Moroccan officials say Israeli digitisation has given them the edge over Algeria in their row over Western Sahara. Military deals discreetly dwarf all the others five of the latest are said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. “There’s such high interest,” says an Israeli diplomat. Morocco has just hosted a three-day parade of Israeli startups, including Supplant, a company that calibrates irrigation according to weather and soil type. They are also looking into fishing, cannabis farming and gas. Israeli companies are bidding for big water projects, including a desalination plant for Casablanca. One deal involving Morocco and Marom Energy, an Israeli company, together with a Spanish consortium, to provide solar and wind power for Spain is worth $1.2bn. But that excludes arms, services, a flourishing digital and cyber market and joint ventures with third countries. Officially, trade at last count was worth a modest $131m a year. Well-organised trade delegations are piling in, too. Some Israelis come to party, others to visit the shrines of what Morocco says are some 600 Jewish saints, or to rediscover family roots, since some 700,000 Israelis are of Moroccan origin. Morocco expects 200,000 this year, up fourfold since the accord, with ten direct flights a week. Israeli tourists, meanwhile, are flocking in. Wine from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights lubricated a sumptuous five-course meal. Huge Stars of David flashed on a stage in the heart of the Chellah, Rabat’s crenellated medieval fortress, candle-lit for the occasion.

The gala i24 news staged on May 30th had a grander guest list than most Western embassies could hope to muster on their national days. However, caution should be used particularly when there is reason to believe that clustered subgroups may exist within the population of interest or when the sample size is small in relation to the population.Israel’s satellite channel, i24 news, is opening bureaus in Casablanca and Rabat, Morocco’s commercial and political capitals. The addition of a network size imputation method helps to smooth network sizes allowing for more accurate results.

Conclusions: SS-PSE is an effective method for estimating the size of hard-to-reach populations that leverages important information within respondent-driven sampling studies. SS-PSE estimates fell within or very close to the likely values provided by experts and the estimates from previous studies using other methods. Results: Ten population size estimates were calculated for people who inject drugs, female sex workers, men who have sex with other men, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in six different cities in Morocco. Methods: Successive sampling-population size estimation (SS-PSE) along with network size imputation allows population size estimates to be made without relying on separate studies or additional data (as in network scale-up, multiplier, and capture–recapture methods), which may be biased. Estimating the total size of these populations is of great interest to national and international organizations however, reliable measures of population size often do not exist. Background: Respondent-driven sampling is used worldwide to estimate the population prevalence of characteristics, such as HIV/AIDS and associated risk factors in hard-to-reach populations.

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