettlement plan. Social Development committees arrived in the following weeks to process the evictions and assess compensation. The process was administrative, not consensual. Families were presented with forms, not choices.
The compensation structure revealed the state’s valuation of tribal lives. The stated relocation amount was 620,000 riyals — approximately $165,000 per family. This figure appeared in official documentation. The amounts actually disbursed tell a different story. Some families received as little as 17,000 riyals — roughly $4,500. Others reported receiving the initial offer of approximately $3,000 per family, reportedly communicated by an assistant sent by the Crown Prince himself, coupled with the instruction to accept or face forced removal.
The discrepancy between the stated compensation and the actual payments was not an administrative error. It was the gap between what the state announced for public consumption and what it delivered to people with no leverage, no legal representation, and no access to media. The Howeitat had no union, no parliamentary representative, no public interest lawyer, and no free press through which to challenge the terms. They had their land and a decision to make: take what was offered or refuse and face the consequences the state had prepared.
The Bribery Campaign
In the aftermath of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti’s killing on 13 April 2020, Saudi authorities launched a campaign to manufacture tribal consent for the displacement — retroactively, if not genuinely.
The mechanism was financial. Authorities offered up to 100,000 riyals — approximately $26,585 — to state-appointed tribal leaders on the condition that they publicly condemn Abdul Rahim’s resistance. The payments were not compensation for displacement. They were fees for performance: the purchase of public statements that would allow the government to claim the tribe endorsed the project that had killed one of its members.
The payments escalated. Authorities pledged 100,000 riyals per tribe member and 300,000 riyals — approximately $80,000 — per appointed “Sheikh” in return for their participation in an official propaganda film. The film’s purpose was explicit: to make the tribe publicly disown Abdul Rahim and other members who had refused the expulsion order. The production required willing participants. The payments secured them.
Two weeks after the killing, the Saudi Press Agency published a statement attributed to tribal leaders expressing support for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the NEOM project. The statement bore the hallmarks of state production: it used official language, appeared through state media channels, and served the government’s narrative needs at the precise moment they were most acute. Whether the signatories represented the tribe’s views or merely the views of those who had accepted payment is a question the Saudi government has not been required to answer, because no independent institution in Saudi Arabia has the authority or the safety to ask it.
The Raids
For those who would not accept payment, the state deployed a different instrument.
In March 2020, before Abdul Rahim’s killing, security forces began conducting raids on the homes of Howeitat members who had refused the eviction terms. The scale was designed to overwhelm: convoys of up to 40 vehicles descending on individual family properties. The purpose was not arrest — that would come later. The purpose was demonstration: to show each family that the state possessed the capacity and the willingness to enter their homes at will, and that the privacy and security they had known on their own land was now a privilege the state could revoke.
The raids intensified after the killing. Mass arrests began in April 2020. In the week of 21 September 2020, Suleiman Mohammed al-Taqique al-Huwaiti, a prominent tribal activist, was arrested and his social media accounts deactivated. Thirteen other tribe members were allegedly abducted by security forces around the same time and held incommunicado — detained without charges, without access to lawyers, and without notification to their families.
The infrastructure of daily life was weaponised against those who remained. Electricity was cut to resistant households. Water access was restricted. Roads were blocked or patrolled. The effect was to convert the land itself — the land the Howeitat had occupied for centuries — into a space that punished occupation. The eviction was not accomplished through a single act of removal. It was accomplished through the sustained degradation of the conditions necessary for life, applied until departure appeared to be the occupant’s own decision.
Reports documented fires at Howeitat properties — incidents that residents attributed to state action and that the government did not investigate or explain. Employer pressure campaigns were deployed against tribe members who held jobs outside the immediate area: transfers south, away from their communities, effectively dispersing the tribal network through the administrative machinery of Saudi employment law.
The UN and the International Response
On 9 October 2020, the al-Huwaitat tribe submitted a formal request to the United Nations calling for an investigation into the forced displacement. The request was made through intermediaries, because no member of the tribe within Saudi Arabia could safely communicate with an international body. The tribe’s representative in London — Alya Alhwaiti — provided testimony and coordinated the submission with human rights organisations.
The UN had already been engaged. On 10 August 2020, UN mandate holders had issued a formal communication to Saudi Arabia expressing “grave concern” about Abdul Rahim’s killing, referenced as AL SAU 11/2020. In May 2023, UN Human Rights Council experts issued a formal press release expressing alarm at “imminent executions linked to NEOM project,” naming six individuals facing death sentences or decades of imprisonment for resisting the evictions.
The UN experts stated that the charges against the Howeitat “do not appear to be in line with international law” and noted that the death penalty may only be imposed for “the most serious crimes, involving intentional killing” — a threshold that social media posts about eviction do not meet under any recognised legal standard.
Saudi Arabia’s responses to these communications have not been made public in their entirety. The Kingdom’s general position on the displacement — as conveyed through official statements and government-aligned media — is that NEOM is a development project in the national interest, that affected communities have been compensated, and that those who engaged in violence or incitement to violence were lawfully prosecuted under the counter-terrorism statute.
The Diaspora of a Tribe
The Howeitat were not deported. They were disaggregated. The displacement did not send the tribe to a single location where community bonds could be maintained. It scattered families across the Kingdom — some to Riyadh, some to Jeddah, some to settlements in the south — through a combination of forced relocation, employer-directed transfers, and the simple impossibility of remaining on land from which electricity, water, and physical security had been withdrawn.
The disaggregation was functional. A tribe concentrated in a single area can organise. It can maintain oral history, communal identity, and collective resistance. A tribe scattered across a country of 2.15 million square kilometres cannot. The displacement of the Howeitat was not merely geographic. It was the dismantlement of a social structure — the relationships between families, the proximity that enables collective decision-making, the physical presence that constitutes a claim to land.
For those who remained in the broader Tabuk region, conditions changed even if their specific properties were not seized. The NEOM zone absorbed the economic and security infrastructure of the area. Roads that had served tribal communities now served construction logistics. Checkpoints that had not existed now controlled movement. The military and security presence that had been deployed for the evictions did not withdraw when the evictions were accomplished. It became the permanent security apparatus of a construction zone — a zone in which the original inhabitants were, by definition, trespassers on what had been their own land.
ALQST’s February 2023 report “The Dark Side of Neom” documented the scope: at least 47 tribe members arrested or detained, 5 sentenced to death, 15 sentenced to prison terms of 15 to 50 years, 19 detained with no information on their fate, and 8 released. The compensation offered ranged from the stated 620,000 riyals to as little as 17,000 riyals. The tribe’s request for UN intervention produced communications but no enforcement.
The Wall Street Journal Count
The Wall Street Journal reported that approximately 20,000 people were forcibly removed from the NEOM zone — a figure that encompasses not only the Howeitat but other communities and individuals whose properties fell within the 26,500-square-kilometre boundary. The number has not been disputed by the Saudi government with a specific alternative figure. NEOM’s public communications do not reference the displacement at all. The project’s website, its promotional materials, its architectural renderings, and its investor presentations present the zone as empty land — a blank canvas on which the future is being drawn. The 20,000 people who lived there before the canvas was declared blank do not appear in any official NEOM document.
The erasure is comprehensive. NEOM’s marketing shows mountains, coastline, and desert — the same landscape the Howeitat knew. It does not show the villages that were demolished, the homes that were burned, the roads that were blocked, or the families that were scattered. The architectural renderings depict a city of the future. They do not depict the community of the past that was destroyed to clear the site. In NEOM’s official narrative, the land was always empty. The Howeitat do not exist in the project’s recorded history because the project’s recorded history begins with a rendering, not with a map.
The Ongoing Resistance
The displacement was not accepted universally, and the resistance has not been extinguished despite the prosecutions.
Tribal members in exile continue to document the displacement through social media and through cooperation with human rights organisations. The hashtag #الحويطات_ضد_ترحيل_نيوم remains active. Alya Alhwaiti, the tribe’s representative in London, continues to provide testimony to international bodies and media organisations. The documentation effort is sustained, even if the enforcement gap between documentation and accountability remains vast.
Within Saudi Arabia, the cost of resistance has been made clear through the sentences: death for the most prominent, decades of imprisonment for those who mourned or protested on social media, and forced disappearance for those whose cases the state preferred to handle without the formality of a trial. The deterrent effect is by design. The sentences are not proportionate to the acts they punish. They are proportionate to the message they are intended to send: that opposition to a royal project is existentially dangerous, and that the mechanisms of the state — the courts, the security forces, the prisons — are available for deployment against citizens who refuse to subordinate their rights to the Crown Prince’s architectural ambitions.
The City That Required Their Removal
The project for which the Howeitat were displaced has, as of April 2026, produced no city. The Line — the 170-kilometre mirrored structure that was supposed to justify the evictions, the killings, and the death sentences — is suspended at 2.4 kilometres of foundation. Trojena’s dams and ski infrastructure have been cancelled. The Mukaab is suspended. The floating platform at Oxagon has not been procured.
What exists in the NEOM zone is an airport, a port, road networks, worker housing, and an $8.4 billion green hydrogen plant that is 80 per cent complete and that could have been built on any stretch of Red Sea coastline without displacing a single family. The hydrogen plant does not require the Howeitat’s land. It requires sun, wind, and water. The airport does not require the removal of a tribe. It requires a flat surface and an approach corridor. None of the components that NEOM has actually built — the components that generate economic returns independent of the megacity thesis — required the displacement that was carried out.
The displacement was required by The Line, the structure that was supposed to run 170 kilometres through the tribal territory. The Line is suspended. The displacement is permanent. The tribe cannot return to homes that have been demolished, to land whose title has been transferred to PIF, to a community whose members have been scattered across the Kingdom. The eviction was irreversible by design. The project it served was reversible by budget.
Twenty thousand people were removed from their ancestral lands to clear a path for a linear city. The path was cleared. The city was not built. The people cannot go back. The land sits empty — cleared of its inhabitants and cleared of the construction that was supposed to replace them. It is the most expensive vacant lot in human history, purchased not with money alone but with centuries of tribal presence, individual lives, and the trust between a state and its citizens that, once broken, cannot be repaired by compensation at any amount — least of all at $4,500 per family.
This investigation draws on documentation by ALQST (“The Dark Side of Neom,” February 2023; political prisoner profiles); MENA Rights Group (case profiles and UN filings); the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (communications and press releases); the Wall Street Journal (20,000 displacement reporting); Al Jazeera; Middle East Eye; the BBC (lethal force investigation, May 2024); testimony from Alya Alhwaiti; E-International Relations; the European-Saudi Organisation for Human Rights; the Saudi Press Agency; Dezeen; and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.