New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit back after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the UN General Assembly podium to accuse him of supporting Hamas and making Jewish New Yorkers “feel unsafe” — remarks that came after delegates from scores of countries walked out of the chamber to protest against the far-right fugitive’s presence.

Refuting allegations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — where Israeli forces have killed more than 75,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,500 children, since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023 — Netanyahu said: “To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you.”

“Mr Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” the prime minister claimed. “It’s no wonder … You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Pezeshkian speaks from the heart, but with legal, moral and strategic clarity
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

“And that’s exactly what Mr Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.”

Mamdani issued a statement later saying: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide of Palestinians.

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are accused of murder and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, but Israel assassinated them.

Third country arrest
While neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute governing the ICC, the treaty states that people from nonsignatory states who commit alleged crimes in states that are party to the treaty — as Palestine is — can be arrested in third countries and subsequently tried by the court.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Abbas and Netanyahu address the UNGA     Video: Al Jazeera

Mamdani has said that Netanyahu should be arrested and brought before the Hague-based tribunal for trial, but that he lacks the legal authority to apprehend the prime minister in New York.

The International Court of Justice — also located in The Hague, Netherlands — is currently processing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

The case is based on what the ICJ called the “plausibility” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The court has issued a series of provisional orders for Israel to adhere to the Genocide Convention — orders that critics say Israel has simply ignored.

Last year, an independent UN commission of inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a conclusion shared by the International Association of Genocide Scholars and other experts, including many Israeli and diaspora Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others.

As Netanyahu prepared to deliver his UN speech on Thursday, delegates from a reported 77 nations walked out of the chamber in protest.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall — please do so now,” the prime minister said. “Thank you very much.”

While some observers applauded the display of solidarity with Palestinians, others expressed disgust that Netanyahu was allowed to address the world body and that he has not yet been brought to justice.

War criminal Netanyahu has completely isolated Israel at the world stage – When he came today to UN General Assembly podium to speak, there was mass walkout and he was booed. Shamelessly, he called them ‘moral cowards’! pic.twitter.com/w5Oo78SeJv

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) September 24, 2026

UN failure to stop genocidal war
“The head of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime, a fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, was allowed to enter the US and to address the UNGA today, without arrest,” said Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in protest of what he described as the world body’s failure to stop Israel’s genocidal war.

“Netanyahu insulted delegations, openly celebrated the regime’s many crimes, bragged about its terrorist pager attacks on Lebanon, repeated the regime’s debunked genocide propaganda, defended the illegal occupation of Palestine and Syria, lied incessantly, called violent, racist, illegal Zionist settlers ‘peaceful’ and ‘honorable people,’ labeled human rights defenders as ‘antisemites,’ even arrogantly attacked American citizens and officials for speaking out against the regime’s crimes,” he continued.

“This violent psychopath cannot hide behind [US President Donald] Trump’s skirts forever,” Mokhiber added. “He (and his collaborators) must be captured and brought to justice. And the UN must finally act to isolate the regime and hold it accountable. ”

Referring to Netanyahu’s address and Trump’s threat on Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran during his rambling, lie-laden General Assembly speech, University of Colorado Law School associate professor Maryam Jamshidi said on social media, “Between Trump threatening Iran w/annihilation and Netanyahu bragging about Israel’s pager attacks, the UN podium has become a venue for promoting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Meanwhile, people took to the streets of New York to protest Netanyahu’s presence in the city, US complicity in Israeli crimes, and to show solidarity with Palestinians.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside UN headquarters in Turtle Bay for a sit-in demonstration led by Jewish Voice for Peace. Demonstrators blocked roads while chanting slogans including, “Netanyahu you can’t hide, you are wanted for genocide!”

As Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday, more than 100 demonstrators were arrested.

Among those reportedly arrested were progressive congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier; actors Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, and Cynthia Nixon; New York state Assemblymember Emily Gallagher (D-50); Democratic New York City Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés; former Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; and Palestinian American political activist Linda Sarsour.

“I will never, ever be silent,” Sarsour said on Facebook. “I will never just accept the world as it is. I want history to record for future generations of Palestinians that we fought. At every turn. In every way. When it was easy and when it was hard.”

“I want Palestinian girls in Gaza to see me in my hijab and my unapologetic Palestinian blood fighting for them to live FREE,” she added. “This is bigger than all of us. Netanyahu is a war criminal and belongs in The Hague, not the United Nations.”

Netanyahu faces a general election in Israel on October 27.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished from Common Dreams on a Creative Commons licence.

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.

Follow Press TV on Telegram: https://t.co/GHI09iAGh2 pic.twitter.com/eGDt1DDAHA

— 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.”

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.

COMMENTARY: Andrey X Khrzhanovskiy answers some emerging criticisms.

• READ MORE: Gaza documentary ‘NAZA’ Sets US theatrical release through self-distribution model

I watched NAZA. (Unlike 99 percent of people expressing their very strong opinions).

So here are my takes, which will make a lot of you very angry.

1. “Is the film antisemitic blood libel against the IDF?”

No, it is literally a series of confessions by IDF war criminals themselves, so that claim is laughable.

2. “How can Yuval and Rachel betray their country?”

Our loyalty must be to justice and humanity, not to systems of power that privilege us. It is your duty to resist your country if your country is committing genocide.

3. “Is the film good?”

Yes. And the vast majority of you will learn something new about the mechanics of the Gaza genocide, even if you’ve been following it closely. And for the people who haven’t been following — who will watch it now because of the festival award — it may be absolutely eye opening.

Democracy Now! features Yuval’s speech.                   Video: Democracy Now!

4. “Is the film good for the justice movement?”

It’s very good for the Palestine justice movement that a film on the Gaza genocide is getting so much attention. It forces the mainstream to confront Israel’s crimes once again, which is especially important now when the attention is dying down because of the so-called “ceasefire”.

The activist scene is still very focused, but the mainstream attention is decreasing, and NAZA winning festivals around the world will do a great job returning the conversation to what matters.

5. “Why didn’t they release the evidence as articles instead of a film?”

They did, over the course of the past three years Yuval published some of the most valuable investigative journalism on the Gaza genocide in +972 Magazine. The fact that you all didn’t know about it is all the more evidence for why this film was needed to be made.

6. “Is the film beyond reproach?”

Every piece of art, journalism or activism must be subject to criticism. And from the activist standpoint there is only one metric that’s important — its material impact. Not the identity of the artists, not the form, and not even the content. Only the material impact.

7. “The film protects war criminals, instead of delivering them to international courts.”

Providing a anonymity to whistleblowers is an essential part of investigative journalism. I also have sources in the IDF and the settler movement that I keep anonymous. Getting 24 people charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) — and likely never prosecuted — is much less useful than getting their testimonies heard by the entire world.

8. “The film didn’t show anything new, all of this has been reported by Palestinian journalists.”

This is largely true, as stated by Yuval himself. Nonetheless, confessions of the perpetrators are adding to the body of evidence of the Gaza genocide, and confessions always hold more weight than accusations. For many, this may be THE tipping point, unfortunately.

9. “Why not just upload it to the internet instead of going to festivals?”

Social media videos, written articles, feature films and many other formats cannot replace one another. They work for different audiences and achieve different goals.

Festivals bring the film to an audience that wouldn’t watch it on the internet, and provides credibility to a very damning account of the genocide.

10. “Yuval Abraham is too Zionist/too anti-Zionist.”

Yuval’s politics is beside the point. You can disagree with someone and still find their work valuable.

A comprehensive pressure campaign at all levels is very important for the Palestine cause.

Andrey X Khrzhanovskiy is an independent journalist and human rights advocate working in the West Bank. Follow his on-the-ground reports about settler and IOF violence.

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.

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.

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).

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/rsf-slams-outrageous-failure-to-bring-justice-9-years-after-killing-of-maltese-journalist-daphne-caruana-galizia/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:51:35 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133282 Pacific Media Watch

Angered by the lack of full justice nearly a decade after the assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has demanded the government take measures to protect journalists and media freedom.

On 2 September 2026, the Criminal Court in Valletta found Yorgen Fenech, the Maltese businessman linked to both the mafia and politicians, not guilty of “complicity” and “criminal association” in the killing of Galizia.

Almost nine years after the crime — Galizia was killed by a bomb planted in her car — after two months of trial and eight hours of deliberation, the jury at Valletta’s Criminal Court Fenech not guilty of the two charges he was facing: complicity and criminal association in the assassination of the investigative journalist.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Watch reports

Eight out of nine jurors voted not guilty on both accounts; at least six votes were needed to convict him. The trial, which RSF attended, started on July 1.

“We are beyond outraged. The verdict means that almost nine years since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese authorities have failed to identify and convict the mastermind,” said Pavol Szalai, director, of the RSF Prague Bureau, in a statement.

“We stand in solidarity with the journalist’s family, which first suffered from Daphne’s loss and then painfully fought for justice only to learn that the man charged with ordering the assassination has been judged not guilty.

“Full justice must be served and Maltese authorities must implement the long overdue measures protecting journalists and media freedom — the absence of these measures contributed to Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, as concluded by the public inquiry into the crime five years ago.”

Investigation into corruption
The journalist was murdered on 16 October 2017 when her car exploded near her home in the town of Bidnija.

According to court testimony by her son, journalist Matthew Caruana Galizia, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s last days were dedicated to their joint investigation into alleged corruption in the Electrogas project, the construction of a power plant fuelled by natural gas.

Prosecutors accused Yorgen Fenech, one of Electrogas’ key shareholders and a businessman linked to both mafia and politicians, of ordering Daphne Caruana Galizia’s killing based on evidence and testimony by Melvin Theuma, who confessed to being a middleman in the murder.

Five men were convicted after Theuma received a pardon in 2019 in exchange for information about the killing.

In 2022, Malta’s Criminal Court found brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio guilty of installing and detonating the bomb in Daphne Caruana Galizia’s vehicle. The third perpetrator, Vincent Muscat, negotiated a reduced sentence in 2021 in exchange for his testimony, which contributed to the 2025 conviction of Robert Agius and Jamie Vella for supplying the explosives.

The public inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, which featured RSF’s testimony, said in its 2021 report that the state must “shoulder responsibility” for the crime.

The Maltese authorities have, however, systematically failed to enact most of the report’s recommendations.

Malta ranks 67th out of 180 countries and territories in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index, the fifth worst among the 27 European Union member states.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/08/solidarity-group-condemns-surge-in-anti-palestine-violence-in-nz/ Tue, 08 Sep 2026 01:00:36 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133227 Asia Pacific Report

A national pro-Palestine solidarity movement has condemned a spate of “radicalised” tyre slashing vandalism and other violent attacks by Israeli supporters.

The most recent pro-Israel vandalism is in Christchurch and Wellington alongside a violent attack on a supporter in Auckland, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) says in a statement.

In Christchurch, a prominent Palestine supporter had a car tyre slashed in his driveway. In Wellington, another supporter of Palestinian rights had a solidarity sticker scraped off their car and a swastika scrawled on the vehicle, the statement said.

• READ MORE: Eight-year-old Gaza girl killed by Israel on first day of school
• Other PSNA protest reports

Earlier in the year, a New Plymouth couple had their car tyres slashed outside their property and graffiti attacks on five separate occasions. Police could not find the perpetrator.

Other Palestine supporters had their tyres slashed in Raglan. In this case, the details of the offender, a prominent Auckland businessman in the pro-Israel lobby, were provided to police who “refused to prosecute”, the statement said.

At the same time, Israelis, including serving Israeli Defence Force personnel, and former Israelis, have physically attacked people at demonstrations, including outside the Israeli Embassy in Wellington.

PSNA national spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said these violent acts would be “described as terrorism” if they had been carried out against the Israeli lobby in New Zealand.

‘Lead to accident, death’
“A flat tyre can lead to an accident and death or injury. Lives have been put at risk,” she said.

“There is no question who the targets are — it’s the supporters of Palestinian rights protesting against a genocide.”

Tamimi blamed what she called “radicalised Zionists”.

“They are likely to believe in the most extreme demands and threats made from within the Israeli government. They feel they are entitled to assault people who call out Israeli terror.”

Tamimi said she did not know if any of the 50 New Zealanders who had served in the IDF (Israeli military) might be responsible for any of the attacks in New Zealand.

“But we do know that threats are coming more frequently from New Zealand fans of Israel. It seems they are frustrated that Israel is at last being revealed for the genocidal and apartheid state that it is, and they want to take it out on someone.”

Tamimi said PSNA had met senior police earlier this year to express its concerns.

“We also wanted to raise these attacks and threats against us with the Human Rights Commissioner, Stephen Rainbow,” she said.

“But we have just been informed that Dr Rainbow is too busy and other commissioners are not available till late October”

The PSNA statement said there was a “disturbing pattern of official disinterest” in sharp contrast with their energy and action when the pro-Israel lobby is attacked.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/07/maori-and-pacific-soldiers-final-resting-place-in-gaza-dont-forget-their-story/ Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:15:18 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133193 COMMENTARY: By Maher Nazzal of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand

There is a deeply painful connection between Aotearoa New Zealand and the Gaza War Cemetery that deserves to be remembered.

Long before the current destruction of Gaza, New Zealand soldiers fought and died in the Palestine campaign of the First World War. Some never made it home. Their final resting place is Gaza.

Among those buried at the Gaza War Cemetery are Private Kamati and Private Tutavake, two soldiers associated with the New Zealand Māori Pioneer Battalion’s Rarotongan contingent. New Zealand historical reporting has described them as members of the Māori Battalion.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza war graves desecration reports

They are not simply names on a distant memorial.

They were young men from the Pacific who travelled thousands of kilometres from their homes to serve in a war that brought them to Palestine. They became part of the history of Aotearoa, the Pacific and the Middle East — and Gaza became their final resting place.

Today, that cemetery itself has been caught up in another war.

A cemetery caught in the destruction of Gaza
The Gaza War Cemetery contains more than 3000 Commonwealth graves from the First World War, together with graves from the Second World War and other conflicts. The New Zealand War Graves Project records 32 New Zealand casualties at the cemetery, including Kamati and Tutavake.

In February 2026, reports emerged that sections of the cemetery had been bulldozed and damaged.

The New Zealand Herald reported that the destroyed section contained 20 New Zealand and two Rarotongan soldiers. Satellite imagery showed parts of the cemetery’s previously green grounds turned into churned earth.

The damage was serious enough for the New Zealand government to publicly express its concern.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said New Zealand was “deeply concerned” about damage to the Gaza War Cemetery and the nearby Deir el-Balah War Cemetery, describing them as the final resting places of New Zealanders who died in the two world wars.

New Zealand’s ambassador to Israel raised the matter directly with the Israeli government, conveying New Zealand’s expectation that the graves of New Zealand, Pacific and Commonwealth service personnel be treated with the utmost respect.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has committed to restoring the cemeteries when it is safe and practical to do so.

Their story is bigger than a cemetery
There is something profoundly symbolic about this.

These Pacific soldiers left their islands and travelled to a part of the world they had never known. They fought and died in Palestine more than a century ago.

Their graves subsequently became part of Gaza’s landscape.

For generations, the cemetery was cared for by Palestinian caretakers. New Zealanders visiting Gaza on Anzac Day came to remember their countrymen. A 2014 New Zealand Herald account described the cemetery as a place where New Zealanders came to honour the fallen.

And then Gaza became a battlefield again.

The people living around the cemetery today are experiencing a war of their own — while the men buried beneath the ground have, once again, been caught in the violence of a conflict in Palestine.

That is the tragedy of Gaza’s war graves.

Aotearoa should remember them
For New Zealanders, this should not be an abstract international story.

The men buried there were part of our history.

They represented New Zealand and the Pacific at a time when Māori and Pacific soldiers made enormous sacrifices during the First World War.

The story of Kamati and Tutavake also reminds us that the history of New Zealand’s military service is not exclusively a European story. It includes Māori, Cook Islanders and other Pacific peoples whose contribution and sacrifice helped shape the history of Aotearoa.

Their graves in Gaza are physical links between Aotearoa, the Pacific and Palestine.

And that makes their treatment today especially painful.

Whatever one’s position on the present conflict, the principle should be straightforward:

Respect for the war graves
War graves must be respected. The dead should not become casualties of the wars of the living.

More than a century after these soldiers died, their final resting place should be a place of peace.

Kamati and Tutavake deserve to be remembered not only as soldiers who died in Palestine, but as Pacific men whose lives became part of the shared history of Aotearoa, the Pacific and Gaza.

Their names remain.

Their graves remain.

And their story should not be forgotten.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/21/bloodthirsty-psychopath-israels-ben-gvir-touts-viewing-booths-at-gallows-for-palestinians/ Fri, 21 Aug 2026 05:58:25 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132455 COMMENTARY: By Brett Wilkins

Still drawing international censure for his genocidal call to kill dozens of Gazans daily, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has faced fresh condemnation after visiting the construction site of a gallows where Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis are set to be hanged to death, with select Israelis gathering as spectators.

Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, posted a video to social media in which he gloats about the construction of gallows, which is being built in an undisclosed location in central Israel.

“I promised to worsen the conditions of terrorists in prisons — we kept it,” Ben-Gvir says in the video. “I promised to pass the Death Penalty for Terrorists law — we did.

• READ MORE: Israel builds execution chamber for Palestinians convicted of murder
• Other Israeli execution reports

“And now the death row and hanging facility are also starting to take shape.”

The law to which Ben-Gvir referred was passed in March by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and took effect the following month. The legislation changes the rules governing Israeli military courts in the illegally occupied West Bank so that the death penalty effectively applies only to Palestinians who kill Israelis.

Far-right Knesset members, including Ben-Gvir, wore noose-shaped lapel pins to show their support for the legislation.

Ben-Gvir also handed out sweets to Knesset colleagues after the bill passed its first reading.

WATCH: National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announce expansion of newly approved death row facilities, including observation booths.

‘Terrorists deserve only one thing – death by hanging’ pic.twitter.com/MRKJoSVD9q

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) August 18, 2026

Viewing booths
Ben-Gvir said the execution site would include viewing booths where victims’ families could watch executions, describing this as something customary in various countries and specifically citing the United States as an example.

“Terrorists deserve only one thing — death by hanging,” said Ben-Gvir, who in 2007 was convicted by an Israeli court of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, whose leader he has openly honoured.

Abdullah al-Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoner Society, urged “effective international action” in response to Ben-Gvir’s comments. Al-Zaghari told Anadolu news agency that the minister’s visit to the gallows site was part of the “continued determination of the Israeli occupation system” to codify incitement against Palestinians.

Leftist Israeli Knesset lawmaker Ofer Cassif excoriated Ben-Gvir’s actions.

“This criminal thug — a sympathiser of murderers of Palestinians, a supporter of terror, and a pathological racist — is also hopelessly infantile,” Cassif told The New Arab. “Soon we will oust him from the government, and next, throw him behind bars.”

European Parliament Vice-President Pina Picierno accused Ben-Gvir of staging “a horrific spectacle that turns the death penalty into a show”.

The liberal US pro-Israel group J Street asked on X, “Are we supposed to believe, as some in the Jewish establishment would like us to, that Ben-Gvir’s words somehow tell us nothing about the country he helps govern?”

Jewish extremists excluded
“He is Israel’s National Security Minister, and he is now celebrating a facility built to execute Palestinians while Jewish extremists are excluded from the law,” the group added.

“As the old saying goes: When someone tells you who they are, believe them. When a government gives someone this much power, we have to reckon honestly with the agenda they are pushing.”

Ben-Gvir — who is under sanctions and banned from countries including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank — was still being denounced on Wednesday for advocating the daily mass killing of Palestinians, including civilians, in Gaza amid a nearly three-year war that United Nations experts, human rights groups, a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice, and many others call a genocide.

Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said on Wednesday — which was World Humanitarian Day — that Ben-Gvir’s “remarks are appalling, they’re outrageous, they’re dehumanising, they’re dangerous, and we condemn them unequivocally.”

A spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Wednesday in Berlin that Merz “strongly condemns Minister Ben-Gvir’s inhumane statements, which violate international law — they are unacceptable.”

“As the occupying power, Israel must treat Palestinians with dignity, protect their property, and ensure public administration and humanitarian aid,” the spokesperson added.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot called Ben-Gvir’s remarks “unbearable and inhumane,” adding that “further sanctions could be imposed, and all options are on the table.”

In the United States, actor and activist Mark Ruffalo said Thursday on Bluesky that “Ben-Gvir is a bloodthirsty psychopath, war criminal, and one of Israel’s beloved genocidal leaders.”

“America and the world should be sanctioning, divesting, and boycotting Israel in every way until this apartheid regime falls,” he added.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This article was first published by Common Dreams and is republished under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/20/palestinian-theologian-warns-against-trusting-israel-over-hind-medics-killings-probe/ Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:49:24 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132408 Asia Pacific Report

Palestinian Christian theologian Reverend Munther Isaac, the director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, has questioned the Israeli military’s announcement that it will investigate the killing of Hind Rajab and other Palestinians in the Gaza genocide.

After two years of denial, Israel has officially admitted firing on the 5-year-old’s car on on 29 January 2024. But her family and others don’t expect justice.

Reverend Munther asked in a post on X: “Can we, in any seriousness, trust the Israeli military to investigate itself?”

• READ MORE: Who was Hind Rajab and why is Israel investigating her killing?
• Israeli military launches criminal probes into killings of 5-year-old and paramedics
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“And let us not forget: There are thousands of Hinds in Gaza — thousands of children killed, each with a name, a family, a story, and a future stolen from them,” he said.

“Justice must prevail. Justice will prevail.”

Can we, in any seriousness, trust the Israeli military to investigate itself?

And let us not forget: There are thousands of Hinds in Gaza—thousands of children killed, each with a name, a family, a story, and a future stolen from them.

Justice must prevail. Justice will… pic.twitter.com/f2eecJejXJ

— Munther Isaac منذر اسحق (@MuntherIsaac) August 19, 2026

Rajab’s mother, Wissam Hamada, continues to travel to several cities globally to speak out about the unimaginable impact of Israel’s war on children, even though she is unable to watch the critically acclaimed Oscar-nominated docudrama, The Voice of Hind Rajab, about her daughter’s death because hearing Rajab’s voice remains too painful.

More than 20,000 children have been killed by the Israeli military in the war on Gaza with a total death toll of more than 73,000 Palestinians.

In the killing of the paramedics that is also being investigated, Israeli troops fired on an ambulance driving to retrieve casualties from an Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah. They then fired on other emergency vehicles that came looking for the first one, according to phone footage and the sole survivor of the shootings.

Fifteen medics and emergency responders from the Red Crescent and Gaza’s Civil Defence were killed.

Australia summons Israeli envoy over ‘outrage’
Meanwhile, Australia has summoned Israel’s ambassador to express “outrage” over the Israeli military’s decision not to pursue criminal proceedings against those responsible for a 2024 drone attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

The victims included 43-year-old Australian citizen Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom.

The Israeli military announced that an extensive internal review found no “reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct” to justify opening criminal investigations into the April 2024 attack.

Israeli authorities previously cited operational errors, misidentification, and procedural failures for the strike on the clearly marked aid convoy.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Canberra learned of the decision moments before its public release on World Humanitarian Day, calling the timing “especially insulting” to Frankcom’s family, humanitarians globally and all Australians.

“This decision falls far short of the accountability we expect,” Wong said in a statement.

“The Australian government will not stop pressing Israel for justice for Zomi and her colleagues.”

Wong summoned Ambassador Hillel Newman in Canberra, and instructed Australia’s envoy in Tel Aviv to lodge formal objections directly with Israeli officials.

The Australian government reiterated that disciplinary measures alone were insufficient for an alleged mistake of this magnitude and stated it would continue to press Israel for justice, full transparency, and formal criminal accountability.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/19/deranged-behaviour-marco-rubio-slammed-for-us-sanctions-on-icc-president/ Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:12:59 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132353 By Brad Reed of Common Dreams

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has drawn an outraged reaction from critics after he unveiled sanctions against Tomoko Akane, president of the International Criminal Court.

In announcing the sanctions, Rubio described the ICC as “a corrupt and fatally politicised” institution that has allegedly “abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”.

Rubio said the ICC “has repeatedly attempted to assert authority over… the United States and other countries that have not consented to its jurisdiction,” which he said “sets a dangerous precedent for all nations”.

• READ MORE: It won’t be Trump who kills the ICC — it would be the court’s alleged supporters who refuse to take action to defend it
• US sanctions international criminal court president and prosecutor
• Other ICC reports

In addition to sanctioning Akane, Rubio said the US would also be sanctioning ICC senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Saye.

While Rubio did not mention what specific actions the ICC had taken to warrant such sanctions, a report in The Guardian noted that Saye was charged with investigating war crimes allegedly committed by Israel during its years-long assault on Gaza.

The Trump administration had previously sanctioned then-ICC prosecutor Karim Khan — who obtained arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant — and an additional eight ICC officials.

Israeli officials warned local media in May that the ICC may seek five more arrest warrants for ministers and senior military officials involved in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

US protecting Netanyahu
The social media account of Drop Site News accused Rubio of attacking the court solely to protect Netanyahu from war crimes prosecution, pointing out that “there is currently not a single American citizen under indictment, investigation, or facing an arrest warrant” from the ICC.

The sanctions earned the praise of the Israeli American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which accused the ICC of conducting “politically motivated investigations and prosecutions targeting America and Israel”.

Rutgers Law School professor Adil Haque said the ICC sanctions showed the US was acting like a “rogue government” and engaged in “deranged behaviour”.

Michael Karanicolas, law professor at Dalhousie University, did not just point fingers at the US over the sanctions, but at US allies who have sat back as international institutions have come under assault.

When you are shameless, contemptuous of international law and morally bankrupt, you boast of disgrace as though it were an achievement.https://t.co/AHdY7iwyE3

— Elijah J. Magnier (@ejmalrai) August 18, 2026

“I’m no longer surprised by the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy the ICC,” wrote Karanicolas. “What I keep waiting for is any response from Canada or the European governments who ostensibly still believe in international law to defend these institutions.”

War correspondent and international political analyst Elijah Magnier delivered a withering rebuke of Rubio’s announcement.

“When you are shameless, contemptuous of international law, and morally bankrupt,” wrote Magnier, “you boast of disgrace as though it were an achievement”.

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This article is republished under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/18/four-months-on-still-no-charges-in-death-of-man-in-fiji-military-custody/ Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:56:44 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132274 RNZ Pacific reporters

The Fiji Police Force has yet to charge any suspects four months after the alleged murder of the reportedly infamous Jone Vakarisi while he was in military custody.

Vakarisi, 37, who was widely known for being on the wrong side of the law and reportedly linked to criminal networks, died on April 17 after being taken for questioning by soldiers to the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) headquarters in Suva.

His death was initially attributed to pre-existing conditions by the RFMF commander Ro Jone Kalouniwai, who was later forced to issue a “correction” when police classified Vakarisi’s death as murder after a copy of Vakarisi’s death certificate was leaked online, exposing massive blunt force trauma to his head and chest.

• READ MORE: Fiji police confirm murder probe launched into death of man in military custody
• Other Fiji police reports

Vakarisi’s sister Melehola Tagaga told RNZ Pacific Waves at the time that he begged for his life at the military barracks in Suva before allegedly being “bruatlised to death”.

Several weeks later in May, Kalouniwai admitted that the RFMF was “at fault” for Vakarisi’s death, describing it as an “unintentional” and “regrettable” incident.

However, more than 120 days after Vakarisi’s death, an active murder investigation remains open, while no one has been charged or presented in court.

In late July, the Fiji Sun reported that the case file on Vakarisi’s death was expected to be forwarded to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

investigators ‘completing interviews’
“Police Commissioner Rusiate Tudravu confirmed yesterday that investigators were completing interviews with those involved before finalising the file,” the newspaper reported on July 21.

“I can state that people need to trust the process that we are following. Investigation has been done,” Tudravu was quoted as saying.

Earlier this month, the police commissioner told local reporters that investigators continue to carry out house-to-house inquiries, collect witness statements, and examine forensic evidence as the probe intensifies.

He also called for “patience, understanding, and continued public support” for the joint police and military taskforce.

Local and international human rights groups condemned Vakarisi’s death in military custody, saying it reflected a “culture of impunity” within Fiji’s military forces.

Amnesty International’s Pacific researcher Kate Schuetze said the RFMF’s shifting excuses regarding Vakarisi’s death raised “more questions than answers”.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/17/why-cant-israel-be-held-accountable-for-its-genocide-in-gaza-its-the-media/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:00:47 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132238 ANALYSIS: By Robin Andersen

In a Double Down News (DDN) video report, British filmmaker Richard Sanders begins a summary of a “horrific new [United Nations] report” with a listing of three atrocities committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian children.

Sanders tells of an infant who was shot in the head while breastfeeding in his mother’s arms, a 16-year-old boy whose body was mutilated by an Israeli tank, and teenage boys deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers in a game of “target practice”.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry released the report on June 23.

• READ MORE: Western media coverage of Gaza erases Palestinians from the story
• How Netanyahu govt media reforms risk deepening Israeli press bias
• Other Gaza media reports

Titled “The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed,” it was the first to focus on crimes and violations against Palestinian children in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Vijay Prashad at CounterPunch called it an “accusation of extraordinary gravity.” In 100-pages, the investigation documents Israeli security forces’ direct killing, degrading, and inhumane treatment of Palestinian children, including sexual and gender-based violence and torture.

The report also documents the destruction of schools and civilian infrastructure and amounts to a gruesome compendium of how Israel is destroying Palestinian childhood and denying the Palestinian people a future and self-determination.

As the human rights lawyer Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chaired the UN commission and led the press conference that announced its findings, bluntly summarised, “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.” This is genocide.

Trump’s Board of Peace claims contradicted
The UN report flatly contradicted the claims made by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace that conditions in Gaza were improving.

The UN report stated that the amount of available aid is woefully inadequate to meet the needs of hungry, wounded people, living in appalling conditions, who are being squeezed into 30 percent of what was once the Gaza Strip.

The UN report further noted the admission of one Israeli soldier: “It feels like a game. You can sit in some basement of a house, safe, with your helmet off, scratching your balls, half-dressed, and kill Palestinians.”

The new report sits atop an ever-expanding mass of documentation of Israeli war crimes committed since October 7, 2023. This trove consists of journalistic documentation, investigations compiled by the UN and other aid agencies, and by human rights lawyers who have corroborated the testimonies of victims of sexual torture with forensic evidence of their broken bodies.

It includes damning evidence from Israeli soldiers themselves, who have recorded their crimes as they committed them and subsequently posted those recordings online. The combined record of evidence includes visuals of massacres, satellite footage, and audio recordings of specific events such as the January 2024 killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, as documented by Forensic Architecture.

Journalists bear witness, with corroborating evidence, to seeing their colleagues killed by targeted Israeli strikes. Compilations of detailed refutations of falsified Israeli “pseudo-evidence” produced to deny its crimes must also be considered a significant part of this trove. In short, as many have observed, the genocide in Gaza is the most well-documented in history.

The most well-documented but contested genocide in history
And yet, in the face of all the evidence, Israel’s genocide remains the most contested in history. Israel simply denies what it’s doing.

As Ramzy Baroud wrote, Israel’s enemy is not merely its armed adversaries; “it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.”

Israel relentlessly claims that all these agencies are lying to make Israel look bad, and that all criticism of the state of Israel is based on antisemitism.

A look at The New York Times coverage of the UN’s June 23 report illustrates how the media amplify Israeli denials by dutifully replicating them. Amid details of the carefully documented horrors that lie within the report, The New York Times announced that Israel’s UN mission in Geneva dismissed it as a “libelous sham” and condemned the UN commission as a “fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel”.

Another quote from the Israeli Foreign Ministry sandwiched in the article claimed that the UN report “completely erases Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped, and targeted by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas’ cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war.”

The Times let this statement stand without qualification, even though most of it is false.

The UN report does include incidents of Hamas killing Israeli children during and since the October 7 attacks — which it also noted were the focus of two prior reports, made to the Human Rights Council in June 2024 and the General Assembly in October 2024 — though they pale by comparison to Israel’s subsequent atrocities.

Israel has killed 20,000+ children
Hamas killed one infant on October 7, 2023. In the two years since then, Israel has killed more than 20,000 children, including 440 newborn babies.

But US media have never fully covered what actually happened on October 7. Israeli civilians and children were killed that day by Israeli security forces who were ordered to fire on everyone, employing the Hannibal Directive, to prevent hostages from being taken.

Additionally, the claim that Hamas used “human shields” during the genocide was always a fabrication. In a May 2025 article titled “One Side Routinely Uses Human Shields in Gaza — But Not the Side That’s Usually Blamed,” FAIR’s Gregory Shupak wrote that Israel and its backers “have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality.”

Scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon are cited to explain how the human shield discourse has been misapplied in Gaza: “Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield.”

This misdirection “has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.” Shupak added that the “corruption of the meaning of ‘human shields’ has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide”.

Another example from the commission’s report describes BBC reporting of a CCTV videotape of soldiers shooting a boy, then standing around for 45 minutes watching him bleed to death. They shot at his mother to stop her from coming to his aid. They also blocked two Palestinian ambulances from reaching him, and they were seen planting a rock next to him as “evidence” that Israeli security forces had acted in “self-defence”.

Although Israel has provided no evidence to contest the videotape, corporate news outlets, such as The New York Times, have given the Israeli military opportunities to claim the boy was “a terrorist” who “attempted to attack soldiers”.

Not a shred of evidence
Without the Israeli government having produced a shred of evidence to support its accusations, the establishment press has allowed Israeli officials to cast doubt on a well-documented case of murder. For almost three years, this cycle of denial has dominated corporate coverage, making this the most contested genocide in history, despite the troves of evidence to the contrary.

This is ironic given that, even as Israeli officials deny these claims when talking to news media, statements admitting and celebrating their crimes circulate widely on internet platforms. In the DDN video, Richard Sanders shows footage of the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, saying, “Erase Gaza … do not leave a child there. Expel all the remaining ones at the end so that they will not have a resurrection … Every child born there is already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.”

This announcement of intent to continue a genocide to its conclusion could not be made clearer. Indeed, though there are long lists of statements by Israeli officials that constitute incitement to genocide, they are ignored by corporate media frames of denial. Israelis are demanding the right to commit genocide, even as they deny they are doing so.

The UN commission recognised and condemned Israel’s ongoing determination to expand territorially, saying that such long-term goals violate international law.

Spending millions on public relations and failing
The UN’s latest report comes at a time of crisis for the Israeli state, as global citizens are registering their revulsion at Israel’s seemingly endless violence. Israel’s approval ratings are plummeting in the United States and globally.

As of May 2026, only 16 percent of Americans support unconditional aid to Israel, and in June 2026, historic progress was made in the House of Representatives, with seventy-three cosponsors for the Block the Bombs bill to impose a partial embargo against sending any more US weapons to Israel.

Global outrage, anti-genocide disgust, and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle have shifted the global paradigm and dramatically changed the political landscape. Reporting on the Second Anti-Zionist Jewish Congress held in Dublin, Ireland, Ramzy Baroud argued that the shift in global perceptions over the past two years has been driven by independent journalism and Palestinians themselves reclaiming their own narrative.

In response, Israel is investing millions of dollars to revive its image. In one initiative, Israeli propagandists have abandoned calling ethnic cleansing “voluntary migration,” a term repeated frequently in establishment media. A new initiative will refer to it as “a plan of free movement.”

As Caitlin Johnstone writes, “They never say ‘It’s time to stop doing the things that cause people to hate us,’ they just say ‘It’s time for a rebrand.’” Despite millions of dollars spent on hasbara, Israel’s PR campaigns are failing. Dr Baroud argues that “the damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.”

As Dr Baroud has aptly noted, “Corporate media exist to serve corporate interests.”

Government and corporate elites and states can continue to support Israel militarily and economically only as long as establishment media continue to rehearse the lies, falsifications, and denials of its genocide in Gaza. Through propaganda and strategic alliances, Israel seeks to evade any accountability for genocide. That evasion would be impossible without the complicity of the corporate media.

Palestinian storytellers fundamentally reshaping the global conversation
Western newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have not changed their editorial approach throughout this genocide, but Omar Zahzah, author of Terms of Servitude, argues that independent media, social media platforms, and Palestinian storytellers are not only fundamentally reshaping the global conversation but are also being censored for it. And that is true.

Sadly, however, the establishment press steadfastly continues to provide the Israeli state the cover it needs to deny its crimes against humanity and bury its genocide. It’s long past time for legacy media to stop allowing Israel to hide behind its own journalistic malpractice.

The fact that newsrooms still allow a foreign military — one that is openly censoring Western media and content posted to Big Tech platforms, committing genocide, and murdering journalists — to dominate the language of US journalism must come to an end. It has become far too obvious to the rest of the world.

This was first published by Project Censored and is republished from CounterPunch under Creative Commons.

Dr Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University. She is an award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. Her most recent book is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. Her writing has appeared in CounterPunch, LA Progressive, The Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, and ScheerPost, among others.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/06/gaza-genocide-mourning-the-112-victims-of-two-families-of-israeli-attacks-why-the-world-silence/ Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:52:40 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=131644 By Hamza Gwarzo

Many of you have seen on social media globally what happened in Gaza this week.

Why has the world remained silent? Why have the mainstream media remained silent?

We, the people on social media, are the ones posting about it across different platforms.

• READ MORE: Gaza holds mass funeral for 112 people killed in Israel’s 2023 Sabra attack
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Thousands of people gathered in Gaza City for the mass funeral of 112 people killed in the Sabra massacre by Israel in 2023 while the world watched in silence.

The dead were members of two families — Al-Hasayneh and Abu Sharia — whose remains were pulled from the rubble of homes destroyed earlier by Israeli airstrikes.

The funeral came during one of the deadliest stretches of Israeli bombardment in recent days, proof that the Gaza genocide‌ has not ended despite ceasefire and deal announcements.

Israel’s plan has not changed since 1948 — the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Recovered bodies
Rescue teams recently recovered the bodies of the two families from the site of the Israeli attack in the Sabra neighbourhood on 22 November 2023.

The attack killed 308 members of the two families, including 40 children, 30 women and seven people with disabilities.

The bodies were wrapped in white shrouds. Mourners wept in grief and sorrow while the world looked on without taking action.

So I ask: does US President Donald Trump know about this? Has he been informed?

If he does know, and still doesn’t care, then what is the difference between this and the actions he has accused other countries of committing?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for some Israeli leaders, yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still traveling to different countries, including the US, and continues to be seen alongside world leaders.

There have been no strong sanctions, and the international pressure has not been as great as many expected.

Heartbreaking world
I cannot describe the kind of world we are living in.

The world is silent. The media are silent. World leaders are silent.

Does this mean the world is unable to do anything to stop leaders accused of committing atrocities?

Where is the international community when it is needed most?

What is the purpose of international law if it is applied only against the weak?

It is truly heartbreaking.

A citizen journalist’s response to the Gaza mass funeral republished from Presstv.ir.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/03/john-minto-when-tvnzs-israeli-counter-terrorism-op-against-palestinians-is-actually-a-lie/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:39:20 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=131487 COMMENTARY: By John Minto

Television New Zealand outdid itself last week.

For decades it has been a direct funnel for Israeli propaganda into our living rooms and last week TVNZ news editors managed to turn an Israeli pogrom against a Palestinian community into the need for Israel to launch a “major counter-terrorism operation” against Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Israel kills 19 in Gaza as attacks escalate despite latest Trump plan
• Other Palestinian resistance reports
• Other John Minto reports

Here is the complaint we have lodged with TVNZ:

Complaint Re 1News 6pm news bulletin on Saturday, 25 July 2026, under the free to air broadcasting standard #6 related to accuracy.

Context
The context in which this news item was presented to viewers is that Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli military, have been conducting violent attacks on Palestinian communities across the Occupied West Bank over many years, but most intensively over the past three years.

These attacks have been labelled pogroms where Palestinians have been killed, their houses and cars torched, their property destroyed, their livestock stolen and no redress available from the Israeli state.

This situation has been documented exhaustively by the United Nations, human rights groups in Israel and internationally — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

There are thousands of videos online recorded these attacks as well as numerous in-depth analyses showing this is a central strategy of the Israeli state to steal Palestinian land and dispossess the Palestinian people.

The New Zealand government has a public list of the most notorious of these settlers who it refuses to let enter New Zealand.

All this would have been known to 1News editors even if 1News has chosen not to inform the wider public in any significant manner in its news bulletins.

1News report on Saturday, 25 July, 6pm
The news report included some indeterminate footage with the 1News presenter saying:

“Israel has launched a major counterterrorism offensive in the Occupied West Bank following a deadly clash between Palestinian residents and Israeli settlers and security forces.

“Four Palestinians and two Israelis including a security guard and a soldier were killed in the incident in a village south of Nablus. Several others from both groups were injured.
Palestinians say settlers targeted their homes. Israel says a group of Israeli hikers were attacked.”

Our complaint
1News framed the report in Israeli propaganda terms by stating “Israel has launched a major counterterrorism offensive”.

1News failed to attribute its description of a “counterterrorism offensive” to whatever Israeli sources it was relying on to frame it in such a way.

A “counterterrorism offensive” is an Israeli government claim. 1News has reported it as a fact, that Israel is responding and not initiating action, and that the nature of that action is “counterterrorism”.

The 1News claim is similar to the non-attribution of a statement made by ThreeNews, for which the BSA upheld a complaint, on 22 April 2025-081, when the reporter stated that “Israel chose to respond to … ceasefire violations”.

In the July 25 instance, viewers are told by 1News that Israel was responding to a terrorist attack, or attacks, of some sort.

However, it was blatantly clear to anyone who had read any online reports that the recent violence started as a co-ordinated settler pogrom against a Palestinian community with the Israeli government endorsed aim of ethnic cleansing.

The 1News framing editorially points the finger at Palestinians as the attackers/aggressors and Israelis as the victims — the inverse of the truth.

1News’ presentation of Israel’s justification for its “counterterrorism offensive” is a response to “an attack on Israeli hikers”.

This Israeli explanation would have been ignored or pointed out as not true, if it had been subjected to basic journalistic scrutiny.

In the context of the incident described above it was so implausible as to be laughable.

Hikers don’t set fire to vehicles, destroy property and terrorise Palestinian families. There was plenty of evidence available for 1News to ignore or dismiss Israel’s explanation.

Alongside the lead-in to the story, the 1News description of a “deadly clash”’ is an assumption of it being Palestinians who were in the wrong.

The 1News report helps give political cover to Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

It encourages viewers to see Palestinians as the problem. Such framing of events gives Israel impunity in its war crimes (ethnic cleansing is a war crime).

It is literally a deadly framing for Palestinians.

This 1News report, like the majority of Western agency reporting on the Middle East, centres Israeli narratives, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications with barely a passing nod to Palestinians.

The report amounts to a lie.

John Minto is national campaign coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). Republished from PSNA with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/26/eugene-doyle-sex-crimes-karim-khan-and-the-wests-war-on-the-icc/ Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:40:53 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=131182 COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

In a secret vote on July 24, the member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC) voted to remove Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan.

This was far more than a vote about the alleged serious misconduct of one powerful man. It represents an unprecedented institutional crisis for both the ICC and the entire system of international justice on which the Palestinian and other suffering people of the Global South still place hope.

The Western governments who led the campaign to oust Khan secured 82 votes, comfortably surpassing the required absolute majority of 63. Thirteen states voted against removal, 15 abstained.

• READ MORE: ICC prosecutor Karim Khan removed over ‘political’ sex abuse claims
• The Malaysian lawyer at the heart of the ICC crisis
• NZ called on to back international law in ICC vote – ‘don’t throw in towel’
• Other ICC reports

For the reasons outlined below, the vote in all likelihood is a statement of the West’s coercive power rather than a credible determination of Khan’s guilt.

Khan’s chief lawyer, Tayab Ali, expressed “regret” that the assembly of member states disregarded concerns about due process by more than 180 rights groups and legal experts.

“The decision is unsupported by any lawful or properly reasoned finding that Mr Khan KC committed…

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 25, 2026

On the surface, the member states voted on Khan’s fitness for office given the serious allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him.

Two women charge that Khan used his position of power to sexually pressure them: “Sarah”, a Malaysian lawyer who served as his special assistant at the ICC and alleges he repeatedly subjected her to non-consensual sexual acts, and “Patricia”, who alleges he groped and harassed her as his unpaid intern in 2009, when he was a leading defence lawyer at the court.

On the other hand, the vote was the climax of a high-pressure Israeli and Western effort to unseat Khan after he submitted charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant.

Back in March, a panel of judges tasked with reviewing the charges against Khan unanimously cleared the prosecutor of wrongdoing. In reporting to the ICC’s oversight body — the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) — the panel found that allegations against Khan did not establish Karim Khan’s misconduct or breach of duty under relevant framework.

In the normal course of affairs, this would have been a final determination.

Political vote
In an unprecedented manoeuvre, the Executive Bureau of the ASP decided to push ahead with Khan’s ouster by setting aside the legal process and turning it into a political vote by the member states.

As I reported earlier this week, more than 180 Palestinian civil society organisations and rights groups argued the disciplinary process “has been reduced to a political referendum following the national interests of individual States Parties”.

The Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC), the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society organisations, decried the Karim Khan disciplinary process saying it had “failed all parties” and is “corroding” the court’s independence.

In their statement, PHROC said: “Notably, the Bureau, as a political body composed of diplomats, does not have the independence, impartiality or legal expertise to make assessments on the legal characterisation of conduct, nor did it enjoy the same timeframe as the ad hoc Panel to independently examine the two reports and 5000 pages of evidence.”

Let’s be clear: if these states actually cared about justice for victims of sexual violence and the coercion of vulnerable women, men and children to the predation of powerful men, we would have seen the following:

They would have condemned Israel following the 2025 release of the United Nations “Report of the Commission of Inquiry: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023”.

Earlier this month I met Chris Sidoti, a distinguished Australian human rights lawyer. He is a member of the UN Commission which recently released its report, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023.

Children targeted
“There was the direct targeting of children by snipers and quadcopters, and here the evidence that we collected, subject to all those rigorous tests that we applied, left us in no doubt that children were being explicitly and deliberately targeted,” Sidoti said.

I have written about the sexual depravity committed against Palestinian prisoners at Sde Teiman prison by Israeli forces, including rape-murder. It was brought to the world’s attention by none other than Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s Military Advocate General (Israel’s top military lawyer/prosecutor).

To date she is the only person who has been punished in relation to these sordid events; her crime was to secretly release the footage of Palestinian prisoners being sodomised with metal implements.

Netanyahu referred to the rapists as “our heroic soldiers”. As with all these examples, New Zealand, Australia, UK and all the Usual Suspects mumbled and averted their gaze.

Tearing down the pillars of international law is now a full-on Western project. Just this week, the US Secretary of State declared that Washington will lead a “whole-of-government response” to neutralise the court’s jurisdiction.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Marco Rubio said: “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

One should never forget that Karim Khan’s predecessor as Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, was sanctioned, had her US assets frozen, and tormented by the Americans for having prepared a case against US forces for murder, torture and other war crimes in Afghanistan.

Western impunity
The case never went ahead; Western impunity was preserved.

Impunity is embedded in US law: the “Hague Invasion Act” is the informal name for the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), a United States federal law passed in 2002. It authorises military action if any US military personnel or government officials face prosecution by the ICC at The Hague, Netherlands.

ICC judges from UK, Peru, France, Benin, Fiji, Slovenia, Georgia and Canada have had their credit cards blocked, their funds seized and their freedom of movement restricted through sanctions imposed by the US and supported by financial institutions, digital platforms and European governments.

Imagine that: judges unable to even pay for a meal in a restaurant because they committed the crime of fulfilling their duties under international law to prosecute war crimes. And the response from the Western governments? Silence.

Professor Yusra Suedi, international law scholar at the University of Manchester, told Pascal Lottaz this week: “I think that the International Criminal Court is a necessary idea. I think the history of geopolitics has indicated that something like this was needed in the world. The ICC’s institutional structure is an important source of hope for many people, especially during these difficult times.”

Lottaz, Associate Professor at Kyoto University, is the host of Neutrality Studies. He makes a very good point about the political value of the international courts: “In an imperfect world, they are a venue and a way to build political pressure.”

All victims of sexual violence should see the predators face justice. A court of law, not a political kangaroo court, is the appropriate venue to determine Karim Khan’s guilt or innocence.

I just wish that the US servicemen who recently killed the 165 schoolgirls and staff in Minab, Iran, would face justice. I wish that the US servicemen who raped and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese girls and women at My Lai faced justice.

I wish the rapists at Abu Ghraib and all the US black sites faced justice. I wish the thousands of Palestinian hostages suffering today through the living hell of the Israeli gulags could one day be free and see their tormentors face a reckoning before the law.

For the moment, thanks to New Zealand, Australia, the UK, US and all the other state sponsors of criminality, we do not live in such a world. May that day come soon.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He also contributes to Asia Pacific Report and he hosts solidarity.co.nz

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/22/media-avoids-israels-sadism-like-a-crocodile-infested-moat/ Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:09:35 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130972 COMMENTARY: By Jeremy Rose

Israel’s Environment Ministry has removed the protected status of Nile crocodiles to allow them to be used in a moat guarding the country’s largest detainment camp, a move requested by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The story has been widely covered by Israel’s English-language press, alternative media worldwide, and news sites in non-English-speaking countries.

But, in the Anglosphere, there is a virtual news blackout.

• READ MORE: Israel strips crocodiles of protected status to pave way for crocodile-infested moat — Democracy Now!
• Israel plans ‘alligator Alcatraz’ for Palestinian prisoners
• Other Israeli prison reports

Searching within New Zealand and Australian internet domains yields nothing. In the UK, only The Telegraph has reported the story; the BBC and The Guardian do not deem it newsworthy.

In the US, the only report I have seen was by the progressive independent outlet Democracy Now!

It feels nigh on impossible that a similar event in Putin’s Russia, Iran, or any number of dictatorships would go unreported by the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Age, The New Zealand Herald, or the English-language newswires.

Democracy Now’s headline — ”Israel strips crocodiles of protected status to pave way for crocodile-infested moat“ — is about as clickbaity as hard news gets.

Barbarism as state policy
Veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz: “National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is taking Israel to the next stage in its development: barbarism as a legal and explicit state policy.”

“Sadism is no longer just for deviants; it is the new political correctness,” he continued.

“After years in which barbarity and sadism toward Palestinians were hidden as something shameful and repressed — and mainly as the exception to the rule — Ben-Gvir is moving them to centre stage to great applause from some of the crowd and silence from the rest.”

A relative in Israel messaged me asking whether I had seen the crocodile story — the “true reality in Israel”. She included this translated snippet from the breaking news story.

“Exclusive: The Crocodile Snatch: The Nature and Parks Authority opposed the establishment of Ben-Gvir’s crocodile prison, but Environmental Minister Silman amended the law, paving the way for the transfer of the animals. Among other things, Silman determined that the Nile crocodile is a ‘cultivated wild animal’ that can be raised within a security entity.”

That Ben-Gvir is monstrous is not news. The Australian and New Zealand governments, along with those of the UK and Canada, have banned him from entering their countries for inciting pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank and promoting the expansion of illegal settlements.

But the monstrousness of Israel’s gulags is newsworthy — if underreported.

18,500 Palestinians detained
In March, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a report stating: “Since October 2023, more than 18,500 Palestinians have been detained across the occupied Palestinian territory, including at least 1500 children. Thousands remain in detention without charge or trial. Many have been forcibly disappeared. Nearly 100 detainees have died in custody.

“Detainees have been abused in unfathomable ways, including rape with bottles, metal rods and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, and being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.”

Albanese said: “A system that has long been used to dominate, degrade and break Palestinians has evolved and hardened into state doctrine.

“It is defended by politicians, rationalised by legal institutions, sanitised by media narrative and tolerated by governments that continue to arm and shield Israel.”

The name of Ketziot Prison, where the crocodiles are to be deployed, will be familiar to some from news reports of the abuse of Freedom Flotilla volunteers held there earlier this year.

News of their mistreatment and images of Ben-Gvir abusing them cut through the Western media fog and prompted rare condemnations from Western governments.

Israel’s ambassadors in Wellington and Canberra were called in for ritual reprimands.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong described the images as “shocking and unacceptable”.

Unacceptable face
Similar statements and actions were made by the US, the UK, France, Italy, and Canada. Ben-Gvir is the unacceptable face of an apartheid regime that all those countries accept and, to differing degrees, abet.

The detained Flotilla activists repeatedly pointed out that their treatment — as appalling as it was — was minor compared with what Palestinian prisoners endure daily.

There was nothing like the same reaction from Western governments when a video of Ben-Gvir taunting imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti emerged in August last year.

Following the visit, Ben-Gvir reportedly said: “We entered Marwan Barghouti’s cell and he was crying in terror. I told the jailers to keep treating them like that,” adding, “When we enter Israel’s prisons, the Palestinian prisoners piss their pants when they see us, they piss themselves out of fear.”

The video was reported by mainstream media outlets but not as prominently as the one showing the abuse of the international activists.

Ben-Gvir is not just a comic-book villain; he is a high-ranking member of the Israeli cabinet. He has a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the convicted terrorist who killed 29 Palestinians, hanging in his Knesset office, and he himself acts as a state terrorist, marshalling the full force of Israel’s prison system and police in his campaign against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Supporters of Israel argue that the country attracts a disproportionate amount of bad publicity.

‘Great negativity’
Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that the ABC’s coverage of Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel.”

Segal claimed there had been a “disproportionate” number of critical stories.

“They could run positive stories about other things Israel is doing,” she said. “The amazing startup nation, things like that. They very rarely do that. There is no attempt at that part of the agenda.”

The Jerusalem Post reported last week that Israeli defence-tech start-ups working with the Defence Ministry raised nearly US$3 billion in the first six months of 2026 — three times the amount raised in all of 2025.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, and its bombing and assassination campaigns in the war on Iran have been a boon for the self-described startup nation.

Gaza is history’s first AI-assisted genocide, and our media are paying it too little attention, not too much.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He has a Substack: Towards Democracy.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/22/why-the-trump-administration-is-running-scared-of-the-global-criminal-court-in-the-hague/ Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:56:43 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130948 BP Daily

The strongest sign that the International Criminal Court (ICC) still has teeth is that the most powerful administration in the world is trying to pull them out.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared this week that the Trump administration would use “all the tools at our government’s disposal” to “dismantle” the ICC, calling it a body run by “smug globalists” and “hostile Third World governments” whose investigations into US officials would mean “the death of the US as a sovereign and independent nation”.

Analysts and legal observers say the real motivation may have less to do with protecting American soldiers and more to do with protecting the people currently in power.

• READ MORE: Trump administration vows to ‘disable’ International Criminal Court
• NZ called on to back international law in ICC vote – ‘don’t throw in towel’
• Mamdani: Netanyahu is a war criminal, but New York cannot arrest him
• Other ICC reports

The ICC, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, was established in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The US has never ratified the Rome Statute, meaning the court does not have automatic jurisdiction over American officials.

Congress reinforced that position the same year by passing the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which prohibits cooperation with ICC investigations and authorises the president to use military force to free any American detained by the court — a provision widely known as the “Hague Invasion Act”.

What has shifted is the scale of potential exposure. Trump launched a war against Iran that legal scholars describe as illegal under international law.

A missile strike on the first day of the war on February 28 killed more than 100 children at a school in Minab in the southeastern Iran, with a preliminary military investigation concluding the US was likely responsible.

Mamdani: Netanyahu is a war criminal, but New York cannot arrest him https://t.co/8rHXkij1xH via @AJEnglish

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) July 22, 2026

Trump has also repeatedly threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure, and in April told Iran that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” unless the Strait of Hormuz reopened, language legal experts say could constitute incitement to genocide under international law.

At home, the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v United States granted presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts, closing the domestic accountability door.

The ICC remains one of the few avenues where accountability could still theoretically apply.

Rubio’s campaign to dismantle it is, in that context, less a defence of American sovereignty than a bid for permanent impunity.

Republished from BP Daily under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/21/nz-called-on-to-back-international-law-in-icc-vote-dont-throw-in-towel/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:00:54 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130913 Asia Pacific Report

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon today urging the New Zealand government to vote against the removal of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan.

Instead, said PSNA, Luxon should insist that proper judicial process be followed regarding allegations made against him.

“This is a pivotal moment for the International Criminal Court and New Zealand must stand up for our values and our support for international law,” PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said in a statement.

• READ MORE: Former UN oversight chief says ICC prosecutor Karim Khan is ‘victim of massive stitch-up’
• Why ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was suspended — and what could happen next
• Other ICC arrest warrant reports

“We are not making any judgement on the allegations against Mr Khan, but New Zealand must insist a proper judicial process be followed.”

Middle East Eye reports that a former United Nations investigations chief has accused the ICC’s executive body of subjecting Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan to a “stitch-up” in their decision to suspend him from office over misconduct allegations.

Ben Swanson, a former UN assistant secretary-general and deputy head of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), has previously served as director of the OIOS Investigations Division.

Over the past year, he has submitted four expert’s opinions commissioned by Khan’s legal team criticising the investigation.

Doubt over justice
Swanson wrote: “I am of the opinion that the Prosecutor is the victim of a massive ‘stitch-up’ and given what has happened since the release of the Panel’s Report I doubt whether justice will be done or seen to be done.”

The president of the ICC’s oversight body, the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), Finnish diplomat Paivi Kaukoranta, wrote to member states last week to confirm that no retaliation allegations made against Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan had been established by members of the executive bureau.

When allegations were made against Khan, the OIOS was asked by the president of the ASP to gather evidence from the alleged victims.

Between November 2024 and December 2025 more than 5000 pages of evidence was gathered, noted the PSNA in a statement.

The ICC then established a Judicial Panel, comprising three eminent judges selected by the Bureau of the ASP, to analyse the evidence.

After doing so, this Judicial Panel declared it was “unanimously of the opinion that the factual findings by OIOS do not establish misconduct or breach of duty under the relevant legal framework”.

Tamimi said that now Israel and the US were rejecting the Judicial Panel findings.

‘Blatantly lobbying’
“They are blatantly lobbying to remove Karim Khan because he sought arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’.”

This “intensive Israel-US diplomatic bullying” had succeeded in having the Judicial Panel findings set aside in favour of a decision to remove Karim Khan being made by the full Assembly of State Parties (ASP) in which New Zealand will vote.

“Karim Khan’s position must be decided through a legal process, not a political process dictated by Israeli-US lobbying,” Tamimi said.

“New Zealand has already failed numerous times to uphold international law in the face of Israeli-US pressure.

“They must not throw in the towel again.”

“In October last year, Foreign Minister Winston Peters issued a formal statement with Nordic ministers in Stockholm to ‘reaffirm our unwavering support for the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court’.”

“You can’t pick and choose when you will support international law, and when you can disregard it,” said Tamimi.

“New Zealand must do the right thing at the ICC this week.”

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/20/fiji-police-arrest-man-over-alleged-social-media-threat-to-burn-suva/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 02:00:20 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130849 RNZ Pacific reporters

Fiji police say a man in his 50s has been taken into custody after he “allegedly issued a threat on social media” to remove the country’s 2013 Constitution or “burn the nation’s capital”.

In a statement on Monday, police added that investigations were continuing.

“The suspect in his 50s was questioned by investigators from the Cybercrime Division at the Criminal Investigations Department Headquarters on Sunday 19 July 2026, and remains in custody,” the statement read.

• READ MORE: Man in custody for alleged social media threat to burn Suva and remove Constitution

This comes as the Fiji government’s dual and parallel constitutional review and truth and reconciliation processes are underway.

Fijian social media users have been warned that “inciteful posts or the practice of sharing such posts” can result in them being prosecuted under Fiji’s criminal laws for offences such as urging political violence, criminal intimidation and malicious acts.

“While respecting one’s freedom of expression and speech, it must be practised with responsibility, as abuse and the breach of the law will not be condoned,” police said in an earlier statement on the issue on Sunday.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/16/race-was-used-as-a-weapon-fiji-coup-frontman-urged-to-reveal-backers/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 06:12:33 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130690 By Margot Staunton of RNZ Pacific

Mahendra Chaudhry — a former Fiji prime minister removed from power and held hostage during the 2000 coup — wants George Speight to name those behind the racist takeover.

The 84-year-old Labour Party leader, who became Fiji’s first prime minister of Indian heritage in 1999, made the comment after Speight — the coup frontman — appeared before the Constitutional Review Commission last week.

Speight emerged into the political limelight in a formal suit and glasses, after spending 24 years in a maximum security jail for treason. The ex-convict has called on the perpetrators of the country’s past political upheavals to own up, saying “if you want redemption, you have to confess”.

• READ MORE:  Former coup leader re-enters Fiji political debate with challenge to immunity and national identity
• Fiji will remain unstable while Indigenous people are economically sidelined, says ex-coup convict
• Other Fiji coup reports

However, Chaudhry told RNZ Pacific it is up to Speight to name the co-conspirators involved in the failed takeover.

“He has the answers, he knows, because he’s always been regarded as the frontman. There were people who were behind him but they remain unidentified to this day,” Chaudhry said.

“He has himself said that those who were associated with him are roaming around freely.”

Need for closure
The veteran politician said many Fijians still want to know who the masterminds were behind the coup.

“He [Speight] can help bring about closure to the whole episode because it still remains open, people don’t said know really who was behind the coup,” he said.

“Only he and [Josefa] Nata know, but they are hesitant, they are reluctant to name them.”

Nata, who was a public relations man at the time, became one of the faces of the coup along with Speight, and has admitted he played a key role as a negotiator.

Fiji has been rocked by four coups since gaining independence in 1970. The first two, in May and September 1987, were led by then-military lieutenant-colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who is the current prime minister.

In 1999, Chaudhry was sworn in as the country’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister, but the Labour Party leader’s election stoked racial tension in Fiji.

A year later, Speight led rebel soldiers from the military’s Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit in an armed takeover of the then-coalition government. Chaudhry and his government were held hostage for 56 days.

He later pleaded guilty to treason and received the death penalty, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. However, he was granted a presidential pardon and released from prison on 19 September 2024.

‘Bigger issue at stake’
Nata, who also spent 24 years in jail for treason before his release in December 2023, has declined to name those who orchestrated the coup “for the sake of the families involved”.

However Chaudhry said there was a bigger issue at stake.

“The families would have supported these people when they were involved in the coup, whether they deserve sympathy I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s a question of the other people, they should be thinking about those who really suffered the pain and anguish of the coup.”

Chaudhry has his own views about who the perpetrators are but said no-one would believe him.

“We know that it was our parliamentary opposition who were involved in the coup because they wanted to get back into power,” Chaudhry said.

“So it was them and their associates, but I cannot name them.”

Rabuka did not serve as the leader of the opposition after the 1999 election, before he resigned to chair the country’s highest indigenous body, the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC).

“We know that the GCC, in meetings which were held subsequent to the coup, were in support of [the 2000 coup],” Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry defends Labour govt
Meanwhile, Speight told the commission during his submission that the events and policies that unfolded during the Chaudhry-led government’s first year in office ultimately led to his actions.

Responding on Wednesday, Chaudhry told RNZ Pacific that Speight’s explanation had no factual basis.

“It is clear that his opinion was not shared by the majority of Fiji citizens at the time,” he said.

He cited a Tebbutt-Times poll conducted in December 1999, which showed his approval rating at 62 percent and a disapproval rating of 15 percent.

He said an editorial in The Fiji Times at the time described the result as “a remarkable performance — and a ringing endorsement by the public of his performance as prime minister”, adding that it was the highest rating ever recorded in a Tebbutt-Times poll.

Chaudhry said that in just one year in office, the coalition government had introduced a series of socio-economic reforms, including removing VAT from a range of staple food items, while achieving a record 9.6 percent economic growth rate and strong business and investor confidence.

Race-fuelled coup
He argued that the campaign against his government in the lead-up to the coup was fuelled by racial politics rather than public dissatisfaction.

“It is well-recorded that the anti-Chaudhry agitation whipped up over the next few months [before the coup] came from ethno-nationalist propaganda and deliberate disinformation spread by the opposition and others, some of whom were driven by greed,” he said.

“Race was used as a weapon to fuel emotions and discredit the government.”

Chaudhry said this was why the Fiji Labour Party urged the commission during its submission to consider constitutional and legislative safeguards to prevent the exploitation of ethnicity for political gain.

Speight has never apologised to Chaudhry in person or asked him for forgiveness.

When asked if he was prepared to forgive Speight, Chaudhry replied: “I can’t answer that”.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/14/dilapidated-infrastructure-blamed-for-fatal-png-prison-escape-attempt/ Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:36:53 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130569 By Kaya Selby of RNZ Pacific

The Papua New Guinea Correctional Service (PNGCS) has confirmed three prisoners have been killed in the Western Highlands Province while attempting an escape.

The inmates, who scaled the fence at Baisu Prison, were shot dead, while five others were critically injured on Sunday afternoon.

Two other escapees remain at large.

• READ MORE: PNG prison break leaves three dead, two still on the run in Western Highlands

PNGCS Deputy Commissioner David Suagu told RNZ Pacific that attempted prison escapes are typical during this time of year.

“It’s almost the same across the country … it happens randomly,” he said.

“We expect a high rate of escape, especially towards the later part of the year, and that is something that we are working towards addressing.”

He said infrastructure at Baisu Correctional Institution Services is in a state of despair, which likely made the escape possible.

“It’s in a deteriorating state, so consequently [they went] straight over the fence.”

Kerevat prison break
Suagu could not confirm whether the escapees were being held in remand, as has been widely reported by local media.

Local media has also reported last week that 38 inmates broke out of Kerevat prison in East New Britain province and were still at large.

According to a release from the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby in March, Baisu’s perimeter fencing “has been affected by rust, cracking concrete, unstable soil and frequent waterlogging,” and is in the process of being replaced with Australia’s help.

According to the World Prison Brief, Papua New Guinea’s prison population was at 5373 as of mid-2023.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/10/rainbow-warrior-bombing-by-french-secret-agents-remembered-40-years-on/ Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:01:59 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=117419 Mānawatia a Matariki!

Flashback 41 years on: One year ago marking the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, Te Aniwaniwa Paterson wrote this article. Further reading: David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (Little Island Press). The late investigative journalist John Pilger wrote: “Eyes of Fire is a beautiful book and an anger-making book, a testament to the finest activism and the need always to ‘bear witness’ and stand up to criminal state power, as you did. I was reminded how pleased I was to use the rescue of the people of Rongelap in The Coming War on China [2016 documentary]. Reading your account moved me all over again.”

SPECIAL REPORT: By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News

Forty years ago today [10 July 1985], French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship  Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.

People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.

• READ MORE: David Robie: New Zealand must do more for Pacific and confront nuclear powers
• Review of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire: Nuclear – now climate change: New book on how great powers have plagued the Pacific — Lee Duffield
• Operation Exodus: The Rainbow Warrior’s last Pacific mission — E-Tangata
• Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On — Little Island Press microsite on the Rainbow Warrior
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.

Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.

Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.

A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.

In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.

This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.

Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.

The legacy of Operation Exodus
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.

For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.

Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.

“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.

He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.

Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.

What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues?
“Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.

A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.

“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.

This article was first published on 10 July 2025 to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

Nuclear – now climate change: New book on how great powers have plagued the Pacific

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/05/john-minto-the-shame-of-nzs-betrayal-of-gazas-children/ Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:29:20 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130171 OPEN LETTER: By John Minto

It is hard not to feel the deepest sense of shame as a New Zealander following the United Nations Independent Commission report released last week. (UN report details the “overwhelming” scale of children killed in Gaza).

This report details Israel’s direct targeting of Palestinian children in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

Most know the shocking case of Hind Rajab but this report exposes not just the deliberate, casualised killing of children individually but its industrial scale.

• READ MORE: A UN report details the ‘overwhelming’ scale of children killed in Gaza. It raises grave legal questions
• Gaza genocide – how many UN findings will the West ignore?
• Other Gaza genocide reports

It’s easy to see how this has occurred. A study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found 62 percent to 76 percent of Jewish Israelis partially or fully agree that there are “no innocents in Gaza”.

Israeli political and military leaders have used such genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians for decades, and particularly in the last three years.

These leaders have set the tone for the behaviour of the public and the individual soldiers who do the killing.

Dehumanising a population as Israeli leaders have done is always the first step to genocide.

The most tragic aspect, however, is this would not have happened had the New Zealand government and other Western governments sanctioned Israel decades ago for the brutality of its illegal occupation in Palestine, its ethnic cleansing and its mass killing of Palestinian children as detailed in the UN report.

They are still silent even now — choosing to stand with those killing the children.

The shame of their betrayal of New Zealand values will last for generations.

John Minto is national campaign coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This letter was first published by The Press.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/04/gaza-genocide-how-many-un-findings-will-the-west-ignore/ Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:19:52 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130072 “No one living today ever imagined they would witness a genocide that would continue for 1000 days. Yet here we are. One thousand days of unbearable loss. One thousand days of children buried before their dreams could begin,” writes the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

ANALYSIS: By Hossam Shaker

Once again, the United Nations reminds us that genocide is taking place in the Gaza Strip.

A report issued on 23 June 2026 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory documented what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people, especially children.

This followed an earlier report from the same commission on 16 September 2025, which found that genocide was taking place, as well as the report of the UN special rapporteur issued on 20 October 2025.

• READ MORE: Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump in US over ‘attack on judicial independence’
• Chris Sidoti on UN inquiry into Palestinian rights
• Other Gaza genocide reports

But what can meticulously documented international reports do in the face of those who have insisted on averting their eyes from declared Israeli intentions to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, comprehensive destruction and horrific starvation — not to mention the torrent of live images transmitted around the clock to mobile devices from the field of atrocities over the course of two full years?

Specialised UN reports, testimonies by international rapporteurs and experts, assessments by the most prominent global human rights organisations, and even Israeli testimonies have followed one another, all confirming the reality of the genocide committed by Israel under the eyes of the world since October 2023.

In contrast, most European and Western states have clung to a rigid position that ignores this glaring truth, despite genocidal intentions being openly expressed in advance by senior Israeli leaders, who continued to boast of what their army and authorities were doing on the ground.

Official western comments on those reports were often absent, unlike what would have happened in other cases

Avoided the term ‘genocide’
Is it not worthy of condemnation that senior European and Western officials have persistently avoided using the term “genocide” in relation to these systematic and horrific Israeli practices?

It is as though the word were a firmly established taboo in European and Western political, media and cultural discourse whenever Israel is concerned.

This taboo exerts its power over those officials and commentators who, in this way, give reason to suspect that acknowledging genocide depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the status of the victims.

Double standards
It is entirely understandable that the allies of a regime of occupation and genocide, or those who consider themselves Israel’s partners and friends, would avoid issuing a clear condemnation of conduct they themselves helped support and encourage, directly or indirectly, even if only through silence and denial of its atrocities.

Throughout this prolonged season of horrors, the Israeli side has enjoyed military and political backing, as well as propagandistic cover, through carefully crafted formulas uttered by senior European and Western officials.

These amounted to evasive justifications for whatever war crimes and grave violations an occupying authority and its military forces might commit against a population left utterly exposed to continuous bombardment.

This may be inferred from the phrase that has become a staple of Western speeches: “Israel has every right to defend itself” — words that Israeli leaders understand simply as advance legitimation for a policy of mass killing and comprehensive destruction on the ground.

Naturally, no mention is made in this context of any right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves, for example, or of their right under international humanitarian law to resist the military occupation entrenched on their land.

States, governments and political leaderships — joined by elites in the fields of thought, culture and media — insist on ignoring the reality of genocide against the Palestinian people, or conceal it through a tendency toward genocide denial, as though all the serious international efforts of documentation and investigation had no value for them.

Denying a genocide that has unfolded before everyone’s ears and eyes simply means minimising its confirmed atrocities. It also entails direct or indirect encouragement of this pattern of horrific violations, so long as they are met with such shocking laxity.

Clinging to outright denial
Moreover, clinging to outright denial encourages the perpetrators to resume committing appalling war crimes, so long as these crimes are not named as such. Which Western leaders — apart from a handful, such as Spain — have described what the Israeli leadership and its army have committed as “genocide” or “war crimes”?

It must be recalled that the centres of Western decision-making, including the European Union and its leading bodies crowned with slogans of noble values and human rights, became implicated in a sweeping display of bias when they chose very mild or evasive terms to describe Israeli war crimes that the entire world followed in images, sound and live broadcasts.

Leaders and spokespersons resorted to cold expressions such as the ploy of “expressing concern” and voicing “sorrow” over the victims, often without naming the perpetrator, because the perpetrator was the Israeli leadership and its army, whose brutal policies and measures were visible to all.

Observers around the world have noted how the charge of “double standards” clings to European and Western political discourse.

This is precisely what the former Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, warned his EU colleagues against — in full view of a world that notices the grave moral gap between European positions on Ukraine and Palestine. He issued that warning days into the war, at a Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 23 October 2023.

One would not be exaggerating to conclude from these contradictory positions that they place some human beings above others in status, degree of concern and human dignity, so that the lives, safety and security of Palestinians are placed lower in rank than those of others.

Thus comes the tolerance of the crushing of children, mothers, the sick and the elderly in the Gaza Strip, without serious positions being taken to restrain the machinery of genocide.

The margins, not the centre
Those faltering positions gave the strong impression that they were conferring moral immunity on the perpetrator, namely the Israeli leadership and its regular army.

Prevailing European and Western criticism was limited to only two reckless ministers from the Israeli government, which amounts to little, since Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are already constantly criticised within Israeli circles.

The narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a ‘humanitarian crisis’, as though the programmed genocide were merely a natural disaster

Meanwhile, the government and the political leadership more broadly continue to escape direct criticism, even after the accumulation of filmed atrocities and the issuance of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

This evasion becomes even clearer when criticism, along with some sanctions of limited effect, has been confined to settler gangs and their leaders, without any verbal reproach or punitive gesture directed toward the Israeli army.

The latter not only sponsors and protects settlers on the ground but also directly commits grave violations, appalling war crimes and campaigns of ethnic cleansing within the context of a horrific genocide.

This contradiction betrays a firmly rooted European and Western position intent on exempting the state, its leadership and its regular military and security apparatuses from any clear criticism, explicit condemnation or accountability, while merely formal positions are issued concerning the margins rather than the centre: some settlers instead of the army, and only two ministers instead of the government.

Evading a simple question
Political Europe, and many elites in public life across Western states, have even evaded confronting a simple question: does what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people constitute genocide?

Denying the genocide committed in Gaza requires wilful disregard.

It begins by brushing aside these war crimes and behaving as though they merit no attention. The adopted narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a “humanitarian crisis” and “alarming” conditions, or a show of concern for “civilian suffering” — as though the programmed genocide, reinforced by declared intentions to commit it, were merely a natural disaster that befell the place.

The states and governments that boast of their commitment to moral positions, human values, international law and human rights were supposed to honour those commitments. They should have warned against the campaign of genocide in its earliest stages, stripped it of political and propagandistic cover, and supported the enforcement of international justice and the cases filed over genocide against the Palestinian people.

Foremost among these is the case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on the basis of Israel’s violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Instead, campaigns of moral targeting, incitement, intimidation and even the imposition of unjust sanctions on prosecutors have escalated, affecting international justice bodies and their personnel, as well as UN rapporteurs.

Thus, it becomes clear that complicity with the genocide committed against the Palestinian people goes ever further in undermining international law and threatening the foundations of international action and the protection afforded to its institutions and authorities.

Hossam Shaker is a journalist and an author who has extensively covered the topic of migration in Europe.This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/06/30/a-un-report-details-the-overwhelming-scale-of-children-killed-in-gaza-it-raises-grave-legal-questions/ Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:21:07 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=129923

ANALYSIS: By Shannon Bosch

A recent United Nations report has detailed serious allegations of Israel deliberately targeting Palestinian children during the conflict since October 2023.

The report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, which has been rejected by the Israeli government, documents harrowing child deaths. It describes the scale of the deaths as “unprecedented”.

Legally, the report itself does not prosecute anyone, but it can have major consequences by adding to a growing record of international law evidence.

• READ MORE: Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children
• Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza children part of genocide: UN inquiry
• The Gaza doctrine – Israeli ‘journacide’ and the muted NZ media response
• Other Gaza genocide reports

An independent investigation
The commission is a standing investigative body created by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 after the escalation in Gaza and East Jerusalem that year.

Its mandate is unusually broad and ongoing. It is tasked with investigating all alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, identifying root causes and preserving evidence for accountability.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, the commission has published several reports on the conflict, including on the deaths of Israeli children.

This latest report is significant because it focuses specifically on children, examining the impact of Israeli military operations on Palestinian children between October 2023 and March 2026.

The report notes that the commission sent requests for information to the State of Palestine, the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government. The first two responded, but the latter did not.

Four major findings
The commission’s report makes four highly significant findings.

1. The scale of child deaths is unprecedented
The report finds more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.

The commission says the “overwhelming scale and rate of children killed and injured in Gaza have been unparalleled across modern conflicts globally”.

UNICEF describes the Gaza Strip as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.

2. Evidence of deliberate targeting
This is the report’s most legally explosive finding. It documents repeated incidents of children being killed by single sniper or drone shots, often in the head or upper torso, suggesting deliberate targeting rather than incidental harm.

Cases such as Hind Rajab and other children shot while evacuating or sheltering are central examples.

Doctors on medical missions in Gaza reported to the commission that it appeared Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers were engaged in a “game” of target practice with “different body parts being targeted on different days”.

The commission concluded that based on forensic evidence and military analysis, there are reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately targeted.

3. Systematic attacks on child-essential infrastructure
The report documents attacks on hospitals, schools and orphanages, which enjoy special protection under international law. The commission found these attacks have directly contributed to preventable child deaths, long-term disability and educational collapse.

The commission’s findings raise serious questions about whether those special legal protections were respected, especially where attacks disrupted paediatric care, neonatal treatment and emergency surgery.

4. Arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence
The report documents patterns of child detention, ill-treatment and abuse in custody.

The commission noted that dehumanising rhetoric by political leaders, soldiers and public figures has normalised violence against Palestinian children and contributed to an environment where such harm becomes acceptable.

How do these findings fit with international law?
This report is important because it reframes the war not only through the lens of civilian casualties, but through special legal obligations owed to children.

International humanitarian law and international human rights law apply concurrently in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This is because Israel retains effective control over its borders, airspace and territorial waters, and has re-established military control on the ground.

As an occupying power, Israel has specific obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention. These include ensuring food, medical care and the protection of civilians, especially children.

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israel must protect children’s rights to life, survival and development. It must prohibit arbitrary detention, torture and deprivation of life. It must also ensure the best interests of the child remain a primary consideration in all actions affecting them.

The commission’s conclusions are stark: children have not simply been caught in the crossfire of war. Many appear to have been deliberately targeted, denied essential care, detained, tortured, displaced and subjected to conditions that threaten their survival.

It reframes the suffering of Palestinian children not as collateral damage alone, but as a possible site of serious international crimes.

Serious legal questions
Many of the acts documented in the report amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If children were deliberately targeted, this would constitute a grave breach of the international humanitarian law principle to distinguish combatants from civilians.

The sheer scale of child deaths raises serious concerns about whether Israeli forces have been adhering to the proportionality analysis: if civilian harm is excessive compared with the concrete military advantage anticipated, the attack is unlawful.

Parties must take all feasible precautions to minimise civilian harm. The report argues Israel’s use of heavy explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas indicates repeated failures of precaution.

Israel at the UN: “This council has heard the same accusations against us again & again.. that Israel intentionally targets doctors, aid workers & journalists”

Yes, because you’ve murdered hundreds of doctors, aid workers & journalists. pic.twitter.com/9gMhanyYBa

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 30, 2026

Adding to the evidence record
In international law, accountability is often slow, but reports like this help build the legal architecture for future prosecutions.

The findings may feed directly into ongoing investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into alleged crimes in Palestine. The commission explicitly recommends further scrutiny by the court.

States could rely on this evidence in domestic prosecutions under universal jurisdiction. This allows domestic courts to hear cases alleging international crimes, regardless of where the crimes occurred, or the nationality of the victims or perpetrators.

States may also impose targeted sanctions or arms embargoes based on credible findings in UN reports documenting serious violations of international humanitarian law, even without a court ruling.

The findings could shape arguments in existing and future proceedings before the International Court of Justice, particularly around genocide and occupation.

Under international law, children are supposed to be the most protected people in war. The children of Gaza have not just suffered in the war, they have become one of its defining legal fault lines.

Shannon Bosch is associate professor (law) at Edith Cowan University. Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

A friend and colleague, Solidarity columnist Eugene Doyle, posed a brief question on the Facebook media page Kiwi Journalists Association last week.

“Kiwi journalists . . . is there a reason for so little solidarity with Palestinian colleagues,” he mused over a haunting portrait of emaciated Palestinian journalist Mujahid Abu Mufleh showing his appalling state after 14 months inside an Israel torture prison.

“No trial. No conviction.”

• READ MORE: Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
• Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
• Facing up to genocide – a New Zealand journalist bears witness with Gaza and West Bank
• Other Gaza media reports

This is what Palestinian hostages look like after release: emaciated, exhausted, and visibly scarred by prolonged detention.

Occupied Palestine has become the deadliest place for journalists in the world. Yet merely three media people responded to Doyle’s question.

Broadcaster and singer Moana Maniapoto (Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa)
summed up the cruel image as “journacide”, citing the use of the label by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese: “Absolutely shocking.”

Journacide is a neologism used by scholars, journalists, and human rights experts to describe deliberate mass killing and hunting down of journalists and media workers in conflict zones. It is also the title of a harrowing new documentary on the topic: Journacide: The War on Truth.

Courage and fortitude
Community broadcaster and educator Victoria Quade commented: “I think few people living and working in relatively protected environments like New Zealand can imagine the courage and fortitude it takes to be a journalist under an oppressive regime where reporting on those regimes can be physically dangerous.

“And, if they can imagine it, would be able to match that courage in their own lives.”

A third comment was posted by communications adviser and journalist Susan Belt: “I think people are battle-worn after so much general genocide, kids and press included, on the part of Israel. There’s so much press targeting etc that it almost becomes ridiculous to keep posting on it. Stuff and NZME keep running Gaza, Lebanon stuff but because our govt like some others has not made much of a fuss about Israel’s illegal civilian and press killing in Gaza and its unprovoked attack on Iran and illegal forays into Lebanon, it leaves people feeling hopeless.

“I am very pro-Palestinian rights and have been since the 1970s but even my Facebook friends despair at the sad postings I seem to always be doing. They know it’s very bad behaviour but we’re in a trance at the hopelessness of it. When our ally the US is backing Israel (though cooling of late) our govt is too scared to say what’s right because it doesn’t want to offend Trump’s team.”

These comments reminded me that I have been puzzling over the generally poor and weak response from New Zealand journalists over what is currently the toughest moral and ethical challenge of our times. Yet, instead of facing up to the Gaza genocide and the accompanying journacide, most of our media colleagues have preferred to look away and remain silent.

The prevailing attitude is that it is something remote and of little relevance to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a response of denial, astonishing given that there have been protests across the motu against the Israeli genocide — and lately the unjustified US-Israeli war on Iran and fragile peace — for the past 142 weeks: by far the longest and sustained political protests ever in this country, yet largely ignored by the media.

This has led to many public protests over media coverage. These too have rarely been reported.

Genocide in plain view
My own articles on the topic on Aotearoa and the Pacific, while stirring responses internationally, have barely raised a ripple in this country. Shameful responses to a genocide — at least 73,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 20,000 of them children — revealed daily before our very eyes. Even since the sham ceasefire declared in October, more than 1000 people have been killed.

And the cost in lives of hundreds of Palestinian journalists trying to bear witness on the annihilation of their own communities is deeply shocking. Yet this barely raises a shrug from New Zealand journalists.

In a report released last week by the Freedoms Committee of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a chilling new statistic was revealed — out of an estimated 1200 journalists in Gaza between 60 and 75 percent of them have lost their homes or been forcibly displaced since 7 October 2023.

The report, titled “Media Without Walls”, also said that approximately 265 journalists had been killed since the start of the conflict, by far the highest death toll recorded globally against journalists in a single conflict.

More than 80 percent of media offices and institutions had been completely or partially destroyed, leading to an “almost complete collapse” of journalistic infrastructure, it said.

The report added that journalists in Gaza no longer work from newsrooms but from tents, footpaths and shelter centres, with mobile phones as their primary production tool and intermittent internet dictating when they can publish.

“I lost my home and my office in the same week,” said one displaced journalist, Dr Ahed Farwana. “I no longer have a place to write, but I write from my phone among people, sometimes while searching for water for my family.”

‘Trying to concentrate’
Another Gaza journalist, Ola Kassab, said: “I work from inside a displacement shelter, choosing the quietest corner I can find. The hardest part is not the bombing itself, but trying to concentrate amid the overcrowding and fear.”

Photojournalist Wisam Zughair said: “The camera is no longer the heaviest thing I carry; it is the feeling that I may also be documenting what could happen to me.”

Just two weeks ago, an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Ahmed Wishah, 25, was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. He was the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since 2023.

His targeted murder came just weeks after his brother Mohammed Wishah, who also worked for the Doha-based global television network, was killed in a deliberate Israeli shelling of his car.

In an interview after his brother’s death, Wishah called on the world to stop the killing of journalists.

“Let the martyrdom of Mohammed Wishah be the end to the killing of journalists. This is my message to the world . . . Stop the Israeli occupation from targeting journalists.”

Smearing journalists
The routine response of Israeli military authorities is a hamfisted attempt to smear all Gazan journalists as “Hamas terrorists”. There is never any credible evidence to back this up and it is shameful that New Zealand media simply echo these lies from a discredited regime whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a “false balance”.

The New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists (CPJ) and Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have frequently condemned the “smearing of killed Palestine journalists” with “baseless claims”.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said it condemned the Israeli occupation army’s “baseless accusations”, which sought to “justify its crimes against Al Jazeera journalists and cameramen in Gaza, most recently the killing of cameraman Ahmed Wishah”.

“Since October 2023, the Israeli campaign of incitement has relentlessly spread false allegations and baseless accusations against Al Jazeera staff. The Network considers this smear campaign a transparent and futile attempt to justify the deliberate targeting of journalists and cameramen whose only ‘crime’ has been their courageous determination to document and expose the genocide being perpetrated by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip.

“These attempts deceive no one and cannot obscure the truth witnessed by the world.”

Al Jazeera called on press freedom organisations and “people of conscience around the world” to take urgent action to safeguard all journalists in the Gaza Strip and ensure their safety.

Reporters Without Borders has filed at least five complaints with the ICC over alleged war crimes against journalists, and together with other media freedom groups such as the Foreign Press Association, has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought an Israeli Supreme Court ruling overturning the IDF’s ban on global journalists being allowed into Gaza to see the reality for themselves.

Gaza bloodlust spreading
Another disturbing factor about the slaughter of journalists is the fact that the Israeli bloodlust against journalists in Gaza is spreading also to the illegally occupied West Bank and the invaded Lebanon.

Journacide: The War on Truth                                    Video: Democracy Now!

Irish filmmaker Seán Murray has investigated Israel’s killings of journalists in his new feature documentary Journacide: The War on Truth, which was featured by Democracy Now! earlier this month. Murray says the term “journacide” applies to Israel’s military actions because of the “explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists” as a way to silence the truth.

The filmmaker describes it as “the Gaza doctrine that is now being applied in Lebanon”.

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman highlighted the attempted killing on June 15 of Iranian journalist Hadi Hoteit, who was working for the news outlet Press TV in southern Lebanon. He was attacked by an Israeli drone while reporting live for his network at Kafr Tebnit.

Although he survived the attack, he was struck by six pieces of shrapnel.

With the latest invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the death toll of journalists has now topped 29.

Murray investigated the killings of four of those journalists for his documentary Journacide.

On March 28, journalists Ali Shoeib and brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed — all together — in an Israeli drone strike on their car.

The following month, on April 22, Amal Khalil was injured in an airstrike and died from her injuries after waiting for hours inside a bombed building as rescuers awaited clearance from Israeli forces to reach her, reports Democracy Now!

About the silence
In a trailer for the documentary, Murray says the film is not about war, it is about the silence. “As Lebanon burns, silence has now become the greatest weapon of oppression. This is a tale of those that fought different, the story of the gatekeepers of truth.”

In the Democracy Now! interview about his film, Murray explores the lengths that Israeli military authorities go to create false narratives about journalists, even to falsifying documents and creating fake images.

“I think Journacide effectively gives the explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists. I think that it fits perfectly. Not only do we see the targeting of journalists, but it’s the double-tap strikes that we see with the Gaza doctrine, that is now being applied in Lebanon.

“So, in the case of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed, the original strike killed Ali and Mohamed, and it was a double tap then that killed Fatima, Mohamed’s sister, in the second strike.

“This is a deliberate targeting of journalists. The reasons behind that is to, of course, silence what is happening in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing that’s going on, the mass war crimes that’s being committed.

“But Lebanon is a little bit different. Israel doesn’t have the geographical repressive abilities that they did in Gaza. And we see that now playing out.”

A wake up call surely for the Middle East realities for New Zealand journalists.

David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Israel’s ambassador to Australia has looked at Australian citizens who say they were beaten, tortured and raped, and called them frauds.

Sit with that. A foreign envoy, on Australian soil, telling Australian women that their rape and torture is a performance.

Ambassador Hillel Newman and his embassy say there is no credible evidence, brand the 11 Australians professional provocateurs, and say the allegations are already proven false. To the survivors’ families, the embassy said its forces treated detainees with great sensitivity.

• READ MORE: A world first: Australia will now investigate Israel over Gaza flotilla brutality
• ‘You’re a liar! You’re a liar!’ NZ foreign minister Peters insults Gaza flotilla torture survivor in Parliament
• ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• Other allegations of Israeli brutality against Gaza flotilla activists

On ABC radio, Newman called the AFP investigation a mistake and warned that if he decided it was a witch hunt, he was not sure how Israel would respond.

How dare he? How dare a foreign ambassador stand in this country and tell Australian women that what was done to them never happened? How dare he reduce Juliet Lamont to a propagandist before one piece of evidence has been tested? A woman who says she was beaten, cable-tied and raped, who has the medical record of a fractured coccyx.

That is not diplomacy. It is

the demonisation of rape victims by the representative of the state they are accusing.

Understand who else he is calling a liar. Penny Wong, the Foreign Minister of Australia, sat with these survivors and told the country she believes them, calling their treatment horrific and unacceptable.

Anne Aly, a minister of the Crown, was also there. So was a senior DFAT official, and a Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police.

By Lamont’s account, every woman in that room believed her, thanked her, and told her she was brave.

So when Newman says the survivors are lying,

he is saying the Foreign Minister of Australia is lying.

He is saying a minister of the Crown is a fool and the federal police are running a witch hunt against the truth. A foreign ambassador has called the senior leadership of the Australian government dupes for daring to believe Australian women.

No contest of the facts
Newman has not contested one allegation with one fact. No ship log. No operational order. No footage. No medical record.

He confirms no request for further footage has even been answered, and says Israel alone will decide whether the AFP is worthy of seeing it. The accused wants to vet his own investigators while branding the victims liars.

That is not a government with nothing to hide.

It is one that has decided contempt is cheaper than cooperation.

Now watch who sprinted to stand beside him. The Australian Jewish Association, the word “Australian” sitting right there in its name and never meaning less.

Confronted with Australians who say they were raped in Israeli custody, the AJA did not call for Israel to be investigated, did not demand it hand over the evidence, and did not stand behind a single Australian woman.

Instead, its chief executive, Robert Gregory, wrote to the AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, demanding the flotilla participants, the Australian citizens, be investigated.

Read that twice, because it is grotesque.

An outfit waving the Australian flag asked Australian police to hunt Australian rape complainants on behalf of the foreign government accused of raping them, and called it “patriotism”.

So drop the pretence and ask where its loyalty lies. Not with the women. Not with the law. Not with the country whose name it wears like a costume. It lies with Israel, and only Israel.

Given a clean choice between abused Australians and the power that abused them, it chose the power and reached for the nearest Australian institution to use as a weapon against Australians.

Juliet Lamont was raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers. this is her story, told by Andrew Brown. #gaza #flotilla #auspol #IDFhttps://t.co/cDagAsu0gK

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) June 11, 2026

Murdoch’s complicity
Then there is Sky News. Handed a story about Australian women alleging rape and torture, the Murdoch network did not interview the survivors, did not put Penny Wong on air, and did not call the AFP.

It handed the microphone to the AJA and let Gregory’s demand to investigate the victims run as the story.

Faced with tortured Australians on one side and the lobby smearing them on the other, Sky knew exactly whose talking points to broadcast. That is not journalism. It is a foreign state’s propaganda, laundered through an Australian network and sold to Australians as though the victims were the villains.

Three voices, one message. A foreign ambassador, a lobby cosplaying as Australian, and a network that has forgotten which country it broadcasts in, all telling this nation that its tortured citizens are liars and that the people who really need investigating are the Australians who came home with broken bones.

There is a word for siding with a foreign power against your own abused citizens. It is not patriotism. It is the opposite. How un-Australian can you be?

This is the same Israeli government whose minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, sanctioned by Australia, filmed the detained Australians and captioned it “welcome to Israel”.

France and Italy have opened war crimes proceedings. Canada has demanded an independent investigation. The survivors have lodged sworn affidavits with the International Criminal Court (ICC). The answers from Newman, the AJA, and Sky News are identical.

Deny everything. Smear the witnesses. Investigate the victims. Protect the state.

So hand it over. Every report, every order, every communication, every witness, every second of footage. If Israel has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear.

Its ambassador says the survivors are lying. The survivors, and the Foreign Minister who believes them, say otherwise. The evidence will decide.

The world is watching. So are Australians. The time for denials is ending. The time for evidence has arrived.

By Andrew Brown in Sydney

This is the biggest story most Australians have not yet grasped.

Australian survivors of physical, psychological and sexual abuse by Israeli authorities met with Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Dr Anne Aly MP, a Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and a senior DFAT official on Monday.

As a result, the Australian government has committed to an independent investigation into the assaults, sexual assaults and torture of the Gaza Flotilla humanitarians.

• READ MORE: Family welcomes Australian investigation into IDF abuse claims
• France opens ‘war crimes’ probe into Israel’s treatment of Gaza activists
• Other allegations of Israeli brutality against Gaza flotilla activists

Read that again. Not an internal Israeli review. Not a department preparing a briefing note. Not a politician expressing concern.

An independent Australian investigation,

with the AFP at the table, into the conduct of the military and prison personnel of one of this country’s closest allies.

That is not normal. There is no comparable moment in the modern history of the relationship. A Western democracy, a reliable friend of Israel, has committed to formally investigating the Israeli state over what it did to that democracy’s own citizens.

That has not happened before. Anywhere.

Eleven Australians
The Australians were among humanitarian volunteers detained by Israel after attempting to deliver food, medicine and aid to starving civilians in Gaza. Eleven of them came home with allegations of physical abuse, assault and, in several cases, sexual assault.

And the investigation did not happen by accident. It happened because a handful of Australians refused to let it be buried.

Juliet Lamont and Neve O’Connor came home injured and traumatised, and instead of retreating into private recovery they kicked the door of the national conversation off its hinges. They put their names to sworn testimony. They sat through Senate estimates. They took their case to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

And when their own prime minister declined to meet them, Lamont’s response was devastating in its simplicity. If Australian survivors can be heard in The Hague but not in Canberra, something has gone badly wrong.

Today they were heard.

“We came here seeking justice for survivors of Israel’s abuse of Australian citizens,” Lamont said after the meeting. “Today we secured an Australian investigation. Believing survivors is the first step. Investigation is the second. Justice is the third.

“There must be consequences for Israel’s brutality.”

O’Connor put the stakes in their proper, global frame. “What happened to us is what Palestinians have been warning the world about for decades. The same methods. The same perpetrators. The same chain of command.

“This investigation matters not only because Australians were harmed. It matters because it exposes the nature of the state responsible.”

That is the heart of it. And it is why this is much bigger than 11 Australians and one flotilla.

Will Israel cooperate?
A credible investigation will need operational footage, body camera recordings, communications records, detention logs, medical records and witness statements. Material capable of establishing exactly what happened.

And this is where Israel is trapped. There are only two paths, and both are damning.

It can cooperate. Hand over the footage, open the logs, produce the records, name the personnel. If its account is true, that material exonerates it completely. A government confident in its own conduct does not hide the evidence. It rushes to produce it.

Or it can refuse. And if it refuses, every Australian is entitled to ask one question. Why? Why would a state that insists it did nothing wrong withhold the one thing capable of proving it? There is only one honest answer, and Israel knows it. You do not bury evidence that vindicates you.

You bury evidence that convicts you.

This is established behaviour. When the United Nations investigated the 2010 Mavi Marmara raid, Israel refused to let its soldiers be interviewed and ran its own inquiry instead. The pattern is decades old. Deny everything, investigate nothing independently, wait for the world to lose interest.

Israel denies
Israel’s ambassador maintains that participants were treated appropriately. Its prison service has issued a flat denial.

Yet National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted footage of detained activists handcuffed and forced to crouch as guards waved Israeli flags in their faces, and called himself proud of it. Let the evidence speak. A state with nothing to hide would already be couriering the files to Canberra.

What makes this explosive is who is asking the questions. Australia is not Iran, not South Africa, not one of Israel’s usual critics. It has spent decades as one of Israel’s most dependable friends.

When a loyal friend opens a file on you, the findings carry a weight no critics ever could.

Remembering Zomi Frankcom
Australians remember Zomi Frankcom. When the aid worker was killed in Gaza, the government accepted an Israeli internal review where it should have demanded answers. That impression has not faded. This time the government has committed to something different,

and it will be held to it.

Penny Wong has told the Senate she believes the women, calling their treatment horrific and unacceptable. Today she went further and committed her government to act. The question is no longer whether the allegations are credible. It is what Australia does with what it finds.

Sanctions. Travel bans. And the bluntest instrument of all. Australia could expel Israel’s ambassador and declare implicated officials persona non grata, putting them on a plane.

A few years ago the idea was fantasy. It is now a live question, and it sharpens with every day Israel stonewalls.

Australia breaks ranks
Understand what is truly at stake. For decades Israel has acted in the settled expectation that it answers to no one, underwritten by the certainty that its Western friends would always look away.

That assumption is what is now on trial in Canberra. The moment a trusted ally follows the evidence wherever it leads, the spell breaks, and other capitals discover they can ask the question too.

This is why the world is watching a story that began with a few small boats.

The 11 Australians have names. Neve O’Connor, Juliet Lamont, Zack Schofield, Surya McEwen, Sam Woripa Watson, Anny Mokotow, Bianca Pullman Webb, Ethan Floyd, Violet Coco, Gemma O’Toole and Helen O’Sullivan. They are not going away.

The era of impunity rested on a single belief. That no friend would ever break ranks. A friend just did.

Asia Pacific Report notes: Three New Zealanders on the Global Sumud Flotilla had similar allegations of brutality and inhuman treatment by the Israeli security forces, along with more than 300 people from more that 40 countries. France has opened a ‘war crimes’ investigation into Israel after the brutality.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war — often referred to as the Six-Day War — not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza — levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population — is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” — the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.

Washington and other Western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing — wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation
The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” — or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state.

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — the 22 percent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.

The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonise all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants.

Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. “We are interested in emptying out Gaza first,” he said.

Given international pressures, he was clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would need to proceed by stealth, so as to attract less attention. Foreshadowing Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza that started in 2007, he proposed that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment” Israel was imposing there.

The ethnic cleansing programme could be hastened, he suggested, by depriving the population of essentials like water. “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water, they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.”

In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel would go on to calculate the minimum number of calories to allow into Gaza so that the people there would grow steadily more malnourished. Or as senior government adviser Dov Weisglass explained in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its “diet”, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment.

They destroyed those “orchards” and transformed the “diet” into a full-blown starvation blockade — a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Targeting innocents
The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives.

Haaretz’s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.

As the newspaper reports: “The historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.”

Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task — as in 1948 — was to prevent their return.

Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli Parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, into which Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers’ job was to murder any Palestinian families trying to get back to their homes.

Here is one soldier’s testimony, reported by Haaretz, that Avnery noted in his autobiography:

We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children.

In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.

Today’s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged. Over the past three years, investigations have repeatedly shown Israel trying to conceal its crimes by secretly bulldozing its civilian victims into mass graves in violation of international law.

It did so, for example, when troops massacred Palestinians seeking aid a year ago, and again when soldiers executed 15 Palestinian emergency workers in an ambush on ambulances in March 2025.

Another soldier troubled by the 1967 shoot-to-kill policy recalled a conversation with his commander: “I asked the officer: And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot them too? The answer I received was: Don’t be a girl.”

There is nothing exceptional about this. Israel is known to have killed more than 1000 babies in Gaza under the age of one since 7 October 2023, not all of them anonymously in strikes from the air.

The Israeli military allowed a group of five premature babies in al-Nasser hospital to die and decompose in their incubators after its soldiers took over the building in late 2023.

Israeli commanders also knew that the first to die from a blockade of aid would be the most vulnerable. Babies froze or starved to death as the population was deprived of shelter, baby formula and food, with their mothers lacking sufficient nutrition to produce milk.

As Soldier 2 noted, Israeli military doctrine encourages soldiers to stop seeing Palestinians, even Palestinian babies, as “human”. Their lives are considered worthless.

Past familiar
Israeli soldiers murdered another Palestinian baby last week in the West Bank, after they ambushed a car driven by a lecturer from Bethlehem university, Fahd Abu Haikal, in the Palestinian city of Hebron, which is under particularly brutal occupation.

One of the soldiers fired into the car, as it was slowing to a halt, from only a few metres away, from where he must have been able to see the passengers inside. The bullet killed Abu Haikal’s seventh-month-old baby, Sam, and wounded his wife, who was holding the infant.

Abu Haikal’s 11-year-old son, also in the car, watched his baby brother bleed to death.

Israeli soldiers have been murdering Palestinian babies for decades. Yet none of it has roused an ounce of the outrage uniformly expressed by Western media and politicians at Israel’s entirely fabricated claim that Hamas killed 40 babies on 7 October 2023.

In fact, only one Israeli baby was killed that day: nine-month-old Mila Cohen, who, like Sam Abu Haikal, was shot in her mother’s arms.

Israel’s 1967 campaign of expulsions in Gaza and the West Bank was not improvised, nor was it done on the spur of the moment. According to Haaretz, the policy had been carefully planned many years in advance.

Since 1948, Israel had been waiting for a moment to carry out additional expulsions and seize the last parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories it had been denied for the completion of its violent settler colonial project.

The 1967 war — against Egypt, Syria and Jordan — provided the pretext.

Ishai Amrami, a senior battalion commander in that war, later admitted: “This thing, which I experienced first hand, was an attempt at massive population transfer.”

As Haaretz observes: “The Palestinians were mere bystanders in this story. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that the Palestinians residing in the West Bank did not take part in the war, and that it was not their war. Nevertheless, they were the ones who paid its price.”

Israel began the mass destruction of Palestinian communities, as it had done after 1948, so there would be no homes for Palestinians to return to. But as Haaretz notes, Israel became a victim of its own rapid military success.

“This was one of the rare instances in the history of the conflict where Israel was forced to back down due to heavy international pressure.”

It hardly needs pointing out that, unlike 1967, such international pressure has been sorely missing over the past three years. The new cast of Western leaders, like Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, once a noted human rights lawyer, have justified Israel’s explicitly exterminationist agenda against the Palestinians of Gaza, terming it “self-defence”.

Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, today’s Western leaders and their media chose to buy Israel the diplomatic time and space it needed — as well as providing the weapons and intelligence — to destroy Gaza. The genocide would have been impossible without their assistance.

Buoyed by this impunity, Israel has tried to spread the destruction further afield, with limited success in Iran and much greater success in south Lebanon.

As Western politicians and media happily forget Gaza, Israel keeps up the relentless pressure and misery there. A so-called “Yellow Line”, demarcating Israeli military control over the destroyed enclave, an area off-limits to Palestinians, has gradually expanded from half the land to 70 percent.

The people of Gaza are quite literally being squeezed out of the ruins of their homeland, as Israel scrambles to find a third country — Egypt, or perhaps Somaliland — willing to take them in.

Excising context
As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

Which is precisely why Western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present — in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon.

Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response — and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that — to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023.

An obvious truth has been obscured: that for at least eight decades, Israel has been exploiting any opportunity it could find to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.

The October 2023 Hamas attack was not a turning-point or a rupture, as it is so often presented in the West.

In 1967 — that is, 56 years before the Hamas attack — Eshkol advised that unforeseen events might accelerate Israel’s stealthy programme of ethnic cleansing. A moment might arrive in the future — what he called an “unexpected luxury solution” — when Israel could rapidly realise its dream of a Palestinian-free Palestine.

“Perhaps we can expect another war, and then this problem will be solved. But that’s a type of ‘luxury,’ an unexpected solution,” he explained to the cabinet.

With the missing context added, as Israel’s Haaretz has done with its new article, the story is transformed.

The events of 7 October 2023 look less like simple savagery and more like a desperate, last-roll-of-the-dice response to decades of Israeli atrocities designed to make conditions for Palestinians so miserable — through pauperisation, confinement, starvation, and murder — that they either flee their homeland or die in situ.

With the missing context added, Israel’s supposed “retaliation” in Gaza — its genocidal rampage — looks like what it actually is: a continuation of its eight-decade ethnic cleansing campaign.

In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, wrote to his son in 1937, 11 years before Israel’s creation: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.”

In a diary entry during the mass expulsions of 1948, Ben-Gurion summarised the mood among his generals: “If we accuse a family — we need to harm them without mercy. Women and children without mercy. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction. During the operation, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”

The goal was the weaponisation of fear, making Palestinians too terrified to remain in their homeland.

Mordechai Maklef, a senior commander in the fledgling Israeli army, noted two years later, in 1950, the logic behind Israel’s policy: “It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived in the Galilee without terror.”

Even if we ignore Palestinian accounts from those times, the small sections of the Israeli archives that have so far been opened to Israeli historians document massacres and systematic rapes of Palestinians in 1948.

In recent Israeli films such as Tantura — the village where a terrible massacre of Palestinians was carried out — old men who served as Israeli soldiers at the time confirm the archival documents, recounting how they personally witnessed Palestinian girls being raped.

Tantura trailer.           Video: Journeyman Pictures

Let us note that weaponised rape continues to this day — in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls Israel’s “network of torture camps”.

These rapes — now often using dogs specially trained for the purpose — are so widespread that they have become impossible to conceal. They have even come, very belatedly, to the attention of mainstream media like The New York Times, provoking a cacophony of protest and threats from Netanyahu to sue.

So routine is the sexual abuse of those Israel detains that international peace activists suffered systematic rapes when hundreds of them were seized last month in international waters off Cyprus, as they began their journey to Gaza to break Israel’s genocidal blockade.

Israel wants the fear to spread, from Palestine itself to anyone who wishes to show solidarity with its people.

Western politicians and the media have barely referred to these horrific crimes against their own citizens. Why? Because to acknowledge those crimes would be to concede that even worse atrocities are being meted out to Palestinians under Israeli rule.

Prisons of complicity
Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it.

If Western publics knew what has really been happening to Palestinians for 80-plus years — first, from the Zionist movement and then from the Israeli state — they might swell further the ranks of the protest marches, making these demonstrations politically impossible to ignore.

If Westerners knew what has really been happening to Palestinians, they might join activists who have been trying to incapacitate Israeli weapons factories, like Elbit Systems, operating quite openly in Western countries such as Britain. They might, as a result, manage to smash the supply of drones and other weapons being used to massacre the people of Palestine and Lebanon.

Instead of thousands, there might be tens or hundreds of thousands of people willing to hold up a placard in the UK opposing genocide, and be arrested as a “terrorism supporter”, overwhelming the prison system and making a mockery of Britain’s supposed “justice” system.

Armed with knowledge rather dulled by ignorance, more Westerners might board boats, amassing an armada that it would be impossible for the Western media to disregard.

But most critically of all, were the real context understood — were Israel’s decades-long pattern of murdering, raping, and expelling Palestinians known — Western publics might wake up to the fact that their political and media class are not moral actors. They are not upholding the values of a superior civilisation. They are not the guardians of international law and a democratic liberal order.

They are imposters. Or more accurately, they are working within political and financial structures that make it impossible to tell truths that would rock a system of power in the West that enriches a tiny elite through a lucrative war machine used to protect the gargantuan profits of the fossil fuel industries.

That system of power drives some Palestinians into an early grave, and others into concentration camps, or exile, or penury.

Meanwhile, it drives us in the West into prisons without physical walls — prisons either of ignorance and complicity, or of knowledge and impotence.

Either way, like Soldier 1, we find our humanity deadened. Our hearts are hardened or broken. The challenge we face is the same as the Palestinians — to find a path out of our confinement.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by Middle East Eye and republished from the author’s Substack with permission.

What is happening right now is [the] erasure of humans, trees and stones, and anything that is Palestinian, by settlers under the support of the military.

— Muntasir al-Maliki, a resident of Kufr Malik

Palestinian Bedouins lived for generations in the occupied West Bank village of Khirbet Zanuta (Zanuta), sustaining themselves through herding, farming and dairy production.

The village was designated as part of Area C under the 1995 Oslo II Accords, placing it under full Israeli military and administrative control.

Today, Zanuta is being eaten away by Israeli outposts and settlements and destroyed by  state-sponsored violence and terror.

• READ MORE: Amnesty International accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
• Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank Bedouin amd herding communities
• Other Gaza genocide, West Bank reports

Just 1km from Zanuta, Israeli settlers established an illegal outpost known as Meitarim Farm in 2021.

The settlers soon began a sustained campaign of violent attacks and threats against Zanuta’s residents.

They set fire to the villagers’ tents and classrooms, broke into their homes, beat them with rifles, threw stones at them, smashed their solar panels and windows, emptied their water tanks and pumped sewage onto their farmland.

The story of Zanuta reflects the fate of dozens of Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities already displaced or at imminent risk of displacement in Area C.

This report lays bare the scale and severity of the ethnic cleansing campaign targeting these communities, carried out in a context of apartheid and unlawful occupation and against the backdrop of an ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip.

The report also demonstrates — contrary to what too many in the international community suggest — that the campaign is not the product of “rogue” settlers, settlers’ organisations or “extremist” government ministers.

In other words, settler violence is not an aberration but an integral part of an organised state policy.

The escalating violence in Zanuta followed decades of systematic discrimination by the Israeli authorities, including constant threats of home demolitions to force them to leave, a common practice adopted by Israel to enforce its system of apartheid.

Zanuta’s residents repeatedly reported settler attacks to the Israeli police, seeking protection, but no action was ever taken.

When the settlers from Meitarim Farm again raided the village on 21 October 2023, this time accompanied by Israeli forces, and threatened to harm residents if they did not leave, the community knew they had no choice but to flee.

In a rare move, in July 2024 and February 2025, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the police and military to facilitate the community’s return and protect residents from attacks.

The Israeli police and military ignored both rulings. Every attempt by residents to return was met with continued settler violence and the acquiescence of Israeli forces.

Digital evidence, interviews and satellite imagery from 30 March 2025 confirm the outcome: Zanuta no longer exists — it has been forcibly depopulated and extensively destroyed.

Meanwhile, the settlers received state backing to intensify their violent campaign. In April 2025, two Israeli ministers — Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strock — held an event at Meitarim Farm where they distributed 19 state-funded all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), cameras and night-vision equipment to settlers living in outposts in the Hebron area.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained why:

“The heroic and pioneering settlers who live here are doing Zionism, and they need security… We are here to build with them and to settle the land…”

… while praising settler land seizures and emphasising the role of ATVs in taking over Palestinian grazing land.

The report demonstrates that the ethnic cleansing campaign in Area C is state-sanctioned, state-driven and state-implemented; it seeks to accelerate the Israeli government’s annexation agenda and settlement expansion through war crimes and crimes against humanity.

As such, the report’s conclusions demand that the international community fully confront and name the Israeli state-driven project, and act decisively to prevent the destruction of Palestinian communities and the annexation of the West Bank.

Amnesty International’s legal analysis
Zanuta is one of 117 predominantly Bedouin and herding Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank that have faced either full or partial displacement due to settler attacks and related access restrictions between January 2023 and April 2026, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

In total, approximately 5910 people were forced to leave their homes, leaving behind them vast, depopulated areas. Most of the affected communities lie in Area C, which comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and has been central to Israel’s territorial and demographic quest for domination for decades because of its natural resources, vital grazing and agricultural land and small Palestinian population.

In late December 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party formed Israel’s 37th government in coalition with two ultra nationalist and religious political parties.

While state-supported settler violence has been a growing concern over the past three decades for Palestinian communities in the West Bank, there has been an unprecedented surge in the scale and intensity of attacks since then.

Tactics became particularly aggressive after 7 October 2023 when Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups attacked southern Israel, killing approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians, and forcibly taking 251 others to the Gaza Strip where they were held as hostages and subjected to abuses.

Amnesty International found that these acts constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In response, Israel launched a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip of unparalleled magnitude, scale and duration and inflicted catastrophic levels of destruction, displacement and starvation on Gaza’s civilian population, committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

While most global attention focused on Gaza, Israel intensified its abusive policies and practices against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with government officials openly encouraging and supporting settler attacks.

Displacement and dispossession: war crimes and crimes against humanity
Ideologically motivated Israeli settlers have terrorised Palestinian communities through repeated raids on their homes and villages, beatings, death threats demanding they leave, persistent harassment, the destruction of property and village infrastructure, cutting off access to water and electricity, and theft of their livestock and belongings.

These practices deliberately intensified an already coercive environment aimed at forcibly displacing and dispossessing Palestinians, manifested in state policies of access restrictions, home demolitions and settlement expansion. Palestinians who have attempted to return have found their villages fenced off or destroyed, or have faced renewed settler attacks, harassment and intimidation, forcing them to flee again.

These settler attacks are the direct result of a state policy that integrated and enabled the settler movement’s vision of “Greater Israel”, an ideology that treats the area extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, including the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), as an integral part of Israel.

Senior Israeli officials in the 37th government have fully embraced this vision and explicitly encouraged, facilitated and condoned settler violence against Bedouin and herding communities as a deliberate tool of displacement with greater openness and force than their predecessors, as they pursued their goal of formally annexing the West Bank under Israeli law.

Since 1967, Israel has been enforcing its occupation through military orders and regulations.

The situation in the OPT, including in Area C of the West Bank, is therefore primarily governed by international humanitarian law (including the rules of the law of occupation); and international human rights law. The same international norms apply to occupied East Jerusalem, illegally annexed by Israel since 1967, despite Israel’s attempts to separate it from the rest of the West Bank through a regime of fragmentation and legal segregation.

In this report, Amnesty International presents conclusive evidence that these violations, perpetrated between January 2023 and December 2025, amount to the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer and the crime against humanity of forcible transfer or deportation, committed as part of a policy to ethnically cleanse Area C of the occupied West Bank by forcibly displacing Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities and expanding illegal settlements at their expense.

Amnesty International uses the term ethnic cleansing in this report to describe a deliberate pattern of conduct aimed at permanently removing Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities from specific areas of the occupied West Bank, in particular Area C.

While ethnic cleansing is not recognised as an independent crime under international law, Amnesty International uses the term in line with the UN Commission of Experts on Former Yugoslavia’s definition, which describes it as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

While this report covers the period between December 2022 and December 2025, these egregious crimes are ongoing and are part and parcel of Israel’s system of apartheid, as shown by Amnesty International’s continuous documentation and reporting of the situation on the ground.

• Read the full Amnesty International report

I interviewed several of the New Zealanders who, as members of the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, were taken hostage by the Israelis in international waters near Cyprus last week and moved to Israel.

The sadism and savagery of their mistreatment — clearly designed to intimidate and stop further attempts to open a humanitarian corridor — gave them a small taste of the network of torture camps that hold thousands of Palestinians in captivity suggestive of Dante’s Inferno.

Their ordeal lasted only four days. Repeatedly kicked, punched, sexually humiliated and beaten unconscious, the cruellest blow was that their own government refused to stand up for them.

• READ MORE: Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

Of the 430 activists from 60 countries, there were several who were raped and many who will carry injuries for the rest of their lives.

This is Hāhona Ormsby’s story:
Itamar Ben-Gvir himself spat at Hāhona Ormsby. Many will recall the footage of the Israeli National Security Minister swaggering among the zip-tied Global Sumud activists last week, each of whom was forced face down before him.

Sadists like doing this sort of thing. It recalled the dreadful footage from last year of him intimidating the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.

Hāhona was being moved through a huge tent. He passed a table where Ben-Gvir was drinking a can of Coke. The minister looked up and saw a man with a facial tattoo. Recognising an Indigenous person, he spat at him!  “It landed on my t-shirt,” Ormsby told me.

“As soon as he spat at me — and I don’t know if the soldier did it to impress Ben-Gvir — but the soldier with me punched me in the back of the head.”

Hāhona Ormsby is Ngāti Maniapoto, a member of a major tribal federation in New Zealand.  He is one of the nicest, most decent people you could possibly meet. His mataora (tattoo) is both sacred and traditional. Earlier that day it had already drawn unwelcome attention.

“He’s a Māori! He’s a Māori!” a female soldier shouted, pointing at Ormsby.  She may have recognised this if she was one of thousands of Israeli soldiers who holiday in New Zealand every year. Our government welcomes them, no questions asked.

Few Palestinian refugees are ever allowed entry.

Personal ‘minder’
As with each activist, Hāhona was provided a personal “minder” soon after he arrived in Ashdod, Israel.

“A soldier came and lifted me up by my zip ties. He pulled down his mask and said, ‘Look into my eyes. I am the craziest motherfucker here. I will hurt you every minute you are with me’.” And that is how the nightmare started.

Throughout the day the New Zealand citizen was intermittently punched, kicked, kneed in the groin, body slammed, stripped naked, and repeatedly hauled up by the plastic zip ties that bound his wrists together.

Several of the captives told me how incredibly tight and painful these zip ties were and how they feared long-term nerve damage.

“The whole time I looked at that soldier I was thinking, ‘I know you kill children, I know you kill women, I know you are that evil,”  Evil. That word has come up several times in my conversations with the activists who got this taste, this small intimate encounter with the genocide.

Hāhona thought of his good friend, fellow Kiwi Julien Blondel who was savagely beaten a couple of weeks earlier. “I felt his wairua (spirit), his brokenness and I now understood that brokenness. That sense of lostness.”

Forced head down for long periods in stress positions, receiving random kicks and body slams throughout the day, he was also menaced by close encounters with dogs. “If you do not stop lying to me, I’m going to lock you in that cell with these dogs!” he was told when an interrogator said he didn’t believe he was a teacher.

Hāhona thought of his whānau, his extended family. He remembered they had urged him to come home after he made it to Türkiye after an earlier interception, an earlier ordeal in April.

“But I thought: my comrades, they were going on and I had to stand with them.”

Beaten unconscious
At one point his “minder” beat him unconscious. The Kiwi citizen was kicked hard in the groin and that night had blood in his urine. “The whole night I thought about the Palestinians and what they are going through. If the Israelis do this to a New Zealander imagine what the Palestinians are going through.”

To me, listening to this, I recognised true courage, true humanity, the kind we seldom encounter and should always revere.

Listening to Hāhona Ormsby I recalled my Catholic upbringing and the words of John 15: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” Ormsby and all those other activists joined the flotilla not out of hatred for Israel but out of love for suffering humanity, for their brothers and sisters in Palestine. They represent the very best of us.

Another man who professes to be a Christian is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Christopher Luxon. For me, his variant bends towards Hell and Israel; our government being a stalwart ally of the Israelis.  The Israeli Ambassador is being called in by the ministry of foreign affairs for what, Ormsby says, is likely “a slap with a wet bus ticket” over the state terrorist attack on New Zealand citizens.

Our government offered no material support to the Sumud activists after the recent ordeals our citizens were subjected to. They issued no warnings to the Israelis to respect our citizens, providing the IDF with a free pass to abuse New Zealanders in captivity.

And, my god, they did. The first duty of a leader is to protect citizens. All this comes in a week that saw Israel added to the United Nations blacklist of nations committing sexual violence in conflict zones.

I won’t repeat all the grim details of what Hāhona went through. Let us just say it was a huge relief when, four days after his capture aboard the Al Tira (named, as all the Sumud boats were, after a Palestinian village that had been erased by the Israeli occupation), Hāhona was transferred to the airport where they boarded planes provided by the Turkish government.

Turkish delight!
Ormsby had his first food in four days on that plane — Turkish delight! On the tarmac at Istanbul they were welcomed by top Turkish politicians and Foreign Ministry staff, a crowd of supporters, media and a fleet of buses and ambulances to shuttle those who needed it to hospital, others to medical checks, forensic interviews to record their testimony, psychological evaluations and eventually a banquet and accommodation provided by the government.

It is worth noting that no officials welcomed them when they returned to New Zealand. No media was there to interview them. It reminded me of the similarly shameful way New Zealanders who fought Franco’s Fascists in Spain in the 1930s were treated on their return, prior to the Second World War.

It’s our collective job to make sure this extraordinary story is shared and remembered — and that we draw the necessary lessons from it.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

The bank accounts of two New Zealanders have been frozen as police probe an extraordinary international case of two alleged Samoan hitmen who confessed to murdering a Sydney gang boss.

Joseph Vaa, 27, admitted on Vietnamese television to gunning down suspected “Coconut Cartel” ringleader Lorenzo Lemalu Tovia outside a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on May 21.

His associate, Steve Tofa, 23, also called Tafia in some news reports, then confessed to being his accomplice in the shooting.

• READ MORE: Samoan police investigate after pair admit killing ‘Coconut Cartel’ ringleader in Vietnam
• Other Samoan crime reports

Fiji police have since confirmed the pair, who are facing down a potential death penalty, transited through the island nation’s international airport.

Tovia died at the scene while his associate Sauni Sam, 27, is in intensive care in hospital with serious injuries.

Tovia is believed to be the mastermind behind Sydney’s Coconut Cartel, which reportedly broke away and declared war on the rival Alameddine gang earlier this year.

Samoa police have frozen the bank accounts of the duo as well as four other people as their investigations into the bizarre international case widen.

Urgent directive
Documents obtained by RNZ Pacific show the transnational crime unit issued an urgent directive to the Central Bank of Samoa (CBS) on Wednesday, ordering six accounts and transactions connected to them to be immobilised.

CBS governor Maiava Atalina Ainuu-Enari immediately ordered commercial banks to freeze accounts belonging to Vaa and Tovia “without delay”, as well as those belonging to two New Zealand nationals, a United States citizen and a Thai.

Those named in the order, issued on May 27 under Samoa’s money laundering laws, were Tafia Tovia (aka Steve Tofa), Vaa Soloa Vaa (aka Joseph Vaa), Connor Songkran Strickert, Fred Olivia Junior Papalii, Olini Atiua and James Tuisavailuu Atua.

The document states the request relates to “an ongoing investigation into a serious violent incident that occurred in Vietnam” and “two Samoan nationals alleged to have been involved in the shooting of another Samoan man, believed to be associated with organised criminal activity”.

In a further connection to New Zealand, three people have been stopped by police investigating the gang hit as they tried to board a flight from Samoa to Auckland.

The man, woman and child were bound for Auckland when they were arrested at Faleolo International Airport in Samoa on Thursday, 7 News Australia reported.

Pair used fake passports, false names – reports
A video on Vietnamese television channel VTV9 showed Vaa and Tofa, wearing black hoods and handcuffs, while being marched into a room by police to confess. The footage showed that the two were reading their confessions from a script.

Fiji police spokesperson Ana Naisoro told RNZ Pacific that the two “travelled through Fiji, using their Samoan passports”.

However, Naisoro declined to confirm local media reports that there had been a security breach, which was only discovered after overseas law enforcement agencies shared intelligence with Fijian border officials.

According to local reports, the suspects used fake passports and false names to transit through Fiji’s main international airport in Nadi.

Fiji police and immigration are now reportedly working closely with international police networks, including Interpol, to trace the pair’s movements during their short stay in the country.

Capital punishment
Australian drug policy researcher Dr Ben Mostyn told RNZ Morning Report the alleged hitmen could face execution under Vietnam’s capital punishment laws.

The Sydney University senior lecturer said the Australian and Samoan governments were opposed to capital punishment and could try to intervene.

“Often when you have these sort of dual citizens in foreign countries you can get diplomatic behaviour from both countries trying to intervene.”

But he said “quite a few” Australian nationals have been executed in Southeast Asia in the past, despite diplomatic efforts.

The duo were initially thought to be Australian but 7News reports they used fake passports and false names; Lang Kenny Trong Minh do and Justin John White, to travel to Vietnam. They were arrested at the Cambodian border less than three days after the shooting.

Dr Mostyn said police believed the killing was meant to send a message to the cartel, which was trying to separate from a larger gang.

Violence around the drug trade is not unusual in the Southeast Asia, he added.

Samoa authorities react
Authorities also identified Unalei Car Rentals in the Apia suburb of Vaitele as an “associated entity” linked to the investigation.

The order stated that the Financial Intelligence Unity (FIU) had grounds to suspect the transactions involved proceeds of serious crime, money landering offences or offences linked to the financing of terrorism.

The development comes after three people due to fly to Auckland on Air New Zealand were were stopped at Faleolo International Airport on Wednesday night.

Sources told the Samoa Observer that a man was given a stop order before boarding the aircraft. Video footage reportedly obtained by the newspaper shows a man dressed in black being escorted by police at the airport.

In a bizarre twist, the police later issued a statement saying they were seeking Strickert for questioning.

The Thai citizen claimed on Facebook that he had already been questioned by the police, was “willing to cooperate fully” and had “nothing to hide”.

‘Highly dangerous’
Lieutenant General Mai Hoàng, the director of the HCM City Police, said authorities would deal strictly with all lawbreakers operating within Vietnamese territory.

“If the subjects provide sincere declarations, they will receive the leniency of Vietnamese law,” he stated.

Local police said the alleged hitmen used “military-grade firearms” during the attack last Wednesday night outside the Cee’f seafood restaurant on Truong Dinh Street in Ben Thanh ward. Surveillance footage showed them fleeing on foot immediately afterwards.

Deputy director of police Nguyen Thanh Hung told state media that police used surveillance measures and digital mapping to trace their movements and escape route.

Investigators issued emergency detention orders against the two suspects and said at the time that they were “highly dangerous” and “prepared to resist arrest”.

The Khmer Times reported that during their initial interrogation, the suspects told police that they were acting on behalf of a individual based abroad.

They said they had arrived at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in HCM city on May 14 and spent several days monitoring the activities of the two Australian victims.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused the Israeli army and internal security agency Shin Bet of repeatedly perpetrating inhumane acts against Palestinian journalists from Gaza.

The Paris-based global media freedom monitoring and advocacy movement says it has interviewed five Gazan journalists who were imprisoned in Israel after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.

They described targeted arrests, interrogations related to their work, torture and brutal abuse at the hands of their Israeli captors.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza journalists media freedom reports

The journalists include Alaa al-Sarraj, a cameraman for the Ain Media production company; Diaa al-Kahlout, local bureau chief of the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed; Shady Abu Sedo, a cameraman with the Palestine Today television channel; and Emad al-Ifranji, the local editor of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds.

The fifth journalist requested anonymity for fear of Israeli army reprisals.

They were all initially imprisoned at Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel, about 30 km from the Gaza Strip, which has been denounced by Israeli and international human rights organisations as a torture camp.

“The facts reported here are damning for the Israeli authorities, including the Israeli army, Shin Bet and judiciary,” said Martin Roux, head of RSF’s Crisis Desk

“They arrested these journalists knowing their profession and, in some cases, because of it.

“The work of these journalists was used as grounds for interrogation amounting to torture, during arbitrary detention legalised by judges. These repeated acts speak to a systematic persecution of journalists in Palestine aimed at preventing media coverage of human rights violations by the Israeli state.

“RSF continues to demand the immediate release of all Palestinian journalists arbitrarily detained by Israel.”

RSF reports:

The time when Palestine Today cameraman Shady Abu Sedo was reporting now seems like a distant memory. In fact, he was last reporting as recently as 18 March 2024. He had gone to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to interview victims of the Israeli bombings, launched five months earlier in retaliation for the attacks by Hamas’s armed wing on 7 October 2023.

Arrested by soldiers after identifying himself as a journalist, he was held for 572 days, initially at the Sde Teiman military base, located 30 kms from the Gaza Strip in the Negev desert, and then in Ofer and Ketziot-Al Naqab prisons.

At the end of these 19 months of torture, deprivation, interrogations and violence, some of it related to his profession, he remains, at 36, scarred by psychological trauma and physical aftereffects that prevent him from returning to work.

“Since you left your camera at Al-Shifa Hospital, I’m going to gouge your eye out,” one of his captors told him, referring to the location of his arrest, before beating him repeatedly in the face.

His right eye has not regained its sight. The scabies he contracted in prison continues to plague him, and he now suffers from epilepsy, insomnia and anorexia.

“After the scenes I have witnessed, I can no longer stay at home within four walls, nor look at the sky without having a fit. If I don’t take sedatives, I suddenly start screaming,” he says.

He was released on 11 October 2025.

None of the five journalists interviewed by RSF was able to resume working as a journalist after their release. When not the result of serious physical and psychological injuries inflicted during their detention, Israeli army destruction has been to blame.

After his release, Shady Abu Sedo did not find his home, which had been hit by Israeli aircraft.

“I lost my house, my car, and all my reporting equipment worth more than $50,000 [about 43,000 euros],” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was detained for 692 days, from 16 November 2023 to 11 October 2025.

“But I could start again from scratch,” said the 35-year-old employee of the Ain Media production company, whose entire archive of reports was destroyed. Two of its journalists were killed by the Israel army, while another is imprisoned and two have been missing since 7 October 2023.

Waving his press card
Like Shady Abu Sedo, the four other media professionals interviewed by RSF said they explicitly told the Israeli army that they were journalists — whose work must be protected in war zones under international law — at the time of their arrest in the Gaza Strip.

Alaa al-Sarraj was arrested on 16 November 2023 at the Netzarim checkpoint, which the Israeli army set up on Salah al-Din Road to screen the population in the centre of the besieged territory.

“I was interrogated there, I confirmed that I was a journalist, and it was on that basis that I was arrested,” he said.

The following month, Diaa al-Kahlout, then director of the Gaza bureau of the Qatar-based international daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (“The New Arab in English”), even brandished his press card while repeatedly stating his profession to the Israeli soldiers who arrested him on 7 December 2023, in Beit Lahya, in the northern Gaza Strip.

“It doesn’t matter,” one of them reportedly told him, before he found himself among a group of several hundred captive men, stripped naked and bound, as evidenced by a video filmed by an Israeli soldier.

Throughout his arrest and subsequent transfer, the journalist, then aged 37, was beaten and interrogated by the soldiers escorting him, as well as by an officer who claimed to belong to Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.

They questioned him about his articles, his alleged ties to Hamas members, and the owner of his media outlet.

When he tried to explain, a soldier gagged him with tape.

“I lost all hope,” he recalls, at that moment, the last before being “thrown into a truck” and forcibly taken into Israeli territory.

“I know you, you’re a journalist”
Now aged 57, Emad al-Ifranji, the Gaza director of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, had no need to introduce himself. He was immediately identified by the Israeli soldier who arrested him on the night of 18 March 2024 at Al-Shifa Hospital, where he had gone to get electricity and an internet connection for work.

“I know you, you’re a veteran journalist,” the soldier reportedly told him.

“I replied that it was true,” Emad al-Ifranji said. “He dragged me roughly out of the outpatient clinic building, and that’s when the ordeal began.”

From Sde Teiman to Ofer, Ketziot and Nafah
This descent into Israeli prison hell began inside the barracks at Sde Teiman.

“From there, you lose your name and become just a number,” said Emad al-Ifranji, who, like Shady Abu Sedo, was held for 572 days.

At the mercy of their captors, the journalists reported having been subjected to violence, humiliation and deprivation. Their accounts share a common thread: terror at the random beatings they endured while constantly blindfolded.

The resulting fractures were systematically left untreated, leading to painful and often irreversible complications. The limited food and sleep they were allowed barely kept them alive to endure the blows and insults of gleeful soldiers. Some witnessed fellow prisoners being murdered and one raped by a dog.

After Sde Teiman, four of the journalists interviewed were taken to Ofer prison, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where a military unit has been established for prisoners from Gaza, and to Ketziot-Al Naqab prison, near the Egyptian Sinai, preceded, in Alaa al-Sarraj’s case, by Nafha prison in the southern Negev.

Violations and ill-treatment of prisoners continued to be the norm there. Only Diaa al-Kahlout was released after 33 days of violence and cruel and inhumane treatment endured on the Israeli military base.

Aman and Shin Bet interrogations
Those who emerged from Sde Teiman speak of a machinery designed to “subjugate men,” said one of the five surviving journalists.

The brutal interrogations, which are a crucial part of the torture machine, subject journalists to special treatment. For example, Shady Abu Sedo, before being handed over to the officer who injured his right eye, was tied for hours to the “fridge,” a cell measuring two metres by one metre equipped with air conditioning that “bites you to the bone.”

He said he was then interrogated specifically about his work by an officer with the military intelligence agency Aman: Had he filmed in the northern Gaza Strip? Was he there reporting on 7 October 2023? Did he know any journalists who had covered the attacks by Hamas fighters?

“I killed all the journalists, and those I couldn’t kill, I brought them here,” Shady Abu Sedo quotes his interrogator as saying. He was then imprisoned for several days in the “disco,” a building in Sde Teiman designed to wear prisoners down by means of powerful speakers that continuously blast music.

Another journalist interviewed by RSF was also subjected to this torture.

While almost all the detainees at Sde Teiman underwent such interrogations, particularly regarding the fate of Israeli hostages, reporters were subjected to “technical questions focused on journalistic work in the Gaza Strip,” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was questioned about his academic background and professional network, including doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital, politicians, political organisations and his colleagues in Gaza.

“They also asked me what you might call strategic questions,” he said.

Emad al-Ifranji and Diaa al-Kahlout, who held positions of responsibility within their media outlets, were subjected to no fewer than four extremely violent interrogations at the hands of Aman and the Shin Bet, a sign of the special attention paid to journalists in an attempt to obtain information deemed tactical by the Israeli authorities in the context of the conflict.

In March 2024, during the first weeks of his imprisonment in Sde Teiman, Emad al-Ifranji was questioned twice, in separate interrogations about 10 days apart, about his interview 13 years before with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, who was wanted by the Israeli army, which regarded him as the organiser of the 7 October 2023 attacks.  Sinwar was killed for this on 16 October 2024.

Regarded by Israel’s justice system as ‘unlawful combatants’
Judges at the Beersheva court have given a veneer of legality to the prolonged detention of civilians identified by Israeli intelligence as journalists.

In a series of expedited hearings conducted via videoconference or telephone, and without legal representation, the Southern District Court of Israel — which has jurisdiction under a 2002 law on “illegal combatants,” revised after 7 October 2023 and applicable to the thousands of detainees in Gaza — has repeatedly approved their continued indefinite detention.

“The assumption is that if a detainee meets the definition of a journalist, this fact is brought to the court’s attention; however, we do not hold specific information to that effect,” Israel’s justice ministry said.

As in the case of its use against journalists, this law, based on a term that is “undefined and is therefore open to abuse and inconsistent with the principle of legality,” according to a 2007 UN report, makes it possible to “to justify arresting all these thousands of detainees from Gaza and keeping them based on secret information for indefinite periods,” said a lawyer specialising in the Israeli prison system for Palestinians.

Four soldiers had laser sights trained on Emad al-Ifranji’s face during his initial court hearing, although the Justice Ministry later claimed to have “no knowledge” of this.

The hearing lasted less than five minutes, but he managed to remind the court that he was “protected under international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Addressing a judge in Beersheba via webcam, Shady Abu Sedo asked, “How can I be an illegal fighter? I’m a journalist.”

The judge’s response was categorical: “You belong to the Palestinian terrorist press.”

A few days before their release, these journalists were summoned by Israeli military intelligence, which routinely subjects detainees to a final act of intimidation. Some of them report having been explicitly warned against resuming their work.

Contacted by RSF regarding the accounts of their imprisonment provided by these five journalists, the Israeli army claimed that it “does not intentionally harm journalists” and that, despite the mounting evidence, it “rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including journalists.”

Shin Bet did not respond to RSF’s questions.

According to RSF data, 19 Palestinian journalists are currently detained arbitrarily by the Israeli authorities. Two of them, like the sources cited in this article, were captured in the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023.

They are Hani Issa, editor-in-chief of Quds Net, and Amjad Arafat, a reporter for the Ain Media production company.

Ali Samoudi, a leading Palestinian journalist and veteran reporter based in Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank, was released on 30 April 2026, after a year of wrongful imprisonment.

On the day of his release, he reported that he lost nearly 60 kilos while held, blaming the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of Israeli authorities.

• Israel is ranked 116th and Palestine 156th out of 180 countries surveyed in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

Samoa police have launched an investigation into a bizarre international case involving two Samoan men who have appeared on Vietnamese television confessing to the murder of a Sydney gang leader in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Samoa Observer reported that Joseph Vaa, 27, admitted gunning down suspected “Coconut Cartel” ringleader Lorenzo Lemalu Tovia outside a restaurant on May 21. Vaa’s associate, Steve Tofa, 23, has confessed to being his accomplice in the shooting.

Tovia died at the scene while his associate Sauni Sam, 27, is in intensive care in hospital with serious injuries.

• READ MORE: Other Samoan crime reports

A video posted by Vietnamese television channel VTV9 showed Vaa and Tofa wearing black hoods and handcuffs while being marched into a room by police to confess.

Australia’s 7News showed footage of the confessions, with a blank looking Vaa clearly reading out a statement.

“Together with Steve, I came to Vietnam and I was the person who directly used the gun to shoot and kill someone on 21 May,” Vaa said.

“I realise that my actions were wrong and I deeply regret what I have done. The Vietnamese police have treated me kindly and provided me with food and drinks to ensure that I remain in good health.”

Tofa, also called Tafia in some news reports, who looked frightened, then admitted to being an accomplice in the crime.

‘Plans to flee’
“Me together with Vaa, were hired to come to Vietnam to look for two victims, Lorenzo Lemalu Tovia and Sauni Sam, in order for my friend to use a gun and kill them. Although I had plans to flee Vietnam immediately after committing the crime, it was impossible to escape from the Vietnamese police and I accept responsibility for the law,” Tofa said.

“I would like to advise anyone who intends to come to Vietnam to commit crimes to abandon that idea immediately because you will be arrested by the Vietnamese police.”

The duo were initially thought to be Australian but it is understood they used fake passports to travel to Vietnam and were arrested at the Cambodian border less than three days after the shooting.

Lieutenant General Mai Hoàng, the director of the HCM City Police, said authorities would deal strictly with all lawbreakers operating within Vietnamese territory.

“If the subjects provide sincere declarations, they will receive the leniency of Vietnamese law,” he stated.

Local police said the alleged hit men used “military-grade firearms” during the attack last Wednesday night outside the Cee’f seafood restaurant on Truong Dinh Street in Ben Thanh ward. Surveillance footage showed them fleeing on foot immediately afterwards.

The deputy director police, Nguyen Thanh Hung, told state media that police used surveillance measures and digital mapping to trace their movements and escape route.

‘Highly dangerous’
Investigators issued emergency detention orders against the two suspects and said at the time that they were “highly dangerous” and “prepared to resist arrest.”

The Khmer Times reported that during their initial interrogation, the suspects told police that they were acting on behalf of a individual based abroad.

They said they had arrived at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in HCM city on May 14 and spent several days monitoring the activities of the two Australian victims.

Police have also detained Vietnamese citizen Nguyễn Trọng Nghĩa, 24, a resident of the southern province of Tây Ninh, along with seven other Vietnamese nationals, for allegedly helping the suspects evade capture and failing to report the crime.

Nghĩa reportedly worked as a passenger transport driver on the Ho Chi Minh City-Tây Ninh route.

Meanwhile, Samoa’s acting Police Commissioner, Leiataua Samuelu Afamasaga, said officers were working with Australian police to investigate Vaa and Tofa’s criminal connections.

Police would need to try and determine who funded the trip to Vietnam to carry out the hit, Leiataua said.

Vaa and Tofa, an aspiring bodybuilder, had reportedly been working for a telecommunications company in Samoa and were involved in the local basketball scene.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable.

This role goes beyond the US State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information; it includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured.

It also includes the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.

• READ MORE: Global Sumud Flotilla urges probe of US complicity in members’ abduction and torture by Israel
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture

The US-funded ‘torture ship’
The vessel at the centre of many severe abuses, including systematic torture and sexual assault, was a converted naval landing craft that participants have come to call the “torture ship”.

The vessel is the INS Nahshon, built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding (a subsidiary of Bollinger Shipyards) and fully financed under the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme.

Delivered to the occupation navy in 2023, this ship was used as a floating prison during the illegal April 29 and 30 interceptions off the coast of Crete, where at least 30 participants were injured severely enough that they had to be taken to the hospital.

Brutality inside ‘The beating container’
During the vessel’s deployment, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container.

Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalised each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” said humanitarian activist Yassine Benjelloun, who was also tasered multiple times.

“What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Megan Marie Dominguez, a US activist, was thrown into the “beating container”, struck with sufficient force to render her nearly unconscious, then passed to a second set of soldiers armed with tasers and what she describes as “other toys to beat people up with.”

Dr Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on board, described a medical situation unprecedented in her professional experience.

She documented:

• 35 participants with fractures, including broken ribs, shoulder dislocations, and humerus fractures.
• Severe head injuries, concussions, and eye/ear trauma.
• At least two individuals forcibly injected with unidentified substances that left them drowsy and disoriented.
• 14 cases of sexual assault, as well as the systematic, deliberate removal of Muslim women’s hijabs.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” said Dr Jihan. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and the most horrible feeling that I have.

“It was so devastating.”

Dr Jihan: ‘I was punched, kicked and choked” by the Israeli military Video: News Straits Times

American munitions used against civilians
The weapons deployed on board were also American-made. Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI).

These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.

A structural policy of complicity — the weapons.
The ship. The diplomatic silence. None of this was accidental. Former US State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest over US arms transfers to Israel, is unequivocal:

“Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorised by law.

“INS Nahshon’s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.

“When this sale was authorised, US officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform. The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 [in which 10 Turkish people were killed by Israeli forces], but is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse — whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

This is not an isolated incident or the failure of a single administration; it is a structural, bipartisan commitment by the United States government to prioritise its strategic relations above the protection of its own citizens and its own laws.

By using a separately constructed, “broken” vetting process, the State Department routinely circumvents the 1997 Leahy Law, which strictly prohibits US military assistance to foreign units credibly accused of gross human rights violations like torture and rape.

While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the US government continues to look away.

Demands to the United States government
The israeli regime continues to commit genocide using US-built ships and US-made weapons.

The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access.

The Global Sumud Flotilla calls on the United States government to take immediate action:

• Open immediate hearings into the deployment of FMF-funded military assets, including INS Nahshon, against US citizens.
• Suspend all arms transfers to the israeli regime pending that investigation.
• Enforce the Leahy Law without exemption or special processes for the regime.
• Provide a full accounting of every consular and distress request filed by families of detained participants that was dismissed or ignored.
• Investigate the use of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) munitions, produced under Department of Defense (DOD) contracts, against unarmed civilian humanitarians.
• End unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Richard Chambers says Pacific Island nations are addressing corruption among their police and customs officials.

Chambers has concluded a trip to Suva, Fiji, for the inaugural Pacific Transnational Crime Summit, which brought together Pacific police chiefs, ministers and prime ministers to discuss what is now a “destination market” for drugs and human trafficking.

He said there was a willingness among police chiefs, most of whom are dealing with corruption in their ranks, to discuss these issues with humility.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji crime reports

“We appreciate that it’s pretty hard sometimes to turn down an offer of a large sum of money when the incomes that many police staff earn aren’t great,” Chambers said.

“New Zealand will support our Pacific neighbours when it comes to particular problems, and that’s not new; we’ve done that for many years.”

New Zealand Police have confirmed their involvement in a six-month investigation into 11 Fiji police officers who were allegedly involved with Auckland-based drug dealers.

The investigation followed a leak of more than 100 text screenshots depicting officers accepting bribes and tipping people off about impending raids.

No specifics
Chambers refused to provide any specifics about that case or any others in which New Zealand may be involved.

However, he said that he had “absolute trust” in the Fiji Police Force and its Commissioner, Rusiate Tudravu.

“He talks quite openly about the challenges that he’s encountered as the commissioner there, and what he’s doing to stamp it out,” Chambers said.

“I’ve been a police officer for 30 years, and over that time I’ve done a lot of work with Fiji … I’ve never experienced any issues myself.”

The Pacific is a strategic transit point for traffickers both in Southeast Asia and Central America. Referred to colloquially by officials and experts as the “narco highway”, product is funnelled through Pacific communities on its way to Australia and New Zealand, where street prices are among the highest in the world.

Chambers’ Australian counterpart Krissy Barrett called this her “nation’s shame”, making for a “moral responsibility” to act. Australia has previously committed AU$400 million to regional policing efforts.

Pacific watch
One action stemming from the summit is a new dob-in line for Pacific communities, calling on the public to “be the community’s eyes and ears.”

The online platform, dubbed Pacific Watch, “will allow the public to” safely and anonymously report suspicious behaviour, drug-related activities and other crimes threatening community safety,” as reported by the Fiji Sun. Its slogan will be: ” Recognise, Remember and Report.”

The website features links to every Pacific country’s police page, as well as a “report now” button that leads to a Microsoft Form. It prompts the user to offer the suspect’s name or nicknames, their appearance and features, occupations, transport and a specific address, on top of describing the activity.

“Phase two” will reportedly include the ability to upload photos and videos as evidence.

It comes after the AFP announced a new office in Bogota, Colombia, alongside Colombian, Mexican, US, Interpol and Pacific forces, with a focus on disrupting supply lines. It would serve as an intelligence source for Pacific officials at one of the key entrances and exits of the narco highway.

New Zealand will send a liaison officer there “before Christmas”, Chambers said.

Military presence
Chambers said military officials from across the world were crawling at the summit.

“[One] thing that has been a particular focus this week is the coordination that needs to occur across all maritime activity,” he said.

“So, besides the Australian Navy, here we have the French Navy, the Mexican Navy, the Colombian Navy.”

However, he said that the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF), which has partnered with the Fiji Police for the country’s primary counter-drug taskforce, were absent.

Fiji police are currently investigating the death of known drug pusher Jone Vakarisi, who was beaten to death in a military prison. Military officers have also reportedly patrolled streets in Fijian drug hotspots without police present.

Tudravu has continuously maintained that his officers are in control of all counter-drug operations in the country.

It is unclear whether the Australian and Fiji police, who co-convened the summit, extended an invitation to the military.

RNZ Pacific has asked the Fiji Police and the RFMF for comment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.