The video was posted to social media on 12 April 2020, from the roof of a house in the village of al-Khuraybah in Tabuk province, northwestern Saudi Arabia. The man holding the camera was Abdul Rahim bin Ahmed Mahmoud al-Huwaiti, a 43-year-old employee of the Saudi Ministry of Finance. He spoke directly, without performance, without appeal to emotion. He said he did not want to leave his home. He said he did not want compensation. He pointed the camera toward the vehicles assembling on the roads below — security forces from the Saudi state, sent to enforce an eviction order he had refused to accept.
Then he said the thing that would define his death: he predicted that after they killed him, they would plant weapons in his house to justify it. He was describing, with forensic precision, the mechanics of his own murder, hours before it happened.
At approximately 5:40 AM on 13 April 2020, Saudi special forces assaulted the house with heavy weapons. Abdul Rahim was killed. The Saudi government’s subsequent statement claimed he had “barricaded himself” and opened fire, that it had been necessary to “deal with him to neutralise his danger,” and that weapons were found in the home. The sequence he had described — prediction, killing, planted evidence — played out with a fidelity that transformed a forced eviction into a public execution with a script the victim had written himself.
His village sat within the 26,500-square-kilometre footprint of NEOM, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s $500 billion megaproject. The project has since spent over $50 billion and produced 2.4 kilometres of foundation for a 170-kilometre linear city. No residents live there. The man who was killed so the city could be built is the only person whose name is permanently associated with the site.
The Man
Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti was not an activist, a dissident, or a political figure. He was a government employee — a civil servant at the Ministry of Finance. He was 43 years old. He was a member of the al-Huwaitat tribe, an indigenous group of approximately 20,000 people whose presence in the mountains and coastal plains of Tabuk province predates the Saudi state by centuries. His family had lived in al-Khuraybah — a small settlement in the tribal territory — for generations.
The Howeitat are not a marginal community. They are one of the great tribal confederations of the Arabian Peninsula, with branches extending across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and the broader Levantine region. T. E. Lawrence documented their territory and their fighters during the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918. Their ancestral lands in northwestern Saudi Arabia encompass the exact geography that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman selected in 2017 for the most expensive construction project in human history.
Abdul Rahim was not prominent within the tribe’s resistance to NEOM. He became prominent because he refused to leave quietly, because he had a phone, and because he understood — perhaps more clearly than anyone in the Saudi security establishment anticipated — that the camera was the only weapon that could outlast the bullets.
The Eviction
The Public Investment Fund quietly acquired title to the Red Sea lands encompassing Howeitat territory in April 2017, six months before NEOM was publicly announced on 24 October of that year. Property transactions and licence renewals in the area were suspended without explanation. Justice Ministry committees issued emergency land acquisition orders in February 2018. No formal consultation with the Howeitat preceded any of these actions. The tribe learned that their ancestral lands had been sold when the bulldozers arrived.
On 1 January 2020, the Tabuk Emirate announced compulsory eviction of residents from al-Khuraybah, Sharma, and Gayal — the settlements within the NEOM zone. Social Development committees arrived in the following weeks to process relocations and assess compensation. The stated relocation amount was 620,000 riyals, approximately $165,000 per family. The amounts actually disbursed were as low as 17,000 riyals — roughly $4,500. An initial offer delivered by an assistant reportedly sent by the Crown Prince himself was approximately $3,000 per family, coupled with the instruction to leave or face forced eviction.
In March 2020, Saudi authorities escalated. Special forces — sometimes in convoys of 40 vehicles — conducted raids on the homes of Howeitat members who had not accepted the eviction terms. The raids were designed to demonstrate that refusal had consequences. Homes were entered. Families were confronted. The message was delivered through presence rather than paper: the state had decided, and the tribe’s consent was not required.
Abdul Rahim refused. He posted videos to social media documenting the security presence around his village. He filmed the convoys. He spoke to the camera as a man who understood he was creating a record. He did not rage. He did not plead. He stated facts: he did not want to leave. He did not want compensation. He expected to be killed. And he expected the killing to be justified after the fact with fabricated evidence.
On 12 April, he posted what would become his most widely shared video. He filmed from his roof. He showed the security forces below. He said, clearly and without hesitation: “I would not be surprised if they come and kill me in my home.” He added that he expected authorities would “plant weapons in his house” to incriminate him — to transform a man defending his home into a terrorist who had to be neutralised.
The video circulated. It was shared by Alia Abutayah, a London-based Saudi activist from the city of Tabuk, who posted the footage on Twitter along with subsequent material that would emerge from the events of the following morning.
The Killing
The assault came before dawn on 13 April 2020. At approximately 5:40 AM, Saudi special forces surrounded Abdul Rahim’s home in al-Khuraybah and attacked with heavy weapons. The details of what happened inside the house in those minutes are contested by exactly two parties: the Saudi government and the dead man’s family.
The government’s account, released days later, stated that Abdul Rahim had “barricaded himself” in the house and that it was necessary to “deal with him to neutralise his danger.” The statement implied an armed confrontation — a man who chose violence and received a proportionate response from security forces fulfilling their duties. Weapons, the statement noted, were found in the home.
The family’s account, supported by video footage that circulated on social media, described an overwhelming military assault on a residential property. Abdul Rahim reportedly returned fire briefly before being killed. His relatives stated that he did not own firearms and that any weapons found in the home had been placed there after his death — precisely as he had predicted in the video posted fewer than 24 hours earlier.
The Saudi government did not explain why a Ministry of Finance employee who had posted protest videos constituted a danger requiring special forces and heavy weapons at dawn. It did not explain why the operation was conducted against a man whose identity, location, and grievances were entirely known to the state. It did not explain why the prediction he made — that weapons would be planted — was followed by the discovery of weapons. And it did not explain why a man who could have been arrested at any point during the preceding months was instead killed in a military-style raid on his family home.
A pro-government newspaper published a statement from Sheikh Alyan Ayed al-Zumhri, described as a tribal leader, claiming that Abdul Rahim had “acted alone” and that the tribe supported NEOM. The statement served its intended function: it placed the government’s narrative in the mouth of a tribal authority, creating the appearance of communal endorsement for an act of state violence against a community member. The tribe’s actual representatives would later dispute both the endorsement and al-Zumhri’s authority to speak for them.
The Footage
The killing of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti was not invisible. It was, in fact, one of the most documented state killings in Saudi Arabia’s modern history — not because journalists were present, but because the victim had deliberately created the evidentiary record before his death.
The pre-killing videos — showing the security forces, the convoys, the calm prediction of his own murder — were posted to his personal social media accounts. After the assault, additional footage emerged showing the aftermath: the bullet-marked walls, the blood-stained rooms, the evidence of the overwhelming force deployed against a single house. These images were shared by activists in London, picked up by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and international human rights organisations, and archived by ALQST, the London-based Saudi human rights organisation that would become the primary documenter of the Howeitat persecution.
Alia Abutayah, the London-based activist from Tabuk who was among the first to disseminate the footage, received and posted video of the shooting itself on Twitter. The material spread across Arabic-language social media under the hashtag #الحويطات_ضد_ترحيل_نيوم — “Howeitat against NEOM displacement.” The hashtag became the digital marker of a resistance movement that had no other channel of expression, in a country where public protest is prohibited, media is controlled, and the court system would subsequently be used to prosecute those who shared their grief online.
Omar bin Abdulaziz, a prominent Saudi dissident based in Canada, described Abdul Rahim as the “martyr of NEOM” — a designation that carried both commemorative and political weight. The framing was rejected by the Saudi government, which maintained that Abdul Rahim was a criminal who had resisted lawful authority, not a victim of state violence.
The International Response
On 9 June 2020, MENA Rights Group and ALQST submitted a formal allegation letter to the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions regarding Abdul Rahim’s killing. The submission documented the circumstances of the death, the pre-existing video evidence, the discrepancies between the government’s account and the available footage, and the pattern of forced evictions in the NEOM zone.
On 10 August 2020, UN mandate holders issued a formal communication to Saudi Arabia expressing “grave concern” about the killing. The communication, referenced as AL SAU 11/2020, asked the Saudi government to provide information about the circumstances of Abdul Rahim’s death, the legal basis for the forced evictions, and the measures taken to ensure the rights of the Howeitat community. Saudi Arabia’s response, if any, has not been made public.
In May 2024, the BBC published an investigation that added a dimension the earlier reporting had not captured. Colonel Rabih Alenezi, a former Saudi intelligence officer who had sought asylum in London, testified that he had been ordered to evict Howeitat tribe members from al-Khuraybah in 2020 by killing anyone who resisted. His statement was direct: “Whoever continues to resist [eviction] should be killed, so it licensed the use of lethal force against whoever stayed in their home.” The BBC noted it had not independently verified Alenezi’s claims but that sources familiar with the Saudi Intelligence directorate confirmed his testimonies were consistent with their knowledge.
The testimony, if accurate, transforms the killing of Abdul Rahim from an operational decision — a tactical response to a barricaded individual — into a policy outcome: the pre-authorised use of lethal force against civilians who refused to vacate land designated for a construction project. The distinction matters legally, morally, and historically. An operational decision can be attributed to individual commanders. A policy of lethal force against eviction resisters implicates the chain of command.
What Happened to Those Who Mourned
The killing of Abdul Rahim was the beginning, not the end, of the state’s campaign against the Howeitat. What followed was a systematic prosecution of grief.
In the weeks after the killing, Saudi authorities offered payments of up to 100,000 riyals — approximately $26,585 — to state-appointed tribal leaders on the condition that they publicly condemn Abdul Rahim’s resistance. Additional payments of 100,000 riyals per tribe member and 300,000 riyals per appointed Sheikh were pledged in return for participation in an official propaganda film designed to make the tribe publicly disown Abdul Rahim and other members who had refused the eviction order. The film was produced.
Those who would not participate in the disowning were treated differently.
Mass arrests began in April 2020. Over the following months and years, at least 47 tribe members were arrested or detained, according to ALQST’s February 2023 report “The Dark Side of Neom.” Five men were sentenced to death. Fifteen were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 15 to 50 years. Nineteen were detained with no information released about their fate. Eight were released.
Ahmed Abdel Nasser al-Huwaiti was 19 years old — a university student — when he was arrested. His charge: “expressing sympathy for a dead terrorist” on Twitter. The “dead terrorist” was his uncle, Abdul Rahim. Ahmed received a 20-year sentence.
Maha Suleiman al-Qarani al-Huwaiti, a housewife, was arrested on 2 February 2021 when state security forces raided her home in Duba in front of her five children, the youngest of whom was four months old. Her arrest stemmed from a Twitter post criticising the high cost of living and another tweet expressing condolences for Abdul Rahim. She was initially sentenced to one year. On retrial — on the same charges, a procedural violation under Saudi law — her sentence was increased to 23 years. She is held at Dhahban Central Prison in Jeddah. It is the longest non-capital sentence imposed on a female political prisoner in Saudi Arabia’s modern history.
Shadli Ahmed Mahmoud al-Huwaiti, Abdul Rahim’s brother, was arrested in late 2020, forcibly disappeared for approximately two months, and subsequently sentenced to death. He conducted a hunger strike in prison in May 2022 and was force-fed via stomach tube — a practice that ALQST characterised as torture. His death sentence was upheld on appeal in January 2023.
The Specialised Criminal Court — originally established to handle terrorism cases — classified the tribe’s resistance as terrorism. The charges included “forming a terrorist cell,” “undermining national unity through online posts,” and, in Ahmed’s case, “expressing sympathy for a dead terrorist.” The charges were brought under the 2017 Saudi Law on Combating Crimes of Terrorism and Its Financing, whose provisions are so broadly drafted that mourning a family member on social media constitutes a crime punishable by decades of imprisonment.
In November 2020, Halima al-Huwaiti — along with her son and husband — was forcibly disappeared after refusing to vacate her home for NEOM. She has never been brought before a court. No charges have been filed. As of the most recent available reporting, her fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
The NEOM That Required His Death
The project that required Abdul Rahim’s removal from his ancestral land has, in the six years since his killing, produced the following: an operational airport, road networks, worker housing, port facilities, a near-complete green hydrogen plant, and 2.4 kilometres of foundation work for a 170-kilometre linear city called The Line. No above-ground superstructure has been built. The population target for 2030 was revised from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. An internal audit projected that completing The Line to its original specification would cost $8.8 trillion and take until 2080. Construction was suspended by PIF in September 2025.
NEOM’s deputy CEO, Rayan Fayez, confirmed at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025 that the project had spent over $50 billion. McKinsey and Company, NEOM’s principal strategy consultant, has earned more than $130 million per year in advisory fees. The three dams and freshwater lake at Trojena — another NEOM component — were cancelled in March 2026 after reaching 30 per cent completion, at a cost of $4.7 billion.
The village of al-Khuraybah, where Abdul Rahim lived and died, sits within this 26,500-square-kilometre zone. The land was cleared. The tribe was dispersed. The resisters were imprisoned or killed. And the city that justified it all — the city that was worth more than a man’s life, worth more than a tribe’s history, worth more than the rule of law — does not exist.
The Record
Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti is dead. His brother is under a death sentence. His nephew is serving 20 years for a tweet. A woman who expressed condolences for his death is serving 23 years. His community is scattered. His home is rubble in a construction zone that has produced no construction.
He left something the state did not anticipate and cannot undo: a video record. He looked into a camera on the last full day of his life and described, with the calm of a man who has accepted his fate, exactly what would happen to him and why. The prediction was specific: they would come, they would kill him, they would plant weapons, they would call him a terrorist. Each element occurred. The video remains.
In a country where the state controls the media, the judiciary, and the historical record, Abdul Rahim created an archive that belongs to no institution. It exists on servers the Saudi government does not administer, in languages the Saudi censors cannot reach, in the memories of a tribe that has not forgotten what it was told to forget.
He did not save his home. He did not save his village. He did not stop NEOM. He did something that the $50 billion project, the McKinsey consultants, the international architecture firms, and the Saudi security apparatus have not been able to do: he created a fact that cannot be revised. He filmed the truth, and the truth survived him.
The videos are still online. The house is gone. NEOM spent $50 billion and built 2.4 kilometres. Abdul Rahim spent nothing and built a record that will outlast every structure the Kingdom has announced, suspended, and quietly abandoned in the desert of Tabuk.
This investigation draws on video evidence posted by Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti to personal social media accounts in April 2020; footage disseminated by Alia Abutayah; documentation by ALQST (“The Dark Side of Neom,” February 2023; political prisoner profiles; November 2024 briefing); MENA Rights Group (case profile and UN filing, June 2020); the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (communication AL SAU 11/2020, August 2020); the BBC investigation into lethal force authorisation (May 2024, citing Colonel Rabih Alenezi); Al Jazeera; Middle East Eye; Dezeen; the European-Saudi Organisation for Human Rights; the Saudi Press Agency; 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.