President Masoud Pezeshkian came to New York with a written text. After hearing US President Donald Trump at the same rostrum the day before, he set it aside, telling delegates he had prepared a speech before the US president called Iran a terrorist state.

He was, by most accounts, the first leader to speak at the UN in person in the middle of a war with the United States.

Speaking from the heart is why the historic address will be heard well beyond the hall. It should not hide how precise it was — legally, morally and strategically.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

He opened with photographs of dead children, victims of American and Israeli bombs, and a direct reply: “We have been the victims of terrorism.

“We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists.”

Palestinians know this inversion well. A people defends itself, and the aggressor calls the defence terrorism. Anyone who has watched the last seven months with clarity will recognise it.

He answered the bullying Trump had put on display, musing aloud about “annihilating” Iran, by standing on the ground of law. Everything said against Iran from that podium, he argued, contradicted the UN Charter.

Use of force, threats forbidden
He is right. Article 2(4) forbids not only the use of force but the threat of it, and a head of state weighing the annihilation of a fellow member state before the General Assembly is as plain a threat as the Charter’s drafters could have imagined.

Iran asks for no special treatment, only the sovereign equality the Charter promises every member. On the nuclear file, his formula was “no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology.”

That is the NPT’s own bargain: the treaty bars non-nuclear states from acquiring the bomb, and its Article IV guarantees the “inalienable right” of every party to peaceful nuclear energy “without discrimination.”

He was equally plain that Iran built its defences to guarantee that any strike on its cities is answered. In Nicaragua v. United States, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that international law places no limit on a sovereign state’s armaments beyond what it accepts by treaty.

Iran’s President Pezeshkian displays images of Iran’s martyred Leader and the several children murdered in the US-Israeli attacks on Iran during his UNGA address.

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— Press TV (@PressTV) September 23, 2026

He also took apart the Israeli-made story that Iran’s political establishment is on the verge of collapse, and that Iranians would welcome foreign invaders. For seven months people have been in the streets daily in support of the defence effort.

The same fact answers Trump’s claim that the Iranian state has killed tens of thousands of its own people. A population does not rally under bombardment behind a government it regards as its killer.

Naming the war crimes
Then he named the war crimes. He showed images of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab and of a sports hall in Lamerd where children had been playing. A weapon that scatters tens of thousands of tungsten fragments cannot be used on a school or a gymnasium without striking indiscriminately.

A UN fact-finding mission reported this month that there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in the February 28 strikes. The US delegate left the hall during this passage. Pezeshkian drew the parallel with Gaza, where the ICJ has ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and former defence minister.

He turned next to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Israel stays outside the NPT and accepts no comprehensive safeguards, although the Security Council called on it in Resolution 487 of 1981 to place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, and the General Assembly repeats the call every year.

Israel has struck the capitals of its neighbours in breach of the Charter and carries out a documented pattern of war crimes, yet keeps its weapons with impunity. Iran, which has acted only in self-defence for two centuries, is sanctioned and attacked instead, although its facilities remain under an IAEA safeguards agreement.

On Hormuz, he described a strait closed to Iran even as it serves to ship missiles and weaponry into the surrounding region. The law of the sea does not allow this.

The 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which Washington invokes but has never ratified, requires ships passing through a strait to refrain from any threat or use of force against the states bordering it. Under the older rule of innocent passage, a ship serving an attack on the coastal state is no longer in innocent passage at all.

Will not be shut out
Iran will not be shut out of its own waters while others use them to make war on it.

He closed on the indivisibility of security: it exists for everyone in the region or for no one. The idea has a long pedigree. European states wrote it into the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and restated it in 1999, pledging not to strengthen their own security at the expense of others.

“We want strong neighbors,” Pezeshkian said. Iran has always been open to diplomacy, “without accepting the language of force.”

Rez Nasri is an international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, and he writes about Iran in Persian, English and French.

A West Papuan advocacy movement has praised the “Pacific family’s bravery” in standing up for human rights in West Papua and has appealed to the region’s leaders to protest over the latest massacre at this week’s UN General Assembly in New York.

“Justice and peace in West Papua can only come through international pressure,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda.

“On behalf of the ULMWP and the West Papuan people, I wholeheartedly condemn the brutal massacre of six West Papuan civilians by the Indonesian military in Yahukimo.”

• READ MORE: Papuan civilians shot in latest security forces violence in Yahukimo
• Other West Papua reports

Wenda said in a statement that this latest massacre demonstrated how vital it was that Pacific nations maintained their pressure on Indonesia to allow a UN Human Rights visit.

Last month, the Pacific Islands Forum reaffirmed its 2019 call for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to be allowed into West Papua, while Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders suggested that Indonesia’s associate membership would be reviewed if no visit took place.

Ten Papuan gold-panners were reported to have been shot — six of them killed — by Indonesian security forces in Samboga Village, Yahukimo Regency on September 18.

The men were already being monitored by drone as they left the panning site in the evening, and were shot as they encountered a roadblock on the public road into the village.

Bodies held back
No warning shots were fired and there was no exchange of fire between the Indonesian military and the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPNPB). The victimes were named as: Yonas Aje, 22; Pilatus Porpom, 25; Daniel Timuka, 19; Kani Borpom, 20; Yanus Patika, 28; and Elli Timuka, 28.

According to a TPNPB press release, the victims’ bodies had yet to be evacuated by churches or humanitarian groups because the site remained under control of the military.

“The viciousness and cruelty of the Indonesian coloniser knows no limits — not only do they kill civilians at will, they also refuse to release their bodies to their families,” Wenda said.

“These 10 civilian gold miners were victims of the Indonesian occupation twice over.

“First, they were dispossessed by the takeover of their ancestral lands. Second, they were murdered for trying to make a living in the new world the occupation has created.

“Their names are added to the more than 60 West Papuan civilians murdered by the Indonesian state in 2026 alone.”

Death sentence condemned
The ULMWP also condemned the death sentence handed down to Karel Fatem, an Indigenous West Papuan TPNPB member who was set to become the first political prisoner executed by the Indonesian state in more than a decade.

“The TPNPB are not criminals or terrorists, they do not bomb or attack in Java or Sumatra: they are the West Papuan home guard. It is not the TPNPB who turned West Papua into a killing field,” said Wenda.

“There have always been West Papuans who defend themselves, their environment, their mountains and their forests. We demand that the Indonesian courts immediately reverse its sentence and frees all West Papuan political prisoners.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We profile a remarkable new documentary about Paulo Freire, the acclaimed Brazilian educator whose revolutionary approach to teaching connected literacy to critical thinking and democratic participation.

In the early 1960s, Freire led an experiment in adult education in the northeastern Brazilian town of Angicos that helped hundreds of rural adults learn to read and write in just 40 hours.

Freire rejected rote memorisation, instead favouring culture circles, where students and educators drew on their own lives to learn vocabulary and develop critical consciousness.

But the experiment was abruptly halted in 1965, when Brazil’s military overthrew President João Goulart in a US-backed coup. The literacy campaign was dismantled. Students burned their books out of fear of persecution. Paulo Freire himself was imprisoned and forced into exile for 16 years.

The new documentary, Reading the World, draws on rare archival footage of the 1960s Brazil and weaves together the memories of farmers, students, educators who took part in the culture circles. This is the film’s trailer.

NEWSREEL: [translated] In Angicos, a small town of Rio Grande do Norte, next to an old railway station, a revolution has begun.

MARIA MIRANDA GOMES: [translated] Before the school came, I didn’t even know how to sign my name, because I had never gone to school.

LUZIA DE ANDRADE: [translated] No one cares about poor people who don’t know anything. They taught us that if we studied, we could be citizens.

PAULO ALVES DE SOUZA: [translated] Paulo Freire, for us, was a symbol of kindness in our lives. I had the seeds of education planted in my chest directly by him.

MARCOS GUERRA: [translated] At the time, Brazil was living through a period of great political fervoUr. There was a desire to change things, a desire to transform the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from Reading the World that features Paulo Freire himself, speaking in 1975.

PAULO FREIRE: [translated] At that moment, the literacy students realise that transforming reality through their work, actions and reflections is a way to create and recreate the world.

And they take on the role of a transformer, not of an object.

AMY GOODMAN: The film Reading the World, or Lendo o Mundo, focuses on a time in Paulo Freire’s life before he wrote the famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It comes as Brazil prepares for its general election next month.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is up for reelection. His challengers include Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now in prison for his role in the 2022 coup attempt. Lula and Paulo Freire were longtime allies.

For more, we’re joined by Catherine Murphy, co-director of Reading the World, which recently premiered here in New York and will air on PBS WORLD Channel on October 9. And we’re joined by Maria Luisa Mendonça, a consulting producer on the documentary, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! In fact, President Lula just met with the New York mayor, Mamdani, yesterday here in New York. Tell us about Lendo o Mundo. Tell us about this amazing documentary, Reading the World.

Reading The World                          Video: Democracy Now!

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, thank you so much for having us.

You know, Paulo Freire was one of the most influential educators of the past century and is still widely studied all around the world. But the studies often focus on his ideas, his philosophies, his books, and much less is known about his original praxis, the beginning, those early on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, grassroots-level experiences that Paulo Freire had in the years leading up to writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his other first books.

And that’s exactly what we ask in this film. We explore these years leading up to writing his first books. And we ask: Who were his closest collaborators? What was that collective that he was working with? And importantly, we ask: Who were the students?

How can we look at this experience through their eyes and through their words, their voices, and sort of see them as co-creators of this methodology that continues to make impacts around the world?

Brazil at the time was highly feudal and colonial. One percent of the population owned the vast majority of the arable land. In the northeast, 70 percent of people were illiterate, could not read and write. And if you couldn’t read and write, you could not vote. So, it was also prohibited to do any kind of rural union organising. So, these were these institutionalised, intersecting ways to keep the majority of people outside of any personal and political empowerment. And this was the Brazil that Freire and his collaborators were seeking to change.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maria Luisa, could you talk — what was — what was revolutionary or unusual about Paulo Freire’s methods, his pedagogical methods?

MARIA LUISA MENDONÇA: Yes, I think one of the most important points of his philosophy is that everyone has knowledge. So, when he started this group, teaching farmers, farm workers that sometimes didn’t even get paid with money — sometimes they just worked for food — in a very poor area, very remote area in the countryside in the northeast of Brazil, when they gathered together, they felt that they had knowledge.

So, the key point about Paulo Freire’s philosophy is that everyone has knowledge. And teaching is about exchanging knowledge, and it’s about seeing the world around you. So, teaching has — needs to have meaning, and learning needs to make sense for people from the concrete reality where they live.

And I think this is something that is very needed in all levels of education all over the world.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Catherine, as Brazil prepares for its elections this year, what does your film show so powerfully in the lessons of Paulo Freire that are necessary to keep alive today?

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, I think it’s important to understand that the demands of the grassroots movements in the early 1960s, when Paulo Freire was working, remain the demands of grassroots movements in Brazil today. For a more democratic and more just Brazil, with greater access to quality education, with expanded voting rights, with political representation through people and sectors of the society that have been historically excluded — women, Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous people — representing themselves and the country, the real Brazil, also advancing labor rights and labor relations, and, importantly, this land justice and land tenure issue, which is still such a huge problem in Brazil today.

So, these issues which were the core of the early 1960 movements are defining, at the core of the presidential debate now and what will be the future vision of the nation.

AMY GOODMAN: The 1964 coup, what happened to Paulo Freire?

CATHERINE MURPHY: So, Paulo Freire was arrested soon after the coup. He was taken to jail for 70 days and forced into exile, during which time he lived all over the world and started writing his books, and wrote his first books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and others.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this seminal work.

CATHERINE MURPHY: Yes. So, Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was really largely based on this Angicos experience and his first experiences in Brazil, looking at how to democratise education, to democratise the entire society.

And after he left Brazil, Pedagogy of the Oppressed circulated clandestinely in Brazil during the years of the dictatorship and circulated openly around the rest of the world.

But then, Paulo Freire also engaged with a number of adult education projects around the world during those two decades that he was out of Brazil, notably in Guinea-Bissau working with Mário Cabral, in Nicaragua working with Fernando Cardenal, and working with grassroots social justice educators all over the world, including in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with Paulo Freire in his own words from the film Reading the World.

PAULO FREIRE: [translated] I said that we had to challenge the illiterate adults and the groups of illiterate adults, challenge them with certain representations of the concrete reality they experienced.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License and is republished under Creative Commons.

The Palestine Forum (PFNZ) has challenged New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters over the country’s response to the Gaza as a test of commitment to international law, human rights and self-determination, saying “meaningful action” is needed now.

“Words alone do not end occupation,” said Maher Nazzal, chair of PFNZ.

“Statements alone do not stop settlement expansion. Humanitarian assistance alone does not deliver self-determination.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Forum reports

“And ‘when, not if’ is not a timetable.”

Nazzal said Peters had presented Palestinian statehood recognition as an example of New Zealand pursuing an “independent, multi-directional foreign policy” including where New Zealand has differed from some of its closest partners.

“Palestine is not a talking point or a diplomatic case study,” Nazzal said in a statement.

In 2025, New Zealand had decided not to recognise the State of Palestine, while several close partner countries, including Australia and the UK, had proceeded with recognition.

‘When, not if’
The NZ government had argued that recognition needed to make a “tangible contribution” to a lasting two-state solution.

“Now, in September 2026, Peters is again saying Palestinian statehood is a matter of ‘when, not if’.

“So when?” asked Nazzal.

He said Palestinians had waited generations for freedom, justice and self-determination.

“An independent foreign policy should not mean simply having the freedom to delay,” Nazzal said.

“It should mean having the courage to act according to principles — even when doing so is uncomfortable, politically difficult or inconvenient for powerful partners.

“New Zealand has repeatedly affirmed the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and support for a two-state solution.

Forum’s wish list
“If Palestinian statehood is genuinely a matter of ‘when, not if’, then Palestinians should not be expected to wait indefinitely for New Zealand to decide that the time is right.”

The Palestine Forum calls on New Zealand to:

• Recognise the State of Palestine without further unnecessary delay;
• Uphold international law consistently and without double standards;
• Strengthen accountability for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law;
• Take meaningful action against settlement expansion and settler violence;
• Ensure humanitarian assistance reaches Palestinians in need;
• Support Palestinian self-determination and political agency; and
• Use New Zealand’s diplomatic voice to pursue an end to the occupation and a just and lasting peace.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Israeli actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in a blistering speech at the United Nations General Assembly, reports Al Jazeera.

In a address that saw the Israeli delegation walk out and Palestinian representatives applaud, Erdogan spoke of Israel’s continuing war crimes in Gaza and the escalation of illegal settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank.

“With the support of [US President Donald] Trump, we contributed to a ceasefire. But despite this so-called ceasefire, more than 1300 civilians have been murdered in Gaza,” he said.

• READ MORE: Erdogan accuses Israel of ‘genocidal mindset’ at UNGA

Although Hamas and other Palestinian groups have accepted the second phase of the October ceasefire framework agreement, he said “Israel is not putting an end to its actions in Gaza, and the West Bank is going through the most challenging time as the illegal Israeli settlers occupy the region”.

Erdogan described Gaza as “the most inhumane, most shameful concentration camp of our time”.

“We face a genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing. No one with humanity, mercy or conscience can turn a blind eye,” he added.

Gaza situation ‘very dire’
Salman Shaikh, a former UN official who has spent time in Gaza and the founder of The Shaikh Group, said “Erdogan is absolutely right”.

He told Al Jazeera that the situation in the enclave was indeed “very, very dire”, adding that the comments made by the Turkish president during his UNGA address were significant.

“What was significant in Erdogan’s speech was [this idea] that we can’t let what is happening in Gaza and the occupied West Bank become a normalised situation,” said Shaikh, adding that Türkiye was an “indispensable regional and international actor spanning many geographies and organisations”.

French President Emmanuel Macron told the UN General Assembly that the situation in Gaza was “shameful”.

“What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza? Some claim that peace has been achieved, but this has not opened up humanitarian deliveries. The spectacle, it is shameful. Shame on all of us,” Macron said.

He also commented on the US-Israel war on Iran, stressing that the Strait of Hormuz should not be used for “blackmail” and that the waterway’s reopening “is a priority”.

Echoing his earlier remarks at the UN General Assembly, the US President Donald Trump once again threatened Iran with “annihilation”.

“We’ve isolated Iran financially and hopefully they’ll do the right thing fast,” he said. “There will be a time when it’s too late, and we won’t have the chance of letting them survive as a nation.

“I would like to see that, and I can tell you that people around this table would like to see it,” he added in a meeting with GCC and Arab leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Guterres warns against ‘ethnic cleansing’
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Israeli violence, displacement and illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank were undermining prospects for peace and raising the risk of “ethnic cleansing”.

“Violence, displacement, and settlement expansion by Israel in the occupied West Bank are bulldozing the path to peace and raising the specter of ethnic cleansing,” Guterres said in his address to the 81st UN General Assembly.

“We cannot allow the two-state solution to disappear before our eyes,” he added.

This is a photo of me in the desert in Saudi Arabia 19 years ago. Was I covered? You bet.

I recall receiving a letter from a white feminist friend who told me my feminism must have been skewed by my experience in the Middle East.

Actually I met so many feisty feminists in the Middle East and I found a Middle East very different to the one I’d seen on the mainstream media.

• READ MORE: Other Saige England reports

My Middle East was a Middle East of moons and stars and tents and light garments draped like tents. My Middle East was the Middle East of palaces in the desert and mysterious winds.

Were there things that were wrong there? Yes. Just as there are in the US. But I saw and experienced much that was good. I rose in my employment, I managed and supervised and I met other women who were managers and supervisors.

As one Italian woman said: “It is easier for me to rise as a woman here.” I found that too. I found work easily in Qatar. I found it difficult here in Aotearoa to rise, no matter how well I did in terms of qualifications and awards.

New Zealand is only free if you don’t write about certain matters. If you don’t rock the boat. If you aren’t too much — too pro the environment or too pro indigenous rights. I still write about those aspects of life.

Relatively speaking
There, in Qatar, I worked with women who were covered and women who were uncovered. Relatively speaking.

I met women who covered from choice. I met women who were forced to cover (and that is wrong). I met women who were conservative and who didn’t cover. I met feminists who covered. I met women who wore the veil and the abbaya because they were radical — it was a way of giving the finger to the US.

Speaking of the US — US military bases were everywhere. The US had invaded Iraq. The military wives often drank a lot.

I interviewed US soldiers and found them worrying. Their education had been conservative, fundamentalist, narrow.

Many US soldiers were bright but they supported the US nuclear bombing of Japan, they supported nuclear everything. They thought all Arabs and environmentalists were terrorists.

When I first arrived, the Twin Towers had been bombed and I’d heard lots of reports about Al Qaeda. I used to leap into taxis vowing that I was not American. I was told that “it is ok, lady, we aren’t like those crazies” (people who blow up buildings).

The people I met were peaceful hospitable people. The women I met wanted careers.

Issues were the same
One of my friends, an Aussie, was a psychologist. I asked her if the problems her female clients faced were different — did Western expat women have different issues to Qatari or Lebanese or Egyptian or Pakistani women? Nope. The issues were all the same: “Is my husband cheating on me?”, “Are my children OK?”

When I arrived in Qatar the divorce rate of the local population was 51 per cent. Many young women chose not to marry.

In Qatar and Bahrain women covered, or didn’t, by choice. Some told me they wore the garments because they were easy and affordable. They could dress up after uni but they could just grab the robe by day. Some wore the veil on a bad hair day. Oh, there were a raft of reasons.

What saddens and sickens me is that I’m often not believed about this. I’ve been accused of betraying the feminist cause. The kind of feminists who don’t ask other women what they want. Those kind of feminists tell me I compromised.

But I felt the compromise when I attended a tupperware party here where the whole room except me launched into racist jibes about Indians. Ye Gods, spare me.

Back here, a few years back, I befriended Fatin who came from Singapore and who lived here in Aotearoa while studying. Fatin was bright and so lovely, so open and kind and free. A poet. She read 30 books in a year. She loved the author, Elif Shafak, a favourite author of mine. We bonded.

But Fatin was often abused in Ōtautahi by people who told her she shouldn’t be wearing the veil or the robe. They felt sorry for her, they said. Fatin said she felt sorry for them for judging others.

‘No judgment’ . . . a favourite
“No judgement” was one of Fatin’s favourite sayings. I learned so much from her. Sadly, she had to leave because she couldn’t gain a residency visa.

Women wear clothing for all sorts of reasons. What concerns me far more than what we wear is unnecessary body surgery. I saw boob jobs and lip jobs, and jaw-broken jobs in the Middle East just as I see them in the West.

I see women manufacturing themselves as products to please men. It makes me sick. Don’t do it. Don’t. Be yourself.

I wore the robe and the veil that hot day in Saudi because it kept the sun and the hot dry wind off my face and body. Like so many women, I was naked underneath. I felt that warm wind caress me.

I loathe the men who make women wear what they don’t want to wear. I’ve always resisted that. I didn’t throw out my hippy skirt when my ex wanted me to, I kept it, cherished it, I sparkled and shone. But I’ve also felt shamed by women who tell me I shouldn’t bother using a towel to shield myself while getting dressed on the beach or while camping.

My choice sometimes is to cover. Sometimes the robe feels good. I like the feeling of having my own wee house and being safe underneath. That is my choice. If I lived differently or had different experiences or had never been abused in this Western world perhaps I would think differently but that is my experience.

I fight the predators in my own way. And I know that freedom is not here yet.

Western abuse insidious
The abuse in the West is insidious. It is often denied. We believe we are free but we are not free. There is another form of control.

Women are bombarded with social messages that tell us to straighten our noses or lighten our skin. They are everywhere.

They appear on my feed as they probably appear on yours.

I’ve aged in an age where I’ve watched young women pout and lie and become “influencers” selling all sorts of fake garbage and sadly, faking themselves. It isn’t good for their mental health. It isn’t good at all. Are they free? I don’t think so.

How do we unpick the social fabric of inequity especially when it tells us we are free.

Freedom is the freedom to choose. Freedom is the freedom to vote. Freedom is the freedom to use our voices and to wear what we want to wear. Freedom is the freedom and the choice not to turn ourselves into objects for the pleasure of others.

Freedom is the freedom to not be raped or abused or killed. Freedom is the freedom to love and learn. Freedom is the freedom to work — to work outside or inside and not be pressured to do both.

Women deserve freedom.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

A national advocacy group congratulated the Invercargill City Council for voting today to end procurement of goods or services from companies profiting from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

Invercargill is the seventh local body to pass similar motions sanctioning Israel, said the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

The other bodies are Christchurch, Nelson and Palmerston city councils, Environment Canterbury and Environment Southland while the capital, Wellington, has banned investment in Israeli government bonds.

• WATCH: The Invercargill City Council debate
• READ MORE: Other NZ sanctions against Israel

“Thank you, Invercargill,” said PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi in a statement. “You represent the best of New Zealand. You have stood up while our [Christopher Luxon National Party-led coalition] government sits on its hands.”

“Palestine will remember your simple but significant stand for Palestinian human rights just as it will remember the complicity of the New Zealand government.”

Today’s resolution ends the council’s purchase of goods or services from companies on a UN Human Rights Council list which are accused of supporting illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Mayor Tom Campbell moved a motion to oppose the Palestine Solidarity motion. But seven councillors in a row spoke against his motion and in favour of sanctioning Israel.

Voted as council policy
Campbell’s motion was decisively lost and the resolution was voted in as council policy.

“The greatest problem in Israel/Palestine is that Israel has never been held to account for its war crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide being live-streamed from Gaza,” Tamimi said.

The Invercargill City Council debate on the illegal Israeli settlements.   Video: ICC

“By itself, the Invercargill resolution won’t force Israel to give Palestinians equal rights, but it is an important step for this country to apply BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) on Israel as requested by Palestinians civil society.

“PSNA expects more councils to have similar votes in the coming weeks.”

Republished from PSNA.

One of Fiji’s most prominent traditional and political figures is warning the country’s lawmakers “not to approve” two major bilateral agreements with Australia.

In early July, the Fijian and Australian prime ministers signed the Vuvale Union and the Ocean of Peace Alliance (Veitacini Treaty), marking a major upgrade to relations between the two nations.

The Vuvale Union is a broad political and economic framework, while the Veitacini Treaty is the specific defence and security pillar within that wider strategic partnership. Both governments have hailed the agreements as “significant” for future Fiji-Australia relations.

• READ MORE: Lau chief raises concern over Fiji treaties

Australian PM Anthony Albanese said that signing the agreements was “one of the most significant endeavours” Australia had undertaken with any country.

Fiji and Australia say the agreements will strengthen cooperation on security, economic development, climate resilience and regional stability.

However, Ratu Tevita Mara, a paramount chief of Lau Province, is urging the Fiji Parliament to withhold approval of both agreements “until the people of Fiji have been given a full, fearless and independent account of what these treaties commit our nation to”.

“Both treaties were signed in Suva on 6 July 2026. Under our [2013] Constitution, neither binds Fiji until Parliament approves it, and both are now before Parliament’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence,” he said in a media statement.

‘Friendship must never require blindness’
“This is the moment — the last moment — for Fiji to examine them properly. Once ratified, they cannot easily be undone.”

He said the examination of the agreements needed to be given sufficient time, independent advice and public participation.

“Let me be clear: this is not a rejection of Australia. It is a defence of Fiji,” he said.

He described Australia as a “valued friend” but noted that an arrangement “presented in the language of family and cooperation” must still be read line by line.

“We must not accept terms whose deeper consequences become apparent only after Fiji is bound.

“Friendship must never require blindness. Cooperation must never become subordination. And no government has the right to gamble with the sovereignty of future generations.”

Ratu Tevita, who is one of the deputy chairs of Fiji’s Great Council of Chiefs (Bose Levu Vakaturaga), is calling on the Great Council of Chiefs to meet to discuss the issue.

Last Saturday, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was in the middle of a speech when he stopped talking, wiped his eyes with a small towel, and apologised to the crowd.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I just remembered our brothers and sisters in Palestine. They are being slaughtered, they are bombed, they are attacked again and again. And we seem powerless to help them.”

He was speaking at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor in Ponorogo, East Java, one of Indonesia’s oldest Islamic boarding schools, marking its 100th anniversary.

• READ MORE: Indonesian president chants ‘Free Palestine’ at reception
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Later, the Palestinian ambassador gave him a keffiyeh, the scarf that symbolises Palestine. Prabowo cried again, then chanted “Free Palestine” several times, saying a strong Indonesia can help its oppressed “brothers and sisters.”

It was an emotional moment. But Palestinians in Gaza do not need tears from a school celebration in East Java. They need action.

Start with what Prabowo still seems to believe should happen to Palestine: a two-state solution, the old idea that Israel and a Palestinian state can exist side by side in peace, and the official position of most governments for 30 years.

But does anyone who matters still actually want it?

No longer trust a plan
Palestinians do not, not in the form it has taken for decades. After two years of bombing that flattened Gaza and killed tens of thousands of people, most no longer trust a plan that leaves their security and borders in the hands of others.

Israel does not want it either. Israeli leaders have expanded settlements in the West Bank for years, cutting Palestinian land into pieces too small and scattered to ever become a real state.

So, when a leader cries and repeats “two-state solution,” we should ask him plainly: after everything the world has watched in Gaza, do you still believe Israel wants peace?

A United Nations commission of inquiry has documented what it calls genocide there. Tears mean little if the plan behind them is the same formula that failed for 30 years.

If the two-state solution is dead, silence is not the answer. A real solution could mean equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea, in one state. It could mean a Palestinian state with real borders, a real army, and control of its own resources, not the walled-off pieces offered so far.

Prabowo Serukan “Free Palestine” dan Dikalungi Keffiyeh oleh Dubes Palestina

Baca di https://t.co/eb1EK6hS2z pic.twitter.com/SIlYusMkha

— Kompas.com (@kompascom) September 19, 2026

What matters most is who decides. A solution designed for Palestinians in a boardroom, not with them at the table, is not a solution.

That is also the problem with the “Board of Peace,” set up by world leaders to oversee Gaza’s future once the fighting quietens down. A board made mostly of foreign powers, without Palestinians in control of their own land.

This is not liberation
It is not liberation, but another arrangement where outsiders decide the fate of a people who have already had enough decisions made for them. Indonesia has a proud history of standing against colonialism, and supporting this goes against everything it claims to believe.

But the deepest problem is closer to home. While Prabowo cries in public for Palestine, Israeli companies continue quiet business on Indonesian soil. Ormat Technologies, an Israeli-founded energy company, won a geothermal concession in Halmahera, North Maluku, earlier this year, and is now developing it.

If the President is serious, he needs to look at his own country’s companies, mines and energy concessions, and ask: are we still doing business with the people responsible for Gaza?

Indonesia is the largest Muslim majority country in the world, with real economic weight and moral standing on this issue. It does not officially recognise Israel and has long supported Palestine at the UN.

That gives Prabowo something rare among world leaders: the credibility to actually do something, not just say something.

A scarf wiped across wet eyes will be forgotten by next week. A serious investigation into which Indonesian entities still profit from ties with Israel, followed by real consequences, would not be.

Neither would it be forgotten if Prabowo used Indonesia’s voice to push for a real solution, instead of recycling a peace process that has already failed.

Crying is human. Leadership is different. Palestinians have watched enough leaders cry for them while nothing changes.

If Prabowo wants his tears to mean something, he should turn them into policy: investigate the companies his own country still does business with, and back a future for Palestine that Palestinians actually choose.

• Indonesia also has a decolonisation issue since 1969 over its Melanesian provinces in the Papuan region — known as West Papua among Pacific nations.

Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the Indonesia-MENA desk at the Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta and a research affiliate at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He spent more than a decade living and traveling across the Middle East. Republished from Middle East Monitor.

Fifty-four years ago, this very day, martial law was declared across the entire Philippines under then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

On 21 September 1972, Proclamation No. 1081 was signed — marking the beginning of a terrible, dark time in Philippines history.

So today especially, more than any other day, we Filipino people, remember.

• READ MORE: Questions for Marcos Jr 40 years after Philippines ‘People Power’ revolt
• Other martial law reports

This 21 September 2026, we join our fellow Filipinos in the homeland, and across the diaspora, to commemorate the heroes and martyrs, the citizens and allies who fought against the dictatorship and its many, many documented human rights abuses.

We recognise the power of collective memory as a testament to the past. And we say, never again!

Disinformation campaigns grossly distorting the reality of martial law are rife across traditional and social media, incorporated in modern education curricula and taught in classrooms across the Philippines.

Aimed at new generations, these campaigns even go so far as claiming martial law was a “necessary good”. This we categorically reject. Our collective memory and experience are a most powerful antidote to this historical revisionism. We remember. Never Again!

Honouring the martyrs
So, we are most glad for your solidarity here, now. Thank you for being here, as we honour our revolutionary martyrs; the men and women; the students, the workers, the activists, and journalists, the farmers, religious workers, our indigenous, the youth and old alike — ordinary citizens detained, imprisoned, tortured, raped, disappeared, and for what crimes? For speaking truth against a dictatorship.

For demanding what is only right, what is true, and just. For aspiring to a life of dignity and freedom.

We will not dishonour their memory. Never Again!

Never forget, the documented, targeted and sustained human rights abuses under 14 years of martial law in which

• 70,000 people were incarcerated. That’s the entire population of Napier to put it into perspective;
• 35,000 documented tortures; and
• More than 3000 extrajudicial killings, Yet only 11,000 victims have been officially recognised and given reparations by the Philippine government through the tireless advocacy of human rights groups KARAPATAN and SELDA — the group of former political prisoners and their supporters.

Under this regime, six out of 10 Filipino families became entrenched in poverty; wages fell by 30 percent. The cost of commodities tripled. Even our precious natural resources were not spared, as almost half of our Philippines forests were denuded.

External debt skyrocketed to almost $27 billion dollars by the end of 1986, binding the future of the Philippines even more to the chains of Western imperialism and US hegemony.

Women vital in resistance
Of the recognised, documented human rights abuses cases, 15 percent were perpetrated against women. Women played a vital role in the resistance, standing on the frontlines.

• Liliosa Hilao, a student leader and journalist remembered as the first political prisoner to die under torture and detention;
• Eugena Apostol, a publisher and journalist who founded alternative publications critical of the regime;
• Coracion “Waling Waling” Chiva, a veteran guerilla from the Second World War who opened her home and shared her experiences to support young anti-martial law activists;
• Margarita “Maita” Gomes and Nelia Sancho, former beauty queens who turned activists; and
• Maria Lorena Barrios, founder of MAKIBAKA — a rallying cry for solidarity meaning “to struggle” — which helped articulate the plight of all women within the broader framework of national and class oppression.

These women, and many others, were subjected to untold atrocities, not surprisingly to include extreme gender based, sexual violence . Tactics that continue to be employed today by the state to terrorise citizens all around the globe, from Gaza and the West Bank, the United States and Occupied Palestine, to our beloved homeland, the Philippines.

A very recent case in point — the Banjawan sisters, Pauline and Fatima, detained in 2024 and 2025 and subjected to torture and interrogation under incarceration. Pauline is still in prison — she is currently suffering a severe mental health breakdown in a Batangas prison cell. She desperately needs aid.

Free the Banjawan sisters.

Which brings us to the present.

Here we are in 2026, and yet another Marcos — this time the late dictator’s only son — continues his father’s legacy. The plague of political family dynasties “continues to bear diseased, rotten fruit as the same spectres of graft and corruption, of bureaucrat capitalism and Western imperialism flourish under yet another Marcos regime”.

The Philippines may no longer be under martial law, but the violence inflicted on our people is still real, and even more insidious.

For Marcos Jr is selling us out. He is selling our land from under us, without our consent; our precious resources to imperialists intent on warmongering.

Even as the Filipino people continue to be mired in poverty, forced to swim in flood waters or mourn loved ones swept away by the deluge; even as we demand justice for flood control projects that have never come to fruition because the money was stolen — yet again — to fund corrupt politicians and their so called nepo babies’ lavish lifestyles.

As the price of oil at the pump keeps climbing and the cost-of-living crisis bites even harder, all directly attributable to America and its war against Iran. Where is the accountability? Where is justice? Where is the rule of law?

Make no mistake — our precious natural resources are being offered up freely to US imperialists and the “fake state” of Israel via the Pax Silica initiative. The United States will have free reign to plunder our water, our land, our minerals for technologies used in endless war, in the genocides in Gaza, Congo, the Sudan.

Palantir, the surveillance company founded by billionaire super villain Peter Thiel, will have first dibs on materials needed for AI surveillance, which has proven to have been used to target and kill children, women, innocent civilians.

And decimate entire populations.

Pax Silica proponents claim it will bring thousands of jobs and will stimulate the Philippines economy to new heights. In truth? Those promised jobs will be on the lowest end of the production scale; low paid and exploitative.

Land — 1600 hectares of ancestral land which rightfully belongs to the indigenous Aeta people who have tended to it for centuries — will be taken for spoils; poisoned, polluted, and plundered, the indigenous living there forcibly displaced.

Our water — hard enough to get as it is — will be used to cool gigantic data centres, diverted from our communities and our farmers who grow our food and feed us. All to feed the Imperialist War Machine.

This is violence, state sanctioned and abetted. This is our government actively working against its own citizens’ interests

No one is free, until we are all free.

And the Philippines has never been truly free. Our sovereignty and self-determination thwarted by the three hundred years of Spanish colonisation, and the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, to of course, US imperialism that has coloured every aspect of Philippine daily life, without the people’s general consent or approval.

Centuries of colonisation, semi-feudalism and Western imperialism have driven millions of Filipinos — including our women, to leave their families and their children in search of financial security, to take care of your children, your elderly, your wounded and hurt, you, even as they experience discrimination, racism and unjustified hate.

We need your international solidarity, most especially now before Pax Silica is fully entrenched in material reality. Our people, our women, our children — the Collective Future — are at stake. Now is the time to agitate, organise and mobilise. Fascism is playing in our faces.

What will be your response? Will you stand with us? Free all political prisoners.

Melissa Cruz is secretary-general of GABRIELA Auckland, the General Assembly Binding Women for Reforms, Integrity, Equality, Leadership and Action. The movement is named after Gabriela Silang, a Filipino woman general revolutionary who led troops, fought and died for Philippine independence from Spain in the 18th century. This article was edited from her speech at Te Komititanga Square, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand, on 21 September 2026.

There is something grotesque about taking one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history — a technology capable of translating languages, modelling proteins, accelerating scientific discovery, assisting doctors, educating children and placing an astonishing repository of human knowledge at an ordinary person’s fingertips — and harnessing it to the ancient government business of deciding who may be killed.

States hardly needed technological assistance with that.

For as long as states have made war, they have assassinated, disappeared, tortured and executed.

• READ MORE: Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
• The controversial documentary NAZA: 10 reasons to defend this whistleblower war on Gaza film
• Other AI killing in Gaza

They have acted on rotten intelligence, mistaken civilians for enemies, bombed the wrong houses and buried the innocent alongside the intended target.

Humanity has accumulated centuries of law in an attempt to restrain that capacity for violence.

Now we have given it an algorithm.

A +972 Magazine investigation into Israel’s “Lavender” system used in the Gaza genocide describes an AI-assisted process that marked tens of thousands of Palestinians as suspected militants for potential assassination. Six Israeli intelligence sources described enormous target lists, scant human scrutiny and predetermined tolerances for civilian deaths.

Significance of Lavender
The significance of Lavender reaches far beyond one system, one military, or one war.

Artificial intelligence does not hate anyone. It has no territory to conquer, no frightened electorate to appease, no flag to salute and no enemy it wants dead.

It cannot decide that one nationality, ethnicity or political movement is hateful. It cannot lust for revenge.

Humans supply the malice

And AI offers governments a hideous new possibility: not merely to make lethal decisions, but to industrialise them.

A human life can become data, the data a probability, the probability a classification and the classification a target. Somewhere along that progression, the unique, precious universe of a living person — somebody’s child, parent, lover, neighbour — disappears into a machine-generated assessment which can be processed thousands of times faster than any human being could properly investigate the people concerned.

That isn’t intelligence replacing human cruelty — it is human cruelty acquiring computational power.

Recreated in machinery
Alan Turing wondered whether machines could think. John McCarthy gave artificial intelligence its name. Claude Shannon helped establish the mathematics on which our information age was built. Marvin Minsky devoted much of his life to understanding whether intelligence itself could be recreated in machinery.

They helped begin an intellectual adventure of almost preposterous ambition: to understand intelligence sufficiently well that we might reproduce some part of it.

Today Demis Hassabis speaks of developing AI to benefit humanity. Dario Amodei leads Anthropic, founded around the problem of making immensely powerful AI safe.

Sam Altman heads OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity.

Surely this cannot be what benefiting humanity was supposed to mean.

AI may help us understand disease, proteins, climate, mathematics, language and perhaps eventually the nature of intelligence itself. Yet the same extraordinary capacity to detect patterns across quantities of information beyond the reach of a human mind can be turned towards finding patterns in a population and deciding which people resemble the people a state wants dead.

And therein lies another danger.

Human judgement, evidence
When a human intelligence officer says, “I believe this person is a combatant,” we understand that a human being has made a judgment and can demand the evidence behind it.

When a machine assigns a probability, the mathematics can lend the conclusion an entirely undeserved aura of objectivity. But an algorithm cannot cleanse dubious intelligence, discriminatory assumptions or corrupted data merely by processing them at enormous speed.

Nor can it assume responsibility.

The analyst can point to the algorithm. The commander can point to the analyst. The politician can invoke the demands of war. The engineer can say the machine was only an advisory tool.

The machine, magnificently innocent of everything, points nowhere.

That is why human responsibility must remain absolute. I would go so far as to say that any use of AI in warfare should be prohibited.

Artificial intelligence must never become moral laundering for state violence. A computer-generated confidence score does not acquire the moral weight of evidence merely because mathematics produced it.

10,000 suspicions
Processing 10,000 suspicions in the time a human being could properly investigate 10 does not make those suspicions more reliable. It merely makes killing scalable.

Turing did not ask whether machines could think so that governments could think less.

Human beings have finally built machines capable of doing things our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

If one of the achievements of artificial intelligence is that it enables us to kill people faster, we will not have taught machines something new.

We will simply have taught them something terribly old.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

Julian Assange is officially back on X/Twitter, restoring to the world an important voice we were robbed of by the US empire’s years-long campaign to silence the WikiLeaks founder via lifelong imprisonment for forbidden acts of journalism.

Not everyone will remember it but there was a time when this was almost impossible to imagine. It seemed almost certain that this man was going to die in Belmarsh Prison or spend his remaining years in some hellhole in America.

Now whenever my nephew catches me or my husband expressing pessimism about something working out, he tells us “Hey. Assange is free now.” It’s become our family code for “Anything’s possible. Don’t give up hope.”

• LISTEN: Video reading by Tim Foley
• Other Caitlln Johnstone reports

Assange returns                                                 Video: Caitlin Johnstone

We should really try to appreciate this. Never let hope die. A better world is possible. Anything can be.

In other news, it’s good to see the world rejecting Ed Sheeran’s policy of feigned neutrality on the Gaza issue. “I don’t pick sides” is a fallacy when there’s a massive power imbalance and a clear aggressor, especially when your own country is partially responsible for what’s happening.

I’m back. https://t.co/2e58azeJkt

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) September 17, 2026

If your husband is abusing your child and you do nothing, you’re not a neutral party in that scenario, and when your kid grows up you’ll probably be blamed just as much as the father.

A modern military force hammering a giant concentration camp full of colonised people using high-tech weapons of mass murder with the help of your tax dollars is not a “war” that you get to be “neutral” towards. It’s a genocide, and you’re either for it or against it.

There is no comfortable third option where you get to avoid picking a side and also avoid looking like an asshole.

One of the most idiotic talking points you’ll see these days is that it’s bad to criticise Israel without also criticising Hamas. It’s like, what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t criticise a nuclear-armed high-tech military committing war crimes with the backing of my own country and its allies unless I also criticise a tiny group of besieged militants?

You’re telling me I can’t say anything about the abuses of an apartheid state whose supporters are relentlessly assaulting my right to free speech and eroding civil liberties throughout the Western world, unless I in the same breath also criticise a few thousand Palestinian resistance fighters who have done me no wrong? What the hell are you even talking about?

No I’m just going to criticise Israel, thank you very much. I am going to criticise the state whose genocidal atrocities are supported by the power structure under which I live and pay taxes, whose support network is systematically demolishing the rights of me and my countrymen. If you don’t like it, go screw yourself.

If you want to enrage an Israel apologist, tell them you won’t listen to the mountains upon mountains of verbiage they throw at you explaining why it’s actually fine to drop bombs on buildings full of children. pic.twitter.com/61JI50IozZ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 15, 2026

I have a few more thoughts for today:
Firstly, I love it when I see Israel apologists whining about people responding to their screeds with “I ain’t reading all that. Free Palestine.” All hasbarists have is endless mountains of verbiage explaining why it’s fine and normal to drop military explosives on buildings full of children, so it enrages them when someone takes away their only weapon.

They don’t have truth and morality on their side, so all they have is words, words, words, words, words. Take that away from them and they’ve got nothing, and they know it.

Imagine for 1 second that you have it wrong and Jews are telling the truth. That the genocide libel is bs. That Hamas are terrorists. That you are being manipulated to desire the removal of Jews from society.

Do you understand if we’re right, that makes you the millions of…

— Jonah Platt (@JonahPlatt) September 16, 2026

And finally, new rule: if you deny that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, then the onus is on you to provide a convincing explanation for why every human rights group on earth (including the Israeli ones) agrees it’s a genocide.

If you hold that there’s an antisemitic conspiracy between all human rights groups, then the burden of proof is on you to show that conspiracy taking place.

If you hold that there has been an Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate all human rights groups, then you need to provide proof of that conspiracy.

If you hold that there is no conspiracy and it’s just a coincidence that all human rights groups happen to think Israel is committing human rights abuses, then you need to provide a convincing argument why every institution of human rights experts coincidentally came to the same conclusion and are still incorrect.

You can’t just say “I disagree with their findings” or “That one group made an argument I find weak” or “It’s not a genocide because blah blah blah”. You need to address the unanimous consensus, because that’s part of the debate now.

Even flat earthers and climate deniers who claim all the experts are wrong at least try to provide arguments for why there’s a secret conspiracy to amplify faulty conclusions in the scientific community, but deniers of the Gaza genocide somehow seem to think they don’t need to address their dissent with the overwhelming consensus of experts in the relevant field.

You don’t get to do that, guys. That’s not a thing. If you’re claiming the experts are lying about one specific country, then you need to provide a detailed and believable explanation for why that might be.

I’ve yet to encounter a single genocide denier who can do this, online or otherwise. Not one.

PS: Claiming you can’t accuse Israel of genocide until the ICJ rules it a genocide is exactly the same as claiming you can’t say Charlie Kirk was murdered until his killer has been officially convicted of murder.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Thousands took part in today’s Greenpeace-led March for Nature in the heart of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Tāmaki Makaurau.

Critics of the coalition government’s controversial proposed Conservation Amendment Bill say this would allow selling off of conservation land, weaken environmental protections, and put short-term profit ahead of people and endanger the future of the planet.

“If Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” said Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party MP.

“This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Organisers of the rally — partnered by Forest and Bird — in Albert Park followed by a march down Queen Street say 35,000 people took part.

Placards and banners declared “Honour Te Tiriti [of Waitangi],”More hoot, less loot,” “Hands off conservation land”, “You can’t rehabilitate exploited land”, and “I’m $hane . . . bribe me!” in apparent reference to an unpopular minister.

Plenty of Palestinian flags were among the marchers. This rally coincided with the 155th consecutive week of protest over Israel’s genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

• Photographs: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
  
• More images/videos

Greenpeace March for Nature

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“If Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” he said. “This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by, while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Greenpeace was supported at the march by Forest and Bird.

“The message to every political party from the people of New Zealand is clear — if you stand up for nature, we will stand with you, but if you sell off our conservation land, weaken environmental protections or put short-term profit ahead of our future, we will not stand by and let it happen,” said Forest & Bird policy and advocacy group manager Richard Capie.

Greenpeace claimed about 35,000 people attended the protest, although police reported a maximum of 6000, with no incidents resulting.

This story was first published on

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York joined by Democracy Now! cohost Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us by the end of the decade.” That was the warning last week from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that set off an escalating debate over how to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems.

• READ MORE: AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace
• Other AI reports

Coxon spoke to the BBC:

COXON: So it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who were involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction.

And many of the people who are sort of deep in the weeds on actually coding the thing believe that there is like a greater than 10pc chance or even greater – some smaller, but they all have different numbers – for a probability that humans might die.

And they all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei also called for the pace of development of artificial intelligence models to slow down. In an essay, he wrote that within six to 12 months a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

He wrote, “The scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.” But President Trump has rejected growing calls for placing regulatory guardrails on the AI industry and has called concerns over AI a “hoax”.

On Monday, Trump called Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer chip maker Nvidia, while Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Los Angeles. Huang put the president on speakerphone.

PRES. TRUMP: The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It’s bigger than the Internet.

And the AI, you know, much more so. And they are just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen.

And that could be political people; it could also be China. And we’re not going to let that happen. It’s a hoax. And [crosstalk]—

JENSEN HUANG [laughs] You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir.

AUDIENCE: [applause]

PRES. TRUMP: No, we’re not going to let it happen. The robots are not going to be taking over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: As the debate over AI intensifies, the award-winning journalists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have a new book out today that is connected to all of this. It is titled End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

It examines how wealthy elites, including tech CEOs, are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability, wars and the climate crisis. They will join us in a minute but first, here is a short excerpt from a video that was released with the book.

ASTRA TAYLOR: End-times fascism is not a monolith. It’s a dangerous and fractious alliance of three main groups.

NARRATOR: Religious end-timers.

ROBERT JEFFRESS: From the very beginning it has been clear that god has a special plan and purpose for the nation of Israel.

NARRATOR: Tech end-timers.

SAM ALTMAN: You know, I think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime there will be great companies created.

NARRATOR: Ethnonationalist end-timers.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: America is fighting with Israel for a common goal – to protect our future, to protect civilisation against these barbarians.

PERSON: That was a good take right there.

PERSON: Seig fucking Heil, let’s fucking go!

PERSON: You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

PERSON: Uh—

PERSON: You’re hesitant.

PERSON: Yeah, well, I—

PERSON: End-times fascists haven’t just given up on liberal democracy. They’ve given up on the possibility of a shared future for all of us.

PERSON: The most powerful people in the world –

PERSON: – are preparing for the end of the world –

PERSON:  – an end they themselves are both accelerating –

PERSON: – and profiting from.

ELON MUSK: [laughs]

PERSON: We have imagined Armageddon so many times it can almost feel inevitable. Except it’s not. So, which side are you on?

PERSON: The side of bunkering down, abandoning Earth and profiting from apocalypse? Or staying loyal to this planet and its people—

PERSON: Who are you aligned with? Who are you protecting?

PERSON: – and making life here better?

‘End Times Fascism’      Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: A short video released in conjunction with the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World written by our guests in studio for the hour.

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, best-selling author of a number of books including Doppelganger and No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein is also an associate professor and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist and documentary filmmaker, the co-founder of the Debt Collective and author of several books including The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart and The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.

Thanks so much for spending the hour with us. Naomi, start off with a title, start off with End Times Fascism, why you chose this.

NAOMI KLEIN: First of all, thank you for having us here, Amy. It’s great to be launching the book on Democracy Now! It just came out this morning, as you said. And I think we have a long tradition of launching books together. We decided to call it End Times Fascism because we are trying to understand what is the same and what is different about our moment of far-right extremism.

We know that far-right parties with lineages to the fascists of the 20th century are rising to power around the world. We just saw a fateful election in a German state, the first time the far right has won an election since the Second World War. We’re seeing very disturbing polls in France, for instance.

And we’re seeing more and more open fascist expressions in the United States from very powerful people in government and in tech.

But we don’t believe that this is simply a rerun. We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop. We believe that we’re in something more like a sequel where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanisation, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis. This is not news to Democracy Now! listeners and viewers that we live in a time of a climate breakdown and collapse.

We have tools like nuclear weapons, that were not known to Hitler and Mussolini, that have the ability to inflict apocalyptic levels of violence that were beyond their reach.

Fascism always emerges during times of systemic crises, and it actually emerges as a way to protect capitalism from systemic change. So if we think about 20th century fascism in Europe after the First World War, there was a rising socialist response to the wreckage of the First World War and then to the Great Depression.

And fascism rises up — we call it “capitalism threat response” or “capitalism with bared teeth” — to make sure all of that popular public anger is pivoted toward the scapegoat. In our time, as we see these global crises — that could lead to systemic change or there can be this what we are calling “end times fascist” response that says, “let it burn,” and now it’s a fight for who’s going to survive the future.

Now it’s about building — as you saw in that film that we were fortunate to work with a great team of filmmakers on — it’s about building the bunkers and the rocket ships and the escape hatches. For religious end-timers, it’s literally about the bunker in the sky; it’s about the idea of the rapture.

But that is almost like a template for these more secular stories that are also a kind of a rapture, but we call it in the book a “wealth rapture”. If you’ve got resources, you can rapture yourself away from the impacts of those threats that we are all in. So that’s why we call it End Times Fascism. It hasn’t won yet.

The reason we wrote the book is because people are fighting back. And we think if we are able to look at this very frightening reality with clear eyes, the more it is exposed to the light, the less popular it is because in fact those people cherish our one and only home and want to stay and want to make it better.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, how is this different, for example, if in the 1950s and 1960s when at the height of the Cold War there were Americans, especially upper-class Americans, building bomb shelters, convinced that there was going to be a nuclear war, and the rest of the population eventually began to organise in an anti-nuclear movement that peaked in the 1980s and that led really to capitalism being forced to restrain itself to some degree in terms of arms control treaties?

Why is this different than back then?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Juan, I guess it’s different because the people we’re calling end-times fascists are systematically dismantling that precise international infrastructure. One of the things that all those three factions all agree on — whether it’s the religious fundamentalists, the tech extremists that we heard from in that video, or the ethnonationalists — they don’t agree on everything but they all agree they want to get rid of the United Nations.

They all believe that that is the sort of antichrist of their story. Sometimes they literally call it the antichrist. And that chapter that you are describing, which we write about in the book, Juan — and I would actually love to bring Astra into the conversation because she went pretty deep into this research on the history of bunkering in the United States and how people shifted the tide, because we actually think that’s a really inspiring story that we need to know better.

Can I bring in Astra, my incredible co-author?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sure.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Thank you so much. Again, thanks for having us. Yeah, it is — very quickly, in the 1950s, the government policy was to encourage people to build their own bomb shelters in their backyard, and that was the response to the nuclear threat. Only around 1 percent, 2 percent of households did that, in part because people revolted at the idea of protecting themselves and letting their neighbors perish.

And there was a massive debate in magazines like TIME magazine, LIFE magazine that was around the idea of “gunning thy neighbor”. People said, “We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to be hiding in a hole in the ground with guns pointing outwards and turning the people we care about away.”

That is part of the genesis of the movement for nuclear disarmament. It was ordinary people who put the right solution on the table, which is let’s get rid of nuclear bombs; let’s not turn on each other and bunker down. There’s a lesson in that for today.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s so interesting because what they understood at the time is like either you bunker — either you just protect you and yours — or you get at the root cause of the crisis and you say, “Actually, we can’t live with these weapons.” Right? It’s just—”It’s too dangerous.”

As you both know, the nuclear disarmament movement had tremendous successes. In many ways, we argue in the book that it was a victim of its own success because many people in the disarmament movement believed that they had won so many victories that now the people in charge were just going to finish the job, because so many thousands of nuclear warheads were successfully disarmed that it seemed like there was a new era.

The majority of the stockpiles were disarmed but not enough, and now there is a rearming and AI is being embedded in the nuclear arsenal. Which is why at the end of the book we call for a triple disarmament movement.

In fact, Juan, we have something that you might be interested in — a new coinage in the book — which is “the Stephen Miller test”. Basically the argument that we’re making is that eventually, the most powerful tools, the most powerful weapons, will meet the worst people in the world, and if you don’t want those tools to find themselves in the hands of Stephen Miller, then the tools should not exist.

That applies to nuclear weapons. It applies to AI. It applies to the wealth concentration itself, which we believe should be now understood as a WMD. That this level of wealth that has accumulated at the top of our economy has itself become a weapon of mass destruction.

And so we need to be disarming the wealth bombs, the tech bombs, and of course, the bomb-bombs. Because we are now seeing that these very dangerous, completely immoral people who seem to have such a casual attitude — and we see this from Donald Trump’s most recent post, just a kind of shrug in the face of apocalypse — they will find — they exert a magnetic pull towards one another.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to follow-up and ask either one of you if you want to answer this, because I did read the book in the last couple of days and really found it to be tremendously well written. At the same time, though, there were some concerns I had. For instance, there is very little mention of the rise of a multipolar world, of how the rise of East Asia, especially, the shift of the world’s industrial working class to China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, along with Brazil and Mexico — in the view of many, that is the single biggest impediment to US economic dominance, of the capitalist markets’ expansion.

And that’s also the biggest threat that many of these end-timers, as you label them, are concerned about. They are concerned about China, yet China and its impact on US hegemony and capitalism is not mentioned at all in the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think that the threat of China is really, really central to the unimpeded AI rollout. It’s really the only argument they have. We do write about that in the book, but you’re right, it’s not the central focus of the book. We are more focused on the United States and the way in particular this is being pushed through Latin America, because we think there — and Europe.

But the threat of the multipolar world I do think is central, because the only argument that Donald Trump really has in the face of the threats that are now being articulated from inside the house, from inside the companies, is “But China, but China; if we don’t build it, they will.”

It’s completely untrue that deregulated AI has to be built the way it’s being built or else China will build it. China is much more open to regulating these technologies, to rules within the multilateral system. It’s the US that has been blowing up these agreements.

And when the Doomsday Clock was reset this year, it was a really — I mean, it’s always pretty harrowing, but this year it was particularly so; they moved it forward four seconds — and described not just the threats, whether it was biological weapons, nuclear weapons, AI, but the way the US government under Donald Trump was going after all of the international agreements that governments like China had been a party to, and just saying, “We don’t need them.”

So I think it’s the tools and the dismantling of any attempt to constrain those tools.

ASTRA TAYLOR: It’s also about the narrative that the people in power are telling themselves. We’re tracking how there’s a certain embrace of apocalyptic narrative, of Armageddon, of the end times, that doesn’t — every government in the world doesn’t have that narrative, right? It’s something that’s very powerful in certain branches of the United States political class, in Israel, in parts of Latin America.

We’re not saying that it applies to every country around the entire world, and so that’s one reason that that isn’t — there are some very powerful international players that aren’t central to the thesis.

AMY GOODMAN: Astra and Naomi, you write about Peter Thiel, saying, “Today a staggering number of his former colleagues and acolytes occupy powerful positions in every part of the Trump Administration. The most consequential of them is JD Vance.” If you can explain, who is Peter Thiel? What does it mean to have his inner circle populating the inner circle of the United States?

And talk about all of these figures that are so much in the news now, that were standing behind President Trump during his inauguration, people who were opposed to him before, who took him off their platforms. We are talking about people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg and others.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yes. Peter Thiel is a powerful billionaire and venture capitalist who has been in Silicon Valley for a long time. He is part of the PayPal mafia so he founded PayPal with David Sacks, who was Trump’s former AI and crypto czar. And also Elon Musk, of course, who is now the president of SpaceX; everybody will know him.

Peter Thiel is quite interesting because he has been on the far right very proudly for a long time since he was an undergraduate at Stanford when he and David Sacks actually wrote a book against political correctness. And he has been on the vanguard of being very much against democracy, very — quasi-libertarian but now just explicitly authoritarian — and has written things like “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.”

He was one of the first figures in Silicon Valley to come out for Trump in 2015.

And as we write in the book and, as you said, many of his protégés are now in positions of power and the most influential one is JD Vance. JD Vance has written about how his life changed when he saw Peter Thiel give a lecture. This lecture inspired Vance to go to Silicon Valley to become a venture capitalist — not a very illustrious one — and that’s where he met critical figures who would fund his political rise, including Thiel who gave what was a record-breaking donation of $15 million and kind of launched and made possible Vance’s bid to become a senator of Ohio.

And it was Peter Thiel who also brokered the meeting at Mar-a-Lago where Vance was able to apologise for calling Donald Trump “Hitler”. So Vance is of course one of those figures who used to be opposed —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that? That Vance said —

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, Vance was once — he was once for green energy. He was against Donald Trump who he said misleads people and offers empty promises like building a wall which won’t actually improve people’s lives. But he’s also quite an opportunist, and Peter Thiel brokered peace among those two, and now we know Vance as the VP.

J.D. Vance is also critical in our book because he is who helped bring together the AI industry and Donald Trump. We remember from Donald Trump’s first term that he was against Big Tech. He was railing against Big Tech all the time. Thanks to JD Vance who hosted a dinner at David Sacks’ house, Trump got on the AI train. It was a fundraiser but it was also a pitch session.

Vance’s Silicon Valley brethren told Donald Trump that AI would be good for the economy but it would be very good for the fossil fuel sector. And now we see that the Trump administration is all in on AI and not much else.

So when we look at the famous image of the second Trump inauguration and we see all those tech execs given their front seats and they’re lined up, our position is that it was the promise of generative AI eating the economy that actually turned them fascist and caused this incredible alliance with the Trump regime that we’re seeing.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, that alliance has served them incredibly well. It has produced the first trillionaire. It has produced companies that are claiming valuations roughly equivalent to the entire US economy. And what they wanted from Donald Trump was exactly what they got: a frontier.

You hear this phrase used all the time now — ”frontier AI” — but if you think about what a frontier is, a frontier is a Wild West. It has no rules. And what they were upset about under the last administration was that there were some, you know, not radical, very simple rules like you have to label deepfakes, guardrails against precisely the scenarios that they are now talking about in terms of integration with weapons systems, and the prospect of a rogue AI.

So all of this was on the table years ago. There were discussions at the United Nations.

It’s interesting that they’re always using China as the bogeyman of why they have to roll out AI without rules. China has many more rules regulating AI than the United States has,
including rules around not allowing children to have these like personal relationships with AI where there’s confusion about whether or not you are talking to a friend or a robot or a therapist or whatever it is.

First of all, that’s a lie, and that’s just the fact that people are not educated about what China is doing that is allowing people to fall for this line of, like, “Oh, no, if we don’t do it, China will.” They just simply don’t know how China is regulating this.

But one of the things I’ve been thinking about is — and we have to be aware of how active this push was for the frontier, because now of course these CEOs are all coming forward and saying “Please regulate us, we’ll regulate ourselves, we know we need to be regulated,” as if they weren’t the ones who not only demanded this Wild West frontier but bankrolled it and created the strategic alliance with Donald Trump so that he would deliver it to them.

And now they’re realising, “OK, maybe we’ve gone too far and have to look more credible.” And Donald Trump is going, “No way.”

Why is he saying, “No way”? Because he has tanked the entire US economy and the only thing he has going for him is the AI stock bubble, and he’s terrified of this bubble bursting all over him before the midterm elections or before the next presidential.

He also is very invested in it personally. He’s richer than he has ever been because of the rampant corruption of this administration, the money he has made from crypto but also many different ways that he and his family are invested in AI.

So that’s why he’s doing these frantic things like calling Jensen Huang on stage to say, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to do anything.”

But if you’ll allow me, I was really struck because there’s this myth that — these sort of parables of the technology slipping out of the hands of the men who built it, right? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein. Creating a monster right?

That’s the myth that they’re all telling. “Oh no, we’ve created this powerful monster. It’s out of our hands and now it’s going to destroy us.” I would argue that that myth really is coming true but the monster is not AI; it’s Donald Trump.

They created Donald Trump, he is their monster, he’s out of control and he just won’t stop. And they’re like, “Wait a minute, maybe it is going too fast.”

[MUSIC BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. We are spending the hour with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. I want to go back to the video that was released in conjunction with the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: On a mountaintop in the dead of winter, a group of faithful men gathered an audience to share their vision. They had seen a gleaming city bathed in golden light.

The city would be filled with buildings so beautiful they would seem to float above the earth as if descended from heaven. Their vision already had a name.

PERSON: New Gaza.

JARED KUSHNER: So, we’ll see if these things work. They never usually work.

NAOMI KLEIN: The mountaintop in question was the resort town of Davos. The faithful men presenting their vision were US real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, this is a very exciting day. See, I’m a real estate person at heart and it’s all about location. Look at this beautiful piece of property.

PERSON: Let’s just plan for catastrophic success.

NAOMI KLEIN: Out of the horrors of a live-streamed genocide, an exclusive paradise was about to emerge fully formed.

PERSON: We’ve already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition.

AMY GOODMAN: Part of the video that was released with the book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. It is by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. I want to talk about Gaza right now. We are coming off — in Venice right now you have two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, who just came out with a film called NAZA and now members of the Israeli government are threatening to take away their citizenship, and it was based on the commentary of high-level Israeli officials, unnamed, talking about the killing in Gaza deliberately. Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and the use of AI to do so. I actually haven’t seen the film. I’m definitely looking to see it. But it underlines what we already know thanks to Palestinian journalists at huge personal cost in the documenting of a livestream genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Over 250 of them killed in this last two years.

NAOMI KLEIN: And as we say in the film, this is the story that the Trump administration is telling, is that out of apocalypse there will be this paradise. There will be what they are calling “New Gaza”. We begin the book with it because it is such an extreme distillation of the story.

And I believe it’s the most dangerous story ever told. It’s a biblical story. It’s deeply encoded in our culture whether we’re religious or not. And the story is first comes the flood, first comes the apocalypse, first comes the mass death — and out of the mass death, the great cleansing, the fury of god, comes the golden city, the paradise, for the chosen few.

That story, which — it’s the story of the flood and the ark; it’s told in its most violent form in the book of Revelation — for people who believe in it literally, it has confused the difference between bad and good. It has kind of flipped the switch, where when we see the things in our world that should be warning us, telling us we need to act, we are in a time of crisis, it is an emergency — whether it’s climate disasters, whether it’s covid, that things are breaking down — that what is seen instead are signs.

“Oh, no, what it means is that we’re entering the end times.” And while that may be bad for many people, it’s actually very good for the chosen few.

That’s why we started with this myth of New Gza . . . there is no paradise that is coming out of the apocalypse in Gaza but that is the story that the Trump administration is telling. It’s a privatized paradise that they’re proposing to build. They are using this kind of biblical narrative but of course it’s all for profit because it’s the Trump administration. They want to build luxury condominiums over a mass grave. And you saw there that it’s a literal story.

We do think that the Board of Peace is significant in the sort of evolution of the privatisation of the state, the fact that the Trump Administration is not just attacking the United Nations and defunding the United Nations but trying to replace the United Nations with something called the Board of Peace, which Trump would be head of for life, that they would control — they would give themselves immunity.

This is part of what we mean by bunkering, by escaping. It’s like they see the state as a mine site. They see the United States as a place that they can extract from. Not just extract wealth and resources — and we’re watching them do that — but also extract other things that matter to them, like legal immunity. Right? I mean, the Board of Peace gives them that.

So that’s why we start with that. And it brings together these different parts of the coalition. Because there are religious extremists, both Christian Zionists and messianic Jews, who really do believe that Gaza, Iran — mean that the Messiah is coming. Like the more violent, the better.

And you’ve covered on the show officers in the US military lodging complaints that their officers are telling them that they should welcome apocalyptic levels of violence in Iran because it means that Jesus is returning.

But it’s not just the religious extremists. It’s also the secular versions of the story. We don’t think Trump believes in the biblical version of this story, but we do believe he believes in a kind of a wealth rapture. And when you see those AI-generated images of new Gaza and Trump sharing them, you can see how these stories have distorted his brain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the little time we have left, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the resistance movements, the people’s movements against this growing fascism, and also perhaps deal with some of the critiques of let’s say of Marxists like John Bellamy Foster, who basically insists that the fascist movement in the United States, the mass base of it is really the middle class, those people driven out by the Walmarts and the Targets from small businesses, and franchisees and others who have been driven down by the growth of these top-end monopoly capitalists and who have now turned to a fascist movement for their salvation.

ASTRA TAYLOR: To answer the second part first, fascism is always a movement of the injured powerful. It is a movement that creates vertical solidarity between political and corporate elites and people who are not the worst off but feel that they’ve lost status and directs their sense of insecurity downwards further towards vulnerable scapegoats — towards immigrants, towards trans kids, towards feminists — instead of upwards at the oligarchs and the politicians.

So that’s how we understand Elon Musk buying X or what was Twitter, right, is that it was a way for him to control a media ecosystem and help direct that rage downwards at the left and at the vulnerable instead of letting it be harnessed towards people like him.

So I think that that’s right, if fascism creates what we call a vertical solidarity to protect capitalism, to protect the status quo. That’s certainly true of fascism in the past and it’s certainly true today.

What we have to do to build the resistance is create that horizontal solidarity, to not scapegoat the vulnerable, to build our own coalition and find our own unusual bedfellows. I think you see that in the resistance to fascism that’s growing in the United States and around the world.

One thing — Naomi said this — the people we’re tracking — end-times fascism is not a coherent ideology necessarily. It’s not a monolith. It’s a fractious alliance of these three groups: the religious end timers, the tech accelerationists, the ethnonationalists.

But what they have in common is this sense that things are going to be increasingly unstable. We say that they’re both building their arks and they’re causing the floods. They’re accelerating collapse. They’ve decided to just bring it on and abandon this shared world in their various fantasies about bunker nation or ascending to heaven or the digital class.

So the resistance fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth, to commit to this place. We describe them at one point in the book as traitors to creation. And we don’t use that word “traitors” lightly. We are saying they’re not traitors to the flag or the nation but actually to life on Earth, to our shared humanity, our shared planet.

And I think we see that commitment to what we call “hereness” in the book in the movement against data centers that is sweeping the nation, in the resistance to ICE where people are saying, “No, I’m going to defend my community, defend my neighbors” and people standing up and fighting for labour rights, which fascists are always attacking.

Fighting for the environment, fighting against detention centers.

And so we see the resistance growing all over the world, but I think that the data center revolt is the main one for us because it really draws new lines and shows people — is bringing people together who a year ago or a couple of years ago might have been fighting over culture war issues.

Now they’re saying, “Well, actually, we have a lot in common because there’s a class of people who actually want to replace us with robots. Maybe we should be on the side of humanity against the machines.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Including those small business people, Juan, who you were referring to. This is why it really is an opportunity to form those new alliances. Because Donald Trump has betrayed many of the people who did vote for him the first time. The trouble, of course, is that many powerful Democrats are also taking money from the large tech companies and so are not willing to harvest what has been called by a comedian in I believe it was Madison — ”the most bipartisan issue since beer” is the opposition to these tech companies.

But in order to gain political advantage from that huge bipartisan issue, you have to be willing to go against your donors or not take their money in the first place.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, the business model of these AI fascists, if they were to be able to prevail, throw millions of people out of work, how will they make their money? Because obviously Henry Ford, back in the days of the early monopoly capitalism, believed you had to give workers a living wage so they could consume the products that you produced.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I’m not sure it’s all that thought through. I think that they think they’re mainly going to be selling products to other businesses in the short term. But this is why, Juan, it is a bubble, and it is a process of extraction, and the bubble is rigged to explode all over working people and their pensions right now.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think they also think that they’ll make a lot of money hooking up with the government and the military. There is a quote from Alex Karp — who is a colleague of Peter Thiel, CEO of Palantir — and he said — we quote him in the book saying, “If these tech companies think they’re going to take everybody’s jobs and then not work with the military, they are” — I’m going to change what he said and say — ”they are foolish.”

What he’s saying is essentially if you’re planning to build a technology that causes a job apocalypse, you are also going to have to align with the state and help build the mechanisms to police and control and contain the masses of dispossessed human beings.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end with the end of your book: “We didn’t choose to be born into a fight quite so fateful but we have reached a choice point. We can either follow end-times fascists into oblivion or we can commit to building the unruly, boundary-crossing movement they so deeply fear, one that wrests away their weapons, holds them accountable for their crimes, and defends the paradise of here.”

Those are the words of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book out this week, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

The original content of this programme and article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Fiji’s Tourism Minister Viliame Gavoka says people travelling to the island for tourism purposes, such as from Australia and New Zealand, know that HIV is a “global phenomenon”.

Gavoka, who is a Deputy Prime Minister, was responding to questions from local reporters about concerns from tourists who are worried about their travel plans to Fiji after the country declared a national HIV emergency this week.

Tourism is Fiji’s main driver of the economy, contributing around 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The sector directly and indirectly supports more than 150,000 jobs, with nearly one in every three Fijians relying on tourism for their livelihoods.

• READ MORE: Fiji declares HIV emergency as 1 in 60 Fijian adults live with HIV
• Other Fiji HIV reports

The Fiji Health Minister confirmed on Tuesday that one in every 60 adults in Fiji is living with HIV, rising nearly threefold in five years to around one percent of the population.

The government’s response includes expanding free rapid testing and providing clean needles to drug users, a measure aimed at reducing transmission linked to intravenous drug use.

‘300pc increase since 2010’
A New Zealand health researcher has described the situation as “a once in a generation health crisis”.

University of Canterbury’s Dr Jalal Mohammed told RNZ Morning Report that one in 60 adults, or 1.6 percent of Fiji’s population between the ages of 15 and 49, have been diagnosed.

“That’s only those who have been diagnosed. So there is a segment of the population out there that remains undiagnosed and this is a significant issue.

“We’ve seen a 3000 percent increase since 2010 in the number of diagnoses.”

Dr Mohammed said there were several factors contributing to the issue, but pointed out a “significant underinvestment” in the health sector as one of the main drivers.

Gavoka said HIV was not unique to Fiji and travellers to the country needed confidence that Fiji knew what it was doing to tackle the issue.

“And that is more important than anything else,” he told Fiji One News.

“We are not sweeping [the HIV crisis] under the carpet. We are very open about it, and travellers today appreciate that.”

The New Zealand government website SafeTravel has warned people travelling to Fiji to avoid activities that could increase their risk of infection.

Calls for resource prioritisation
However, the Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) told RNZ Pacific that public statements alone were not sufficient and that resources needed to be prioritised for the HIV response.

FCOSS chief executive Vani Catanasiga said Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka appeared to have his mind elsewhere, particularly with Fiji’s constitutional debate ahead of the 2027 election.

“I’m calling for prioritisation of resources [for] HIV because our leaders are currently juggling various issues at the national level, but health is something that really I don’t see the same prominence given to it,” she said.

Catanasiga said FCOSS was directing its available resources, including volunteers, into community awareness activities.

“We should expect the impacts and we have to brace for that. But I think, as Fijians, we’ve been through similar things in the past, and we have survived it.”

Meanwhile, the Methodist Church in Fiji said the HIV epidemic and drug abuse crisis in the country went beyond medical and social concerns.

Reverend Lote Raboila Umari said the response required a whole-of-community approach, and government, churches, families and communities must work together.

Earlier this year, the church began a three-year campaign against drugs and HIV/AIDS, mobilising its 59 divisions to participate in rotating shifts of week-long prayer and fasting.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand (PFNZ) has appealed to the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi (NZCTU) to follow the lead of the UK trade union movement and take meaningful action in support of Palestinian rights.

The call follows a key decision by the UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), representing more than 5.3 million workers, which has unanimously backed a motion supporting the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The motion calls for action to oppose what it describes as the “catastrophic destruction” of Gaza and Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

• READ MORE: UK trade unions back motion to boycott and sanction Israel
• Other BDS sanctions reports
• The BDS movement

It includes calls for an end to military cooperation and arms deals with Israel, wide-ranging sanctions, divestment from companies complicit in violations of international law, and support for trade union-led workplace action.

The Palestine Forum said in a statement it was time for the New Zealand trade union movement to now have the same conversation.

“New Zealand workers and trade unions have a long history of standing up for justice, human rights and workers’ rights internationally,” said Maher Nazzal, founder and spokesperson of the forum.

“The UK trade union movement has taken a clear position that solidarity with Palestinian workers cannot stop at statements. It is calling for collective action against complicity.

Consider ‘meaningful action’
“We are asking NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi to consider what meaningful action New Zealand’s trade union movement can take.

“This is not about asking one organisation to speak for everyone. It is about opening a serious conversation within the New Zealand labour movement about what solidarity with Palestinian workers and the Palestinian people should look like in practice.”

The PFNZ is calling on NZCTU to:

• publicly consider and support Palestinian-led BDS initiatives;
• review trade union investments, procurement and relationships to identify links with companies involved in or benefiting from violations of Palestinian rights;
• support measures to end military and economic complicity with violations of international law;
• strengthen solidarity with Palestinian trade unions and workers;
• support workplace and union-led initiatives for Palestinian rights; and
• raise these issues with the New Zealand government, including the need for stronger action concerning the occupation, settlements and settler violence.

International partners
New Zealand has already joined international partners in sanctions targeting individuals and entities involved in financing and enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Forum said in the statement that the question was now whether New Zealand’s civil society and trade union movements were prepared to build on that position.

“Workers’ solidarity has always crossed borders,” Nazzal said.

“Palestinian workers and trade unionists are part of the global labour movement. When workers elsewhere face injustice, trade unions have historically understood that solidarity means more than words.

“We encourage NZCTU to engage with its affiliated unions, Palestinian representatives and civil society organisations and consider following the example now being set by the UK trade union movement.

“The UK has shown that trade unions can act collectively. We are asking New Zealand’s trade union movement to consider doing the same.”

The New Zealand government has so far declined to join the United Kingdom and announce sanctions on goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The UK is one of 12 countries, including France and Canada, which have announced similar trade restrictions or an intention to do so. The goal is to rescue an eventual two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

The sanctions are in response to what UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband described as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians […] perpetrated by settler terrorists”, with the Israeli military “complicit” in those actions.

• READ MORE: Pioneer of Palestine protest in NZ warns against the IDF ‘obscenity’ becoming normalised
• Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine
• Other Israeli illegal settlements in Palestine reports

While condemning the increase in illegal settlements, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand “has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues”.

To do so would be complex and require a full policy process. We are not in a position to do that ahead of the election.

The official response to the UK initiative can be questioned on several grounds.

First, New Zealand has used trade measures in the past to address foreign policy issues, most notably against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Imports of gold, oil and gas are prohibited and there is a 35 percent tariff on all imported Russian goods.

Second, while New Zealand needs to adopt special legislation to impose sanctions outside the United Nations regime, the Russian Sanctions Act — passed in 2022 just three weeks after the invasion of Ukraine — shows it can be done swiftly.

The precise nature of the sanctions may be complex to implement, as the UK has acknowledged. But the intent comes first.

Third, the proximity of a general election should not prevent New Zealand complying with its obligations under international law — especially when the opposition Labour Party has indicated it strongly supports adopting sanctions.

Israeli settler colonialism, explained in 15 seconds https://t.co/WFNekm8uhK pic.twitter.com/j0xgONzYyy

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) September 15, 2026

Saving a two-state solution
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, dates from 1967 and was characterised as a “flagrant violation of international law” by the UN Security Council in 2016.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel’s actions amount to an illegal annexation of territory and are contrary to the prohibition on the use of force and the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Despite this, Israel has built around 160 settlements housing 700,000 people since 1967. In the past 18 months, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has estimated more than 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers (with 20 Israelis killed by Palestinians in the same period), and more than 6000 Palestinians displaced.

In August 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a plan to construct 3000 settlement homes east of occupied East Jerusalem, known as the E1 settlement plan. This would split the West Bank and isolate East Jerusalem, which Palestine regards as its capital.

This is intentional. Smotrich has asserted the E1 settlement plan “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”. In August this year, Israel opened tenders for the construction of 1200 settlement homes, prompting the UK sanctions response.

These UK sanctions go further than the limited restrictions on arms exports to Israel introduced in 2024 (extended in 2026), targeted sanctions on individual settlers and Israeli ministers, and even the UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state in 2025.

While trade more generally between Israel and the UK is unaffected, Israel has reacted furiously, closing the British consulate in Jerusalem (which operates as the de facto British Embassy in Palestine) and banning 12 British MPs from entering the country.

Israel in Panic: The Truth About UK Sanctions Revealed! @Lowkey0nline pic.twitter.com/61NhAACTh0

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) September 14, 2026

Support for a rules-based order
All states have an obligation under customary international law to cooperate to bring an end to serious breaches of certain fundamental rules, including the prohibition on the use of force, illegal occupation of territory, and the right of self-determination.

The International Court of Justice explicitly highlighted this obligation in its 2024 Advisory Opinion which stipulated that states must not recognise Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They must also “abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” concerning the territories.

For New Zealand, joining trade (and other) sanctions adopted (or slated to be adopted) by 12 other countries would be an appropriate way to comply with this obligation.

Not doing so further risks undermining the international rules-based order on which New Zealand relies to protect its interests in trade, security and the environment — at a time when that order is under extraordinary strain.

New Zealand is already an outlier, given its refusal to join the 157 countries — including Australia and a majority of European countries — that have recognised Palestine as a state.

To join the UK and other nations sanctioning goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in no way denies the existence of Israel itself as a state.

But by adopting comparable sanctions, New Zealand would strengthen the global response to Israel’s illegal activities, demonstrate regional leadership, and reassert support for the international rules-based order more generally.

Karen Scott is a professor of international law at the University of Canterbury and has produced more than 70 edited books/journal articles and book chapters in the fields of international environmental law, law of the sea and Polar law. She was president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

ANALYSIS: By Ralph Nader

In his rambling and incoherent remarks for nearly two hours over two nights before a knee-jerk crowd in Dallas last week, Trump provided ample evidence that he is a dangerously unstable, delusional, egomaniacal, and megalomaniacal personality.

He pushed for this unusual midterm GOP convention to shore up his dwindling faithful followers and get out the votes in what is likely to be a losing midterm election for Republicans in the House and maybe the Senate on November 3, 2026.

That is, if Trump fails to steal the election, as a 22 single-spaced-page account published by the Washington Spectator documented in alarming detail (see Dancing in the Dark, Part 4 by Mark Medish and Joel McCleary).

• READ MORE:  US Supreme Court rejects Trump mail ballot restrictions ahead of midterms
• ‘War on terror’: How 9/11 changed the language of conflict
• Other Palestine, Gaza reports

CNN reported that Trump brazenly urged his followers “to ‘cheat like hell’ to help Republicans keep control of Congress… and asked supporters to treat November’s elections as if he were on the ballot”.

Trump certainly lied like hell as he repeated again and again his standard lies about the Trump economy and the United States’ standing in the world.

He lied about the number of illegal aliens entering the US and the crimes they have committed during the Democratic administration.

He lied about “bringing food prices and almost every other item rapidly coming down,” … “no tax on Social Security,” “the US is producing more oil and gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined,” “sixty-five billion barrels [of oil] in Venezuela are ours,” “raking in trillions of dollars in tariffs” “making [America] richer than we ever thought,” “we now pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” labeled the Democrats “communists” when he extorted companies to give the federal government part ownership as he courts and praises two communist dictators — Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

Unfunded fake promises
Then there are the legally questionable and unfunded fake promises to give every adult $5000 if the GOP wins Congress in November.

He boasts of having the greatest military in the world as he approves the firing of seasoned, experienced generals and admirals who might question the sanity of his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who calls himself “a warrior of God in the service of Jesus Christ,” while running out of ammunition in the service of Israel’s mass murdering genocide of Gaza’s civilian children, mothers, and fathers.

Trump lied about named Democratic politicians and wildly praised Ken Paxton as the greatest state attorney-general in history. Paxton is a crook, having been impeached by his own party in the state House, but was acquitted by the Senate.

Conviction on any article required a two-thirds vote — 21 of the 30 eligible senators. Paxton escaped conviction by seven votes.

Trump viciously exaggerated Joe Biden’s physical mobility and mental condition and falsely claimed the Biden administration wrecked America in all ways. This is the same polite Joe Biden who transferred power in the White House on January 20, 2025, greeting Trump with “Welcome Home”.

Because Biden backed the same genocidal Netanyahu, Trump avoids accurately accusing Biden of aiding and abetting genocide. Tyrant Trump has continued providing powerful weapons and unconditional political backing.

Trump’s practice is to mix lavish praise for loyalists by name while assailing opponents with scurrilous libels, including two Senate Democratic candidates, Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Abdul El-Sayed (typically mocking his last name) of Michigan.

Zig zag displays on Newsmax
On frantic zig zag displays at his podium, faithfully played on Newsmax — the very biased and often slanderous channel built for Trumpism — were vivid demonstrations of his megalomania and egomania.

Trump told the crowd on September 9, 2026, that “everybody loves me, and I love everybody.” The following evening, he asked supporters to raise their right hands and recite a pledge to “the greatest president in the history of the United States” — a reference to himself.

Perhaps these are his greatest lies, as he wrecks the lives of the poor, federal civil servants, firefighters, scientists, the sick and injured who needed insurance and benefits, and key protective and nurturing programmes for children in both Red and Blue states and overseas in Africa and Asia.

For some reason needing psychiatric explanation, he hates and undermines wind power and solar energy, while embracing oil and gas, “clean, beautiful coal” to worsen global omnicidal warming.

With his polls plunging and his postings on his misnamed “Truth Social” further bolstering the assessment of his worsening mental stability by 30 credentialed mental health professionals — both Democrats and Republicans (see April 30, 2026 of Congressional Record), Trump is running out of words like “lunatics,” “fanatics,” and “maniacs” to tarnish his critics with descriptions that apply to his own zany, lying, corrupt, violent, treacherous, law-violating, vengeful, obsessive, reality-faking daily impeachable behaviors.

His endless self-naming mania went viral with his planting American flags on a map covering Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Iceland, Cuba and Jamaica.

The man, with his finger on the nuclear trigger, who calls violent climate intensities “a hoax” and scoffs at scientists’ warning of coming pandemics, is openly and proudly out of control.

It is time to fire Duplicitous Doubling-down Donald.

Ponder why the Democratic Party is befuddled without a coherent way of responding to “crazy Donald” or a coherent, authentic pledge to the American people about what they intend to do for and with them should they regain control of Congress and the Presidency.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (2012). His new book is, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All (2020, co-authored with Mark Green). Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

Two months out from New Zealand’s general election, and we have yet to see new policy from any of the seven main political parties on media and communication.

Only the Greens have a media policy on their website — and it is effectively a repeat of the 2023 policy that was heavy on high-minded rhetoric but very light on functional detail. No party has yet presented voters with practical initiatives that take account of the significant shifts in the media industry since the last election.

Admittedly, this is not the sort of policy that will sway voters, but manifestos are more than vote-grabbers. They represent commitments by each party to use their best endeavours during the coming Parliamentary term to give effect to what they say they will do in the interests of the public good.

• READ MORE: Other Gavin Ellis articles on media

Unless there is a sudden avalanche of media policy promises, the signal the parties are sending is that, in this area of public policy, they plan to do very little.

I do not believe our politicians are unaware of the precarious state of journalism in this country. They have been lobbied by every media organisation and left in no doubt that the cuts that have kept newsrooms in operation are not sustainable in even the medium term.

The have been warned we will see the loss of significant news publications and news broadcasts within the term of the next government unless there is a reset. The playing field needs to be levelled to overcome the pernicious effects of uncontrolled foreign digital players in our media market.

Those effects are not only financial. They include significant civic, social and cultural consequences. We have already suffered damage caused by years of political inaction and ineffectiveness, but believe me, worse will come unless significant change is forthcoming.

Comfortable with less scrutiny
One of my worries is that, irrespective of high-minded utterances about the importance of journalism to democracy, most politicians are comfortable with less scrutiny of their activities by journalists than with an enhanced ability to speak truth to power.

Too many politicians, and the functionaries who spread their messages, mistakenly believe that their responsibility to keeping the public informed is met by speaking directly to constituents through social media and email lists, and that news media are no longer needed.

They are mistaken because scrutiny is the missing element in that interpretation of their social contract. Scrutiny includes ferreting out those matters of public interest that politicians would prefer you do not see or hear.

There is also a prevailing view that commercial news media are creatures of the marketplace and should, like any other business, stand or fall on the basis of their ability to sell goods or services.

Under the model prevailing when they were created, that is a valid viewpoint. However, that model is broken and has been dysfunctional long enough for some parts of it to become almost irretrievable.

Some will say that is the nature of the marketplace — ever changing and requiring nimble business practices to keep pace. It is only to be expected that some businesses will fail because they do not (or cannot) adapt.

Again, that is a valid viewpoint. But it is one that does not recognise two things. The first is the civic and social roles that news media play in a society that requires diverse and independent sources of information to properly function. The second is the inequity of a marketplace in which foreign players can plunder content with impunity and avoid the taxes and regulations that burden domestic media.

Untouchable foreign players
Beyond the marketplace are the social harms that are undeniably caused by those apparently untouchable foreign players and the as-yet-unquantifiable effects of their use of artificial intelligence.

The present government’s introduction (not passage) of legislation to introduce an Australian model under-16 ban on social media appears to be a calculated pre-election move, rather than an earnest attempt to deal with the problem (see below).

That Bill may look as if we are catching up with other countries on media policy, but the reality is that we have been left far behind. Inaction and widespread political indifference could see an incoming government face a firestorm of compounding consequences.

There are eight areas that all political parties need to address. I would like to think they could reach consensus on most of them.

The first is to create an enforceable environment that will allow all news organisations to negotiate financial compensation from foreign digital platforms for the use of content. That use would include search and social media plus large language models and other artificial intelligence assets.

The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill that has lain dormant in Parliament throughout the term of the present government should be resurrected, updated to bring its provisions in line with those of Australia, and extended to account for developments in artificial intelligence.

The second is to enforce the provisions of the OECD profit shifting framework to impose a tax on revenue that is currently moved offshore in the form of service payments. The resulting impost, which would be in addition to the money negotiated by news organisations, should be used to finance non-profit local and iwi news initiatives.

Sustaining local newsrooms
The third is the adoption of policies to help sustain local newsrooms. Two initiatives should be considered. Firstly, the State of California’s Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act which will provide refundable tax credits to local newsrooms for each journalist they employ.

Such measures could be used to help sustain local and iwi news outlets. The Californian legislation, which passed the Senate and Assembly by overwhelming majorities and is awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature, extends eligibility to print, broadcast, digital, nonprofit, and independent family-owned news outlets. It is regarded as a blueprint for other states to follow.

Secondly, there is a British initiative that allows local authority rates relief on local news premises. The virtue of policies such as these is that they are effectively revenue neutral. Without the help, the newsrooms would not exist.

The fourth policy relates to public media. The amalgamation of Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand should be resurrected in light of TVNZ’s increasingly problematic advertising revenue base and the need to affect cost savings in both organisations.

The funding system for both organisations, together with Whakaata Māori and Iwi Radio, should be reviewed and consideration given to triennial funding.

The fifth policy should be a comprehensive review of the future of terrestrial broadcasting and the consequences of moves to digital-only delivery. Its deliberations should include possible disenfranchising of the elderly and poor; the impact on Māori broadcasting; the impact on TVNZ news services that could arise in a move to video streaming on demand; and the consequential uses of radio spectrum.

The sixth policy should be an urgent review of the harmful effects of social media that would include, but not be limited to, the effects on those under the age of 16. The proposed ban is based on that currently enacted in Australia, which has been been ineffective. Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, last month issued the results of a study that found that more than eight in 10 Australian under-16s are continuing to use social media despite the ban.

Platform operators as publishers
The review should consider deeming social media platform operators to be publishers (on the basis that their algorithms and AI tools manipulate content and determine audiences) and liable for infringements of law and regulation.

The seventh policy initiative should be a comprehensive review of media regulation and the development of an independent framework for complaint and adjudication. The review should embrace not only local media but also foreign-controlled digital platforms with New Zealand user bases over a certain size. Pending the adoption of findings from the review, existing regulatory bodies (state and industry-led) should remain in place.

Finally, any policies relating to artificial intelligence should make specific reference to news media, the integrity of news content, and intellectual property rights. It should include measures to limit the spread of disinformation, the verification and validation of legitimate news content produced by journalists, and the identification of AI-generated content.

Our political parties — and the public — need to understand the consequences of failing to deal effectively with what will become increasingly existential issues for journalism. Perhaps their starting point should be a general enquiry into the viability of New Zealand journalism and our media infrastructure, even if it tells them what some of us already know.

At least two people were shot and several arrested in the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville on Sunday after unknown people set fire to equipment belonging to an Indian company poised to reopen one of the world’s largest untapped copper and gold reserves.

The arson attack targeted a mining camp belonging to Lloyds Metals and Energy Ltd, an Indian company that was controversially chosen by Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama to reopen the long-shuttered Panguna mine, which is estimated to hold $160 billion in precious metals.

The attack, which sparked a shootout and retaliation, came three weeks after an OCCRP investigation raised questions about Toroama’s decision to choose Lloyds.

• READ MORE: Mining company’s equipment targeted in Panguna arson attack
• Bougainville president condemns ‘terroristic acts of violence’ at Panguna mine
• Other Panguna mine reports

The investigation revealed that Toroama had signed a memorandum of understanding with Lloyds shortly after accepting an offer from its managing director for the president’s wife to travel to India and have a life-saving kidney operation at no cost.

It also quoted an expert and some locals warning that anger over the Indian company’s involvement could erupt into violence.

Bougainville is a semi-autonomous region of Papua New Guinea (PNG) that is seeking to become the world’s newest sovereign nation. Its roughly 300,000 residents voted overwhelmingly for independence in 2019, but the results were only tabled last month in PNG’s Parliament, which must ratify the measure.

Toroama, a former combatant in the decade-long civil war that led to Panguna’s closure, was re-elected last year on a promise to reopen the mine. It is Bougainville’s only economic engine capable of funding independence.

While some traditional landowners support Toroama and his plan to partner with Lloyds, others are opposed.

Armed group arrived
The incident began at around 4 am on Sunday, when an armed group arrived at a Lloyds camp near the entrance to Panguna, threatened unarmed security guards and proceeded to burn machinery and equipment, according to Samson Kaissy, chairman of the Panguna Landowners Interim Council and a supporter of Toroama.

Kaissy said the group was made up of unauthorised gold panners angry over being displaced by the mine’s reopening.

He said armed police arrived about two hours later and engaged in a shootout with the attackers, at least one of whom was shot before escaping into the bush.

It was not immediately clear if anyone was killed. Two officials — one national and another local — who spoke on condition of anonymity told OCCRP that two people had died in the shootout, though that could not be verified.

Seven people were arrested, they said, a figure confirmed by Kaissy.

Robert Lobona, one of the dozens of small-scale miners who have long worked in the shuttered mine pit, said that ex-combatants aligned with Lloyds and Toroama had responded to the incident by destroying his sluicing equipment.

“We don’t have anything now,” he said by telephone. “They poured fuel over all the equipment and houses and the generators and burnt them all.”

Burnt tents, makeshift houses
Kaissy said Lloyds security guards responded to the arson attack by going into the mine pit and burning the tents and makeshift houses belonging to unauthorized gold panners who had already fled the area.

Rose Tamou, a Panguna resident and traditional landowner, told OCCRP that her husband Tony was assaulted and taken from their home today on Monday by ex-combatants aligned with Lloyds and Toroama.

“They just came and hit him for nothing and took him away,” she said. “We don’t know where [he is]. I am looking for a car now to go to the Lloyds base and look for him.”

Neither Lloyds nor Toroama responded to requests for comment. Toroama previously told OCCRP that Lloyds had hired ex-combatants from the civil war to provide security at Panguna.

Toroama struck a defiant tone after the incident.

“The government and people of Bougainville will not be intimidated by individuals or factions seeking to undermine our efforts to redevelop the Panguna Mine,” he said in a statement.

Republished from the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

An estimated 72,500 passengers were counted on trains across the Auckland Transport network by 5pm today — 25,000 more than last Monday.

Auckland’s City Rail Link — New Zealand’s first underground metro — has had its first full weekday in operation on Monday.

Auckland Transport chief executive Stacey van der Putten said passenger numbers stayed strong all day, following the morning’s busy peak period.

• READ MORE:  CRL took a century to open – what else is Auckland still waiting on?
• Other City Rail Link reports

“This shows Aucklanders are getting out there and exploring the new routes that CRL offers, and it’s a fantastic new way for people to visit parts of the city they may not have had easy access to in the past,” she said.

“Our ambassador staff have been supporting customers at Karanga-a-Hape and Maungawhau stations throughout the day to transfer from the East-West to the South-City or Onehunga-West lines,” van der Putten said.

“These transfers will become second nature to Aucklanders in the weeks to come.”

More than 100 customer service staff and ambassadors were at stations helping with travel and transfer information, and more than 100 security staff were also present, she said.

Busiest Sunday on record
AT said the opening day on September 13 was the busiest Sunday on the rail network on record.

On Beresford Square outside the new Karanga-a-Hape Station, some were having a coffee at the nearest cafe, and others took a moment to stop and join a Waiata group singing Purea Nei and celebrating Te wiki o Te Reo Maori.

Bo Meng from the nearby bakery PieFee said in the past they didn’t open on Sundays, but they opened yesterday to coincide with the CRL opening to the public.

He said Monday was also busier than usual.

“I’ve seen heaps of people walking around, and new faces, so yea pretty good,” said Meng.

His colleague added that they’re considering opening on future Sundays as they expect to get more customers coming through.

Charlotte Ryan from the Karangahape Road Business Association said she had seen lots of new faces over the past few days, particularly on Sunday.

Many people returned
“I think I expected lots of our friends or lots of the K’rd community to come out, and they were, but it was actually majority people that I don’t think have been here in 10 or 15 years or even longer.

“People were commenting where they thought old buildings were, it was really really interesting to see that people had returned.”

Ryan said she was optimistic about the future, but added that some businesses were still waiting to see how many customers they would get before they made decisions around staffing.

“Do you bring on those extra staff, how quickly are people going to start using this as a thoroughfare, you know it’s like a social experiment,” she said.

Karanga-a-Hape Station is an interchange station, with a bus connection to Westgate, and a transit point for people hopping from the West-East line to the South City line.

Ryan said she expected people might be open to having a wander around Karangahape Road, or getting a drink in between transits.

Meanwhile, the mid-city Te Waihorotiu station was touted to become New Zealand’s busiest train station, but Shobhana Ranchhodji from Roma Blooms — which is mere metres from the Victoria St West entrance – said she had barely noticed any change in the amount of foot traffic.

“Nothing’s changed, no more people than what it was last Monday … I say give us a month, it is what it is,” she said.

Commuters cut down on travel times
Key features of the new network include the Eastern and Western lines merging into one, as well as faster trains.

On the 5.27am East West train from Swanson, Craig said he is glad he no longer needs to wait for 5-10 minutes at the Newmarket Station as he did in the past.

He estimates that he can save about 15-20 minutes on his journey into town.

Johnny Waititi used to take the train to Britomart from Ōtāhuhu, then bus to Symonds Street to the kura where he works as deputy principal.

He said he was now able to take the train directly to Karanga-a-Hape station then walk to work — saving about 20 minutes on each trip.

Waititi said overall, it was a good experience this morning, but he said the service he had originally planned to take did get cancelled – although he said he was able to quickly find out in advance through the Auckland Transport app.

Waititi said he was worried for older people who don’t have the app and will not be able to get timely updates on cancellations.

One train fault
Auckland Transport told Morning Report there was one train fault this morning which had caused a few cancellations.

Another worker who was travelling on the East-West line, trying to get to Auckland City Hospital, said she was disappointed her train got cancelled and she had to take a bus to get to Grafton.

A family living on Vincent Street in the CBD, whose two children go to school in New Lynn, are stoked to be saving time on their daily school runs.

The family does not own a car, and mum of two Arrenda Maryzona used to spend four hours on the bus each day, with each return trip to the school taking two hours.

Now, she said it’s just a three minute walk to the Karanga-a-Hape station, and she is saving about 15 minutes on each trip — adding up to an hour saved.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori has begun with an election promise from the Green Party to invest an additional $200 million in the language over four years.

Of that, $30 million annually would go towards te reo Māori education and professional development for teachers, while $20 million would be shared between Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori and Te Mātāwai.

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said sustained investment was needed for te reo Māori to flourish in homes, schools and communities.

• READ MORE: Other te reo Māori reports

“Te reo Māori is a taonga. The Green Party will proudly fund te reo Māori initiatives to thrive for generations to come,” she said.

“Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori is a time to celebrate our reo, acknowledge the generations of people who got our reo to where it is now, and advocate for the future of our reo.”

The Greens said the teacher-training funding would be used to develop programmes with schools and communities, following the end of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori.

That programme provided free te reo Māori learning to the education workforce and received $108 million between 2021 and 2024 as part of a wider $120 million package of language initiatives. Its funding was redirected by the coalition government in 2024.

16,000 participants
An independent evaluation found Te Ahu o te Reo Māori improved participants’ language capability, confidence and use of te reo in education settings. More than 16,000 people participated in the programme.

The government has since launched Te Ataarangi, a digital te reo Māori professional-development programme intended to reach 50,000 teachers. Education Minister Erica Stanford said in February that the programme would provide practical, self-paced language support from Term 2 this year.

Davidson accused the government of failing to adequately fund community language revitalisation and waging a “culture war” against the use of te reo Māori.

“Our reo must be treasured, and the Green Party will make sure that it is,” she said.

Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka dismissed the Greens’ announcement as “an election promise to spend more money”.

“Our government’s focus is on achieving results, more people speaking te reo Māori, more often and in more places,” he said.

Potaka said Te Taura Whiri, Te Mātāwai, Te Puni Kōkiri and Manatū Taonga were funded to undertake their existing roles and work programmes, but the government had no additional funding to announce.

Government ‘strategic reset’
He also confirmed the refreshed Maihi Karauna, the Crown’s Māori language revitalisation strategy, was a “strategic reset” rather than a new Budget initiative.

Potaka said the strategy retained the Crown’s long-term reo Māori goals to 2040 and would be followed by a coordinated action plan intended to make better use of existing investment.

He rejected Davidson’s allegation that the government had waged a “culture war” against te reo Māori, pointing to its investment in Māori media and kapa haka.

“We can have a legitimate debate about how public money is best invested without questioning anyone’s commitment to te reo Māori,” Potaka said.

“What matters is whether that investment produces lasting growth in the number of people learning, speaking and using the language.”

Education Minister Erica Stanford has also been asked for comment.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News

A pioneer of Palestine protest in Aotearoa New Zealand today warned against the IDF slaughter “obscenity” becoming accepted as normal in the world.

“It’s a particular obscenity watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Lebanon and for the world to get used to it — as our government does … voices, platitudes, and no action,” said Janfrie Wakim of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

“Today we also want to remember those Palestinians who died in Shabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut — a massacre that occurred in September 1982.

“How many people remember?”

• READ MORE: Labour would prioritise recognition of Palestine, sanctions on Israel
• Bruce King’s record of today’s Palestine events
• Other Palestine reports

Wakim, along with her late husband David, organised monthly Palestinian banners protests in Customs Street for 25 years and was coordinator and spokesperson for the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) and backing “freedom flotilla” missions before PSNA was formally set up.

A former chair of PSNA, she has also long supported the global BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement in opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories.

Speaking in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square and acknowledging the protests against settler-colonialism at Takaparawha-Bastion Point in 1982 — “whose chief stands with us behind us” — Wakim gave a rundown on the Shabra and Shatila massacres that killed between 1300 and 3500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shias the same year.

Three months earlier, Israel had launched a massive invasion of Lebanon “spearheaded by the notorious defence minister Ariel Sharon who wanted to destroy the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] based there at the time”.

‘Laid siege in Beirut’
“They laid siege to the part of Beirut where the PLO was headquartered near the Shabra and Shatila camps where Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba [‘the Catastrophe’] lived.

In early September 1982, a ceasefire deal had been negotiated by US President Ronald Reagan’s administration between the Lebanese Phalangist militia and the PLO, which then evacuated from Lebanon to Tunisia.

The PLO had been given written reassurance from the US that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians they were leaving behind would be safe, said Wakim.

“Known for their brutality, they murdered mostly women, children and the elderly — many were raped and mutilated.

“Israel did nothing to stop the massacre, in fact it encouraged it until the Phalangists left on September 18.

‘Truly horrifying’
“This was truly horrifying — and there was condemnation and outrage around the world. Here [in New Zealand] included. That was the time when my husband David and I became involved actively with the local PHRC.”

Wakim said that after 18 years occupying southern Lebanon, leaving 18,000 killed, Israel withdrew its military forces in 2000 but attacked again in 2006 and also in 2024.

“Today we remember that hideous event 44 years ago and the victims,” Wakim said.

“The devastating trauma that each family witnessed and has borne in subsequent decades.

“The killing continues [today] with increasing ferocity mass displacement, destruction of homes and infrastructure and war crimes as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross have proven.”

Wakim quoted from an article by the Palestinian writer and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre:

“Though Israeli massacres are meant to bring an end to Palestinian resistance, instead they unwittingly fuel it.

“While Israel continues to act with impunity, Palestinians continue to resist.

“This is not just the lesson of Sabra and Shatila, but also the bigger lesson of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

Lost opportunity for arrest
Wakim also spoke of a “crushing” opportunity lost by New Zealand in 2006 to arrest an alleged Israeli war criminal under universal jurisdiction.

“Former Israeli general and war minister Moshe Ya’alon, who faced charges of war crimes committed in Lebanon, visited New Zealand on a fundraising mission,” she said.

“Acting on a tip-off, in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction, and with help from a variety of legal experts, I successfully sought a private prosecution for his arrest and was delighted when a District Court judge agreed to issue a warrant for his arrest.

“Unfortunately, this reaction turned to dismay when the arrest did not proceed because the Attorney-General at the time, Michael Cullen, intervened. He quashed the warrant and allowed Ya’alon to leave the country.

“It was a crushing disappointment.”

The overall death toll of the Gaza genocide by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) since October 2023 has risen to 73,470, with at least 174,540 wounded, according to the latest available figures.

Since the “ceasefire” last October, at least 1344 people have been killed and 4464 injured while at least 815 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, according to the Health Ministry.

Critical of UK policy
Another speaker at the rally, Barry Lee, a long-time social justice activist since the Vietnam War, condemned the weaknesses of UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s dramatic “blind eye” change in British policy towards Israel last week.

The UK announced what it called “sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements”, noted Lee.

The UK sanctions would ban settlement goods but also act against companies and individuals providing services for settlement expansion.

“Sounds great but we shouldn’t get too excited about this because as Dana Paterson’s letter in yesterday’s Herald stated its ‘too little too late’,” he said.

“But when you look at the fine print you see that this only applies to banning transactions with the so-called ‘illegal settlements’.

“This is a qualification which the Zionists, being highly skilled in devious deception, will most likely circumvent by concealing or manoeuvring so that the area of origin is concealed.”

However, this did not stop Britain from being “one of the greatest arms suppliers’ to Israel.

“And it doesn’t stop UK investment and trade with Israel which helps fuel the Zionist economy.”

Lee did acknowledge a couple of points of the new policy:

• The settlements are illegal under international law, and there has been a rise in violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank by settlers in recent months.
• That “The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists”.

Illegal settlements target
However, Miliband was careful to point out that that “the sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel”.

The Foreign Secretary stated that “Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse, members of it have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians”.

“This is pathetic. The Zionist regime has done more than ‘turn a blind eye’. Israeli soldiers have protected the so called settlers.

“And leading government figures, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, have stated openly that they support the settlements. He has vowed to continue establishing the settlements — illegal under international law.

Lee criticised the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) for recently passed legislation to allow the so called area E1 settlement which will effectively cut the West Bank territory in half and undermine Palestine’s quest for statehood.

“Without this official support the settlements would not happen,” Lee said.
He described the current coalition government as being “completely politically and morally degenerate”.

“Like its Western ‘friends’, it is still waffling about the so-called ‘two-state solution’. There is no two-state solution — the Israelis ruled that out decades ago.

“And it was never a solution. Israel is occupied Palestine. The only solution is a secular one state — where all ethnicities and religions live together in equality.”

Kites for freedom in Gaza
After the downtown rally, a linked Global Sumud Aotearoa Kites for Freedom in Gaza action was staged at Mission Bay Beach.

This annual event honours the 12,000 children who flew kites on the Gaza beach to set a world record for simultaneous kite flying. More children were killed in the first five months of Gaza’s genocide than took part in the record.

On August 25, an official of the US-led so-called “Board of Peace” supervising the “ceasefire” in Gaza said: “All militant activity in Gaza must stop, including the flying of kites.”

Organisers of the Mission Bay event said the Israeli military was trying to deny one of the last fun-making events by “banning” flying kites in the ruins of Gaza.

The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory.

The first two come from a Haaretz article titled “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs”, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza.

Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources:

“A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel.

“Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilise the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.”

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

Haaretz reports that rather than pass these warnings on to Israeli national security officials, Netanyahu chose to sit on information which an unnamed Shin Bet official said could have “changed our entire assessment picture”.

Haaretz also notes that Israel had received similar warnings about a coming Hamas attack from Egyptian intelligence, which had been reported earlier.

These are just two items in the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence indicating that powerful people in Israel knowingly allowed Hamas to inflict as much damage as possible on October 7, 2023, in order to advance the murderous ethnic cleansing objectives we’ve seen rolled out in the years since.

Nothing will make you a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on October 7 2023. https://t.co/J2q26vlDiy pic.twitter.com/Optx60745g

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 8, 2026

Nothing will turn you into a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on October 7. But even without knowing those facts it already strains credulity to believe Israel had no advance knowledge of a complex attack which would require extensive open-air training in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land on our planet.

Especially when you look at all the pre-existing military agendas Israel was able to push forward in the aftermath.

Ha’aretz reports that Hamas, through Qatar, conveyed immediately on Oct. 7 that they were willing to return all the civilian hostages for nothing — their only ask was for a mediator to arrange the exchange and establish a connection to then negotiate the further release of the… pic.twitter.com/DYRze8r9bf

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 9, 2026

Later in that same article, Haaretz quotes a Palestinian politician named Samir Mashharawi describing what Hamas leadership told him during his mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas after October 7:

“He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return,” Mashharawi recounts.

“I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else.”

Mashharawi said Israel rejected the offer. A senior Israeli defence official corroborated this, telling Haaretz:

“The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of October 7.

“Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes.

“But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?”

So all that hasbara about the hostages and the Bibas kids and how Hamas needed to be destroyed because they were refusing to release innocent civilian captives was complete bunk from the very beginning.

Hamas offered to release them with no conditions but the opening of communication lines. Israel refused, because what they wanted was to steal more Palestinian land. It was never about the hostages, and anyone who said it was is a liar.

Lastly, a separate report in Hebrew from Haaretz quotes an Israeli air force reserve major describing how IDF policies and culture ensured the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Here are a few quotes, translated by Israeli-American political analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim:

“1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah, and said, ‘You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground.’
“For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another.”

“2) On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: “The Palestinians didn’t know it existed, and the Air Force wasn’t always updated either.

“From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he’s stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. “And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. ‘He came for an arms deal.’ ‘He touched the ground, maybe he’s planting an explosive.’

“To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof.”

“3) On how all morals were lost in Gaza: ‘The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can’t understand it from the outside. It’s not just fatigue, it’s an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event.’

“Very quickly this whole business of ‘collateral damage’ disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, ‘Yalla, score,’ that’s how they shout at a soldier, ‘Kill him, strike him.'”

Like the other revelations, this report further discredits the lies the public was sold about Israel’s reasons for its atrocities in Gaza.

All those lies about how Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza and only kills civilians because Hamas “hides behind human shields” has been thoroughly discredited by copious amounts of evidence that Israel was going out of its way to kill noncombatants throughout the course of the onslaught.

The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just like it was lied to about every other act of mass military slaughter that the US involves itself in. Please carry these lessons into the future.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

ANALYSIS: By Tess Newton Cain and Stefan Armbruster

By Stephanie Tran

The Labor Government has joined with the Coalition to vote against a Greens amendment which would have stripped deductible gift recipient status from Australian organisations found to be supporting an illegal occupation by funding Israeli settlements and organisations linked to the IDF.

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi introduced the amendment in the Senate this week, arguing that Australian taxpayers should not subsidise organisations whose funds support illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Genocide is a war crime. Ethnic cleansing is a war crime.

“But in this country, you can send money to fund those war crimes, and you’ll receive a tax deduction,” Faruqi told the Senate.

• READ MORE: Other Australian charities and genocide reports

Both Labor and the Coalition opposed the amendment.

Faruqi referenced investigations by Michael West Media which revealed that Australian charities registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) were hosting fundraisers linked to the IDF and Israeli settlements in the West Bank while benefiting from Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status.

“These charities are helping to bankroll the genocide in Gaza by channelling funds to organisations linked to the IDF and to violent illegal settlements off the back of Australian taxpayer money.”

The proposed amendment would have amended the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to provide that an entity would not be entitled to DGR endorsement if it had supported an “illegal occupation”.

Last month, the UK Charity Commission launched an investigation into charities in England and Wales donating funds to illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine.

ACNC rules ‘don’t extend to … international law’
Faruqi said the amendment was necessary because the existing regulatory framework did not adequately address conduct that breached international law.

“By maintaining DGR status for these supposed charities, the government says that this violence is okay. That is what this government is doing. That these murders are okay. That this ethnic cleansing is okay,” she said.

“How can supporting ethnic cleansing, settler occupation, and murdering Palestinians be ensuring the safety of vulnerable individuals overseas? It cannot, and the ACNC has not been able to answer these questions.”

When she previously moved the amendment in March, Labor senator Anthony Chisholm told the Senate that the ACNC’s external conduct standards did not extend to conduct under international law.

Faruqi said that meant charities could continue to fund activities that are unlawful under international law while retaining their tax concessions.

“Labor is more than happy for those who participate in, sustain, and fund the illegal occupation of the West Bank, an occupation that Labor itself has recognised as illegal, yet it gets a tax deduction,” she said.

Labor Senator Tim Ayres said, “charity registration can be revoked by the ACNC where the governance and external conduct standards are not met”.

However, Ayres reiterated the government’s previous position that “the external conduct standards don’t extend to conduct under international law.”

Subsidising illegal occupation
Faruqi challenged Ayres over whether the ACNC was investigating specific organisations identified in the MWM investigations.

She cited the Chai Charitable Foundation, which received more than $19 million in tax-deductible donations in 2025 and had hosted campaigns for organisations that publicly stated they provided direct support to IDF soldiers.

She also referred to reporting by MWM which revealed that the Foundation had hosted fundraising campaigns linked to settlements in Tekoa and Hebron in the West Bank.

Faruqi also cited investigations into United Israel Appeal Australia, which reported $50 million in revenue in 2024, and funded the Lone Immigrant Soldier programme, which provides support to immigrants serving in the IDF. The organisation has also funded settlement-related activities in the West Bank.

“Minister, do you know if the ACNC is investigating these organisations?” Faruqi asked.

Ayres heads off allegations
Ayres responded that “the ACNC is an independent regulator and it’s accountable for the work that it does on an independent basis”.

When Faruqi pressed him on whether he should know whether the organisations were receiving tax deductions and whether the allegations demonstrated that existing safeguards were insufficient, Ayres said he could not respond to questions about individual organisations.

Faruqi challenged the government over the external conduct standard requiring charities operating overseas to take reasonable steps to protect vulnerable people.

Palestinians living under occupation, displacement, and genocide

“are clearly vulnerable people. Australians are deeply distressed that tax-deductible donations may be supporting organisations connected to the very forces and settlements harming them,” she said.

“Minister, why won’t the government listen to those concerns and support this amendment, so that it can be crystal clear that Australian tax concessions cannot be used to subsidise what your own government recognises as an illegal occupation? What is the problem here?”

Ayres said the government’s “approach in relation to the broader question has been very clear”.

“I don’t really understand the relationship that you’re trying to draw between the purposes of this piece of legislation, which is about DGR status and a whole range of things,” he said.

Escalating settler violence
The amendment comes as violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has escalated, with two Palestinian teenagers murdered last week by Israeli troops.

Sixteen-year-old Khalil Abu Alia and 19-year-old Omar al-Nassan were killed in the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir after settlers entered the village under police and military escort.

Abu Alia, who was about to begin year 11, was shot in the neck while standing on the doorstep of his home. Al-Nassan, who had recently graduated from the same school, was also shot and died before reaching hospital.

The two teenagers were among five students from the same school killed in Israeli attacks this year. The other victims included a 17-year-old Palestinian youth footballer and two 14-year-olds.

At the same time, Israeli forces demolished the homes of 12 Palestinian families in Khirbet al-Taban in the South Hebron Hills, leaving all 70 residents homeless, including 28 children, according to Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.

The organisation said the community was the 66th Palestinian community to have been wiped out since October 2023.

“These are whole worlds and lives extinguished in evil, depraved, and violent attacks that have become part of everyday life for Palestinians,” Faruqi said.

Coalition, Nats, Labor, One Nation — same deal
The Coalition also opposed the amendment.

Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie accused Faruqi of conflating support for the IDF with criminal conduct and criticised what she described as

abhorrent anti-Semitic comments.

“Listening to Senator Faruqi, it would seem that supporting the IDF or the families of the IDF is somehow now a crime in Australia,” McKenzie said.

She said the Coalition would not support the amendment and “look forward to voting no as soon as possible”.

Faruqi, meanwhile, argued that the amendment was about preventing Australian tax concessions from supporting activities Australia itself recognises as unlawful.

“The International Court of Justice, in 2024, called on parties, states such as Australia, to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of illegal situations created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories,” she said.

“Labor allows Australian charities to funnel money to support ethnic cleansing, apartheid, violence, and occupation.”

She accused Labor of hypocrisy

over its position on Palestinian statehood and Israeli settlement expansion.

“It is completely disingenuous for the government to say it supports a Palestinian state while effectively subsidising its destruction,” Faruqi said.

“Supporting these heinous crimes deserves a criminal investigation, not a tax deduction.”

“Labor says they mourn the death of Zomi Frankcom, but in the same breath, they hand tax benefits to those who support the murderers.”

Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award. This article is republished from Michael West Media with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/labour-would-prioritise-recognition-of-palestine-sanctions-on-israel/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:27:11 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133311 By Russell Palmer of RNZ

Labour is calling the government’s stance on Israel an “embarrassment” to the country, and says it is failing to meet its responsibilities under the Genocide Convention.

Britain, France and Canada are set to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, with British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband saying Israel is turning a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

However, New Zealand has not followed suit, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters saying New Zealand has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues.

• READ MORE: Peters’ ‘hot air’ over Israeli settlement trade ban rules out of step with world
• Palestine Forum condemns NZ for talk, no ‘meaningful action’ over illegal Israeli settlements
• NZ joins call to end Israeli settlement expansion, but not import ban
• UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said that if Labour was in government, New Zealand would be joining the sanctions against Israel.

He said the government’s position on Gaza had also been “weak for the last three years” and it was failing to fulfill its responsibilities as a signatory to the international protocol against genocide.

“The current government’s position on Israel is an embarrassment to the country,” he said.

“We should be sanctioning Israel along with like-minded countries like the UK, Canada, and France. These are our friends who are now saying that what Israel is doing is wrong and they should be sanctioned for it.”

He said Labour would also be formally recognising Palestine.

“New Zealand’s missing in action when it comes to taking a principled stance on what’s happening in Gaza. There is an unfolding genocide happening.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister said the foreign minister’s statement was the government’s position.

‘There is an inconsistency in what we’re saying’, says academic
Waikato University law professor Alexander Gillespie said the government was wrong not to join the trade sanctions, saying there was an inconsistency in New Zealand’s approach.

“The Europeans have it right. New Zealand’s response is that we don’t like blanket bans, and that with the 38 settlers that we’ve got travel bans on, that that’s a targeted approach,” he said.

He said when it came to Russia and Ukraine, it was justifiable to do so with an International Court of Justice opinion to support it, and New Zealand did use trade to influence foreign policy.

“So there is an inconsistency in what we’re saying right now.”

He said imposing sanctions on Israel would take “a considerable amount of work” but “if they want to do it, they can do it”.

“You’ve just seen that with 12 other countries that have joined together to do it, but where New Zealand’s positioned itself is with Australia where we’ve decided not to do that right now, and there will be political reasons for that.

“Partly it’s got to do with the non-recognition of Palestine, because if you recognise Palestine, you ultimately agree to the self-determination of the Palestinian people, and that would mean you’ve got to do more against illegal annexation than other countries.”

He said New Zealand had good rhetoric around supporting a two-state solution but the measures taken against Israel were “nowhere near as strong as … other countries”.

He pushed back on the suggestion that imposing sanctions could escalate the situation for those in the Palestinian Territories, saying “I don’t think you could escalate the situation much more than where it is now”.

Where it might get complicated was if US President Donald Trump decided to back Israel and introduce further trade tariffs against countries sanctioning the occupied territories.

‘Remember what happened last time’, says ACT
ACT leader David Seymour noted while the government was concerned about settlements that breached international law, New Zealand was “a trading nation — we don’t generally use trade bans to make political points”.

He said the conflict in the Middle East “changes at such a rate of knots I don’t think anyone really knows where it’ll be at next week”.

“We’ve got eight weeks before the next election, but it does remind me that just before the last election, we saw that absolutely barbaric and disgraceful attack by terrorists of innocent people at a music festival, and if we’re going to talk about the run-up to the election, sometimes we should remember what happened last time.”

Govt ‘just find excuses not to do something’, say Greens
The Greens’ Foreign Affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono said the government’s statement was weak, and trade sanctions would be a good step forward.

“What has our government done? Nothing. All it does is follow what the US does, and as Israel’s strongest ally as well, and we don’t hear anything from this government as well.

“There was an opportunity for the government to do something meaningful when other like-minded countries were recognising the state of Palestine, and this government dipped even though the official advice to the Minister for Foreign Affairs was to recognise the state of Palestine — and he didn’t.

“It’s a weak statement. It’s a pattern of behaviour of weak non-action from the government, and it’s disappointing.”

Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick has had a member’s bill in the ballot since December 2024, and has been pleading for support on it from across the aisle — which would see it skip the biscuit tin ballot — for well over a year.

With Labour promising its support, Swarbrick a year ago was punished by Parliament’s Speaker for a week after saying if they could find “six of 68 government MPs with a spine we can stand on the right side of history”.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/peters-hot-air-over-israeli-settlement-trade-ban-rules-out-of-step-with-world/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:52:55 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133300 Asia Pacific Report

A pro-Palestine national advocacy and protest group has accused New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as being “derelict in its duties” if it is unable to identify and ban products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) made this statement today following announcements by the United Kingdom, France and Canada that they would ban imports of products which originated from the settlements. Nine other countries have pledged to follow up.

MFAT is reported to have stated a ban “would be complex and require a full policy process” and so New Zealand could not do this — at least until after the general election on November 7.

• READ MORE: Palestine Forum condemns NZ for talk, no ‘meaningful action’ over illegal Israeli settlements
• NZ joins call to end Israeli settlement expansion, but not import ban
• UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said in the statement Palestinian support groups had been urging the government to identify imports from the occupied Palestinian Territory for more than 20 years, on the basis that settlement goods were falsely labelled as a “Product of Israel”.

“Then in July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that UN members must ‘distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967’, as a means of ending the occupation,” she said.

“That’s plenty of time for MFAT to work out how to deliver a trade ban.”

Tamimi said there was ample precedent for import bans.

“The sanctions New Zealand imposes on Russia include oil, gas, coal and gold. Other Russian imports are prohibitively tariffed.

“There were comprehensive import bans on apartheid South Africa.

“So statements, like those made by ACT Leader David Seymour, that New Zealand is ‘a trading nation — we don’t generally use trade bans to make political points’, is quite untrue.”

Tamimi said MFAT was also falsely claiming that New Zealand was sending a clear signal to Israel that New Zealand condemned settler violence, and the Israeli government must control it, and it must not expand settlements.

“The government has banned a small bunch of rabid settlers from entering New Zealand, along with two ministers,” she said.

“But it also sent a clear message at the same time, in June last year, by stating that that it was just two ministers, and the ban was specifically not ‘designed to sanction the wider Israeli government’.”

“Yes, the message is clear to Israel — the New Zealand criticism is meaningless hot air.”

 

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/new-level-of-bastardry-australia-releases-nzyq-agreement-with-naoero/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:34:05 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133271 By Kaya Selby and Johnny Blades of RNZ Pacific

An Australian senator says the release of terms for a controversial deportation deal between Australia and Naoero (formerly Nauru) raises more questions than it answers.

The Australian government has released an agreement to deport more than 350 refugees and asylum seekers to Naoero, known as the “NZYQ cohort”.

Shrouded in secrecy, the government has been hesitant to release the deal, offering details in bite-sized pieces over the course of last year.

• READ MORE: Other Australian offshore refugee reports

One such revelation came from Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in August 2025, when he said the deal gave Naoero AU$2.5 billion over 30 years.

Green Party Senator David Shoebridge, who has led efforts to hold the government to account for grievances over the NZYQ affair, told RNZ Pacific the release only scratches the surface.

“The government has been far from forthright,” Shoebridge said.

“[It has] resisted and made multiple privilege claims for basic information that we have sought about not just this agreement: there’s another whole memorandum which sets up the financial arrangement … they are continuing to resist producing that document.”

High Court ruling
Australia turned to Naoero and its long-standing offshore processing arrangements with the Pacific country to solve a problem created for it by a High Court ruling in late 2023.

A stateless man who had been in Australia for more than a decade — known anonymously as NZYQ — had sued the Federal government for his treatment in a detention centre where he had been held indefinitely.

The court found that the government had no legal right to detain a stateless person within the country: that was the job of the judicial branch. It resulted in around 150 detained refugees being automatically freed — the “cohort”.

The deal with Naoero thus became a work-around: keep the cohort off Australian streets, without the use of detention.

The Australian Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), which represents deportees traumatised by their experiences in offshore processing, said the deal was not worth the paper it was written on.

“The Nauru deal has been in effect for just over a year, and we have already learned about the involvement of organised crime in propping it up,” HRLC director Sanmati Verma said.

“[Australia’s] willingness to scapegoat migrants shows they have no real solutions to offer.”

The details
As per the agreement, signed in August of last year, Naoero is under obligations that can be sidestepped only with Australia’s consultation. But as the only country contracted to process Australian detainees, Naoero may have some leverage.

Under the terms, Naoero is only able to unilaterally refuse a “proposed person” under exceptional circumstances, accepting them “without any reservation in relation to age, past offences, health conditions or other characteristics”.

If somebody is declined, it has to be due to “a serious and immediate risk to the public health or national security” of the country.

Once there, it is agreed that the person would not be detained, separated from the community, or generally restricted in movement, with the right to leave at any time. They are given work rights and an oligation to “modest” cost of living support.

Once they have received a long-stay visa, which has a 30-year term, they would become a “settled person” with a commitment from Naoero not to send or return them to another country where they would be in danger or at risk of chain refoulement.

But their status as a “settled person” depends on their having that visa, which Naoero could work with Australia to amend.

Shoebridge said if Naoero had a change of heart, this could kneecap the protections as given.

“[Deportees] are just protected as long as Nauru feels it’s in their interest to protect it,” he said.

“As soon as another Nauruan government comes in and decides they want to remove work rights, or they want to take away any obligation to provide basic sustenance, or they want to create a detention camp to put people into … it just has to give the Australian government notice and an opportunity to consult.”

He said the lack of connection that the deportees have with Naoero could make this more likely.

“The idea that we’re deporting people who we’ve found to be refugees to a country to which they have no connection, which has almost no economic capacity to deal with them, and which gives them almost no future to hope for: this is a new level of bastardry from Australia.”

Nothing new
The released document reveals nothing new about the broader arrangements outside of NZYQ

Environment Minister Murray Watt wrote last week that the government had reconsidered withholding the document “due to recent events”, with it being an “action to mitigate the potential harm.”

“The Minister [Burke] is now satisfied that the public interests weigh towards releasing this document,” he wrote in a cover letter, the government having argued the opposite for months.

Officials have been scrutinised by the senators, including Shoebridge, under an inquiry into offshore processing that kicked off earlier in the year.

It canvassed the legacy of the old Manus Island offshore detention facility in Papua New Guinea, and the long-running opaque arrangements with Naoero that continue today.

The inquiry heard testimony from traumatised detainees, who recalled the harassment and constant danger they faced in these offshore processing centres throughout the 2010s.

“It’s disastrous for their physical health, or their mental health, we’ve seen man epidemic of self-harm and tragically some people taking their lives,” Shoebridge said.

“We know what happens because past experience has told us this, and in order to deal with a political problem that the government thinks it has here, they’re willing to do that harm to yet more people.”

Australia also deports individuals to New Zealand under Section 501 of the Australian Migration Act.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders summit in Palau last week that that this, and the NZYQ deportations, had in no way contributed to a transnational organised crime crisis in the region.

“If people who aren’t Australian citizens commit crimes in Australia, we’re entitled to implement Australian law, just as other countries are,” he said.

“The objective here is to do everything we can, working with out partners and neighbours, to reduce crime… including with our friends.”

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]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/palestine-forum-condemns-nz-for-talk-no-meaningful-action-over-illegal-israeli-settlements/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 05:07:34 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133258 Asia Pacific Report

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the New Zealand government to follow France, the UK, Canada and nine other countries to impose restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Twelve countries have now announced measures targeting trade connected to Israeli settlements, signalling growing international concern over the continued expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

However, both Australia and New Zealand failed to join the 12 countries in their ban.

• READ MORE: NZ joins call to end Israeli settlement expansion, but not import ban
• UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

“Where is New Zealand?” asked Maher Nazza, chair of the Palestine Forum, “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have expanded for decades, involving the transfer of Israeli civilians into occupied territory and the development of homes, businesses and infrastructure on land claimed by Palestinians.

“Settlement activity is not simply a political issue. It has significant economic dimensions. Goods produced in settlements enter international markets, while businesses and institutions can become connected to, and benefit from, settlement activity.”

Maher said in a statement New Zealand should not be importing or supporting an economic system that contributed to the entrenchment of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

“If the government is serious about international law, human rights and Palestinian self-determination, it must move from statements to action.”

Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the government to:

• Ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank;
• Prevent New Zealand companies and institutions from supporting or profiting from settlement activity;
• Review government procurement, investment and trade relationships linked to settlements; and
• Join international efforts to impose meaningful economic measures against the settlement enterprise.

Israel furious over new UK sanctions          Video: Novara Media

Nazzal said the question for the New Zealand government was straightforward: “If France, the United Kingdom, Canada and other governments are prepared to take action, why isn’t New Zealand?

“New Zealand should not wait for others to act.”

He said that if 12 countries could take action, New Zealand could too.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters said in a statement the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian Territories were a violation of international law and expanding those settlements undermined prospects for a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict.

“New Zealand strongly condemns violence by settlers against Palestinian civilians and calls for accountability for those responsible.”

The UK has announced sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements and says Palestinians face ‘ethnic cleansing’ in parts of the occupied West Bank. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls it a ‘seismic shift’ after years of UK ‘complicity’, but says it is only the beginning. pic.twitter.com/b4Vh9e2vhx

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 8, 2026

In Australia, independent Senator David Pocock said it was really disappointing Australia had not joined the UK, France, Canada and others in expanding sanctions on the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“The UK PM was clear: this is about the unacceptable actions of the Israeli government, not the Israeli people and about refusing to just stand by and watch the horrors being perpetrated against Palestinians,” he said.

“Australia should show the same courage and stand for international law, Palestinian rights and a secure future for both peoples.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese praised the UK  government for announcing the sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements and saying Palestinians faced “ethnic cleansing” in parts of the occupied West Bank.

She described it as a “seismic shift” after years of UK “complicity”, but added it was only the beginning.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/nz-joins-call-to-end-israeli-settlement-expansion-but-not-import-ban/ Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:07:22 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133244 RNZ News

Foreign Minister Winston Peters says New Zealand joins its international partners calling on Israel to end the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, but has stopped short of joining Britain, France and Canada in banning Israeli imports.

A spokesperson for the minister said New Zealand did not traditionally use trade measures to address foreign policy issues.

Peters issued a standalone statement on the matter, following the news from the UK overnight.

• READ MORE: UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

He said New Zealand was “deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation in the West Bank.”

“There has been a marked escalation in Israel’s actions, jeopardising the prospect of a durable peace.”

Peters said the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories were a violation of international law and expanding those settlements undermined prospects for a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict.

“New Zealand strongly condemns violence by settlers against Palestinian civilians and calls for accountability for those responsible.”

‘End settlements expansion’ call
Peters joined international partners in calling on the government of Israel to “end the expansion of settlements, prevent and address settler violence, and refrain from actions that further undermine the prospects for peace.”

New Zealand is deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation in the West Bank. There has been a marked escalation in Israel’s actions, jeopardising the prospect of a durable peace.

Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are a violation of international…

— Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) September 8, 2026

But he also said New Zealand “strongly opposes actions that advance annexation or threaten the forcible displacement of Palestinians.”

“Such measures are incompatible with international law and risk perpetuating the cycle of violence and insecurity.”

A spokesperson for the minister said the UK-led statement referenced a “future trade ban on settlement goods.”

“New Zealand has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues.

“They are different from sanctions. To do so would be complex and require a full policy process. We are not in a position to do that ahead of the election.”

The spokesperson said New Zealand had consistently raised concerns about settlements and settler violence for years, placing travel bans on 38 Israeli settlers and two Israeli ministers, the most recent of which were announced in June.

“This is a clear signal that this violence is unacceptable.”

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