The Global Sumud Flotilla is demanding the New Zealand government intervene to uphold international law, after being intercepted by Israel.

It said 22 boats carrying aid for Gaza were illegally intercepted in international waters near the Greek island of Crete.

New Zealanders Jay O’Connor, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel, and Sean Janssen were among the 175 people detained.

• READ MORE: Freedom Flotilla Coalition calls for the immediate release of Global Sumud Flotilla organisers
• NZer in flotilla intercepted by Israel has concussion and possible broken rib, says wife
• Former Greek minister slams ‘Western complicity’ over brutal Israeli kidnap of Gaza flotilla leaders
• Israeli forces raid Global Sumud Flotilla boats in international waters
• NZer Rana Hamida reports
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

O’Connor had received concussion and a possible broken rib, while Blondel was hit in the face, the Global Sumud Flotilla said.

“These citizens are part of a completely legal action onboard vessels that are lawfully exercising navigation rights under article 87 of UNCLOS — to deliver essential aid, open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza, and break the illegal siege on Gaza by the Israeli regime,” it said.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry had called organisers “professional provocateurs” and said it would not allow “the breach of the lawful naval blockade on Gaza”.

Global Sumud Flotilla said that Blondel had assured the team he was “up to be continuing this going forward,” as the rest of the Flotilla continues to sail.

Two other New Zealanders
Two other New Zealanders, Hāhona Ormsby and Samuel Leason, are currently regrouping with the others in Greece.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it understood up to six New Zealanders had been “caught up” in the interception.

It told RNZ on Saturday that it was aware of allegations made about the treatment New Zealanders had faced while in custody.

“Consular officials in Wellington, New Zealand’s Embassies in Rome and Ankara, and New Zealand’s Honorary Consul in Greece have been working throughout the night and over the past few days to gather information, provide advice to families, and support New Zealanders involved,” it said.

“Immediately following the interception of the flotillas on Thursday, the New Zealand government made it clear to Israel that the safety of New Zealanders involved was paramount and that international law must be upheld.

“These and other views were made clear to Israel’s Ambassador to New Zealand and by New Zealand’s Ambassador to Israel, stationed in Ankara.”

The ministry added that New Zealand had a long-standing “do not travel” advisory in place for Gaza, explicitly warning against any attempt to enter by sea.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. Israel is also on trial for genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa supported by other countries.

The wife of one of the New Zealanders in the flotilla intercepted by Israel in international waters says he has a concussion and possible broken rib.

Jay O’Connor, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel and Sean Janssen were among almost 180 people who had disembarked on the Greek island of Crete.

Flotilla organisers said they were illegally abducted after Israel boarded, disabled and destroyed boats in the flotilla headed for Gaza.

• READ MORE: Former Greek minister slams ‘Western complicity’ over brutal Israeli kidnap of Gaza flotilla leaders
• Israeli forces raid Global Sumud Flotilla boats in international waters
• NZer Rana Hamida reports
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

They said Julien Blondel had taken “several blows to the face” and had been hospitalised along with Jay O’Connor.

The organisers said Blondel had emphasised his commitment to the people of Gaza telling the team that he is “up to be continuing this going forward”.

They also said Sean Janssen and Mousa Taher are now in Turkey waiting for the flotilla to arrive.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry had called organisers “professional provocateurs” and said it would not allow “the breach of the lawful naval blockade on Gaza”.

31 ‘transferred’ for medical aid
Greece said 31 people of the 176 people who disembarked at a port in Crete were transferred for first aid.

O’Connor’s wife, Chrissy O’Connor, had not yet been able to speak with him.

“I’ve received some messages from him and he sent through a recorded voice message, so I’ve heard his voice and I’ve seen a photo,” she said.

“So that’s a huge relief… so I know some things but still waiting to be able to speak with him properly,” O’Connor added.

“It’s better than not knowing, at least I know he’s off the boat, he’s safe even if he’s a bit roughed up.”

O’Connor said she did not know for sure how her husband was but that he had a concussion and potentially a broken rib.

“That’s just from the brief message I had from him, I don’t know what the outcome of medical assessment was at the moment.”

Jay O’Connor had not yet shared details of how he was injured, his wife said.

‘A lot’ of flotilla activists injured in interception
Two other New Zealanders, Samuel Leason and Hāhona Ormsby evaded capture.

Ormsby, of Ngāti Maniapoto, told RNZ’s Māpuna programme the operation happened very quickly.

“It pretty much happened in a blink of eye,” he said.

“They came in the dark, all of a sudden we heard brief mayday calls go out and then they blocked all our radio communication, our Starlink, so there was no communication between the boats, we could only just see what was going on and then the battleships just rolling in between us,” Ormsby said.

“I know on our boat, we had a big boat come past, a big ship, battleship come past about 150m off our port side, shine a big light on us and then as they shined their lights on other boats that’s when we were able to slip through.”

Ormsby said “a lot” of flotilla activists had been injured in the interception.

He said 30 boats in the flotilla managed to get away and went in different directions.

“It was quite an ordeal,” he said.

“I think there was four big battleships, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) on RIBs coming up to our boats and a lot of drones and drone activity around us.”

Plan to ‘keep sailing’ for Gaza
Ormsby told RNZ’s Māpuna the intention of those who got away was to keep sailing for Gaza.

“We will leave Crete, make our way to Turkey to pick up some comrades and more boats, and then from there sail on to Gaza.”

Reuters reported two activists, identified as Saif Abu Keshek — a Spanish national of Palestinian origin and Brazilian Thiago Avila had been “detained”.

The Spanish and Brazilian governments issued a joint statement calling Israel’s action blatantly illegal and outside its jurisdiction, Reuters said.

Israel said Abu Keshek was suspected of affiliation with a “terrorist organisation” and Avila of illegal activity, and both would be taken to Israel for questioning.

Chrissy O’Connor said the flotilla was an international humanitarian organisation with citizens from across the world, that included her husband.

“He’s a trained paramedic and an engineer… I think he has wanted to be able to use his skills in a practical way to do something,” she said.

Not among abducted protesters
The New Zealand delegation of Global Sumud Flotilla said Hāhona Ormsby and Samuel Leason were not among those taken to Greece.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAT) said it was aware of allegations made about treatment while in custody.

It said it did not yet have full details and officials were seeking more information.

“Consular officials in Wellington, New Zealand’s Embassies in Rome and Ankara, and New Zealand’s Honorary Consul in Greece have been working throughout the night and over the past few days to gather information, provide advice to families, and support New Zealanders involved,” it said.

“Immediately following the interception of the flotillas on Thursday, the New Zealand government made it clear to Israel that the safety of New Zealanders involved was paramount and that international law must be upheld,” MFAT added.

“These and other views were made clear to Israel’s Ambassador to New Zealand and by New Zealand’s Ambassador to Israel, stationed in Ankara.”

MFAT said New Zealand had a long-standing ‘do not travel’ advisory in place for Gaza, explicitly warning against any attempt to enter by sea.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. Israel is also on trial for genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa supported by other countries.

Palestinian New Zealander Rana Hamida reports from the Global Sumud Flotilla support team.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has slammed European leaders — and the West at large — for what he said is their complicity in Israel’s abduction of two leaders of the Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla seized off the coast of Greece.

In what numerous critics have called an act of “piracy”, Israeli authorities intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla on Thursday in international waters 45 nautical miles west of the Greek island Kythira and 600 nautical miles from Gaza, according to Greenpeace, whose MV Arctic Sunrise was the aid convoy’s most prominent vessel.

About 175 activists aboard 22 vessels were seized by Israeli forces. The BBC reported on Friday that most of them had been released in Greece.

• READ MORE: Israeli forces raid Global Sumud Flotilla boats in international waters
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

Some of the flotilla members said they were beaten and dragged while handcuffed. The Washington Post reported 34 people—including citizens of Australia, Colombia, Italy, Ukraine, and the United States—required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries.

Detained activists also said they were denied food and water and were forced to sleep on deliberately flooded floors.

Flotilla organizers said 31 of the remaining vessels will continue heading toward Palestine in a bid to “break the illegal siege of Gaza.”

Two members of the flotilla steering committee — Saif Abu Keshek and Thiago Ávila — were taken to Israel for interrogation.

Abu Keshek is a Spanish-Swedish citizen of Palestinian origin. Ávila is Brazilian. Israel’s Foreign Ministry claimed that Abu Keshek is “suspected of affiliation with a terrorist organization” and Ávila is “suspected of illegal activity.”

As is very often the case with Palestinians it has killed, Israel provided no evidence to support its claims against the accused.

Spain and Brazil have been outspoken critics of Israeli human rights crimes, and both countries have formally joined the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Varoufakis noted on X that Ávila “has distinguished himself with repeated attempts to break the illegal, genocidal, Israeli blockage of Gaza.”

“Unlike the remaining abducted members of the Sumud Flotilla crew, which the Israeli navy disembarked in Crete, Saif and Thiago are detained and bound for an Israeli prison,” the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 co-founder continued.

“This is a double violation of international law: First, Israel abducted them illegally at sea. Second, Israel is now transporting them, violently, illegally, to one of its notorious prisons.”

It is not known where Israel will send the two men. Ávila was previously held at Ayalon Prison in Ramla, along with other activists seized from the Madleen last summer. Ávila reportedly refused deportation papers and launched a hunger strike, prompting prison authorities to place him in solitary confinement.

While it is not as notorious as the Sde Teiman military prison — where former inmates and Israeli staff have described torture, rape, murder, and other abuse of Palestinians — Ayalon Prison’s alleged human rights violations include torture, medical neglect, and deliberately degrading conditions.

“Meanwhile,” Varoufakis said yesterday, “the Greek government is cooperating fully in Israel’s criminal behavior, effectively surrendering its search and rescue obligations and conniving with Israel to victimise the brave crews of the Sumud Flotilla who are steadfastly, through their activism, defending international law as well as the verdict of the International Court of Justice, which has clearly and unequivocally declared Israel’s continued naval blockade of Gaza and its occupation of the Palestinian territories illegal.

“Through their complicity and their silence, the Greek government, the European Union, the mainstream media, the West more generally, are flouting, indeed they are trashing, their supposed, much publicised, ‘Western values,’” he added.

BREAKING: The Israeli naval vessel that abducted the 180 Sumud Flotilla crews off the coast of Crete (an act of piracy and a gross violation of the Law of the Sea) is intend on victimising two of them: Saif Abukeshek, a Spanish citizen of Palestinian origin, and Thiago Ávila, a…

— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) May 1, 2026

Varoufakis is calling on the world to demand:

• The immediate release of Saif and Thiago;
• An end to Israel’s criminal behavior in international waters;
• The termination of Israel’s illegal Gaza blockade; and
• That the Greek government and the European Union cease and desist from lending logistical and moral support to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing campaigns in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Varoufakis’ call was echoed by the Global Sumud Flotilla, which demanded that “all governments do all they can to pressure the Israeli regime to release all the illegal abductees.”

Spanish officials including Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also decried Thursday’s raid and demanded the release of the flotilla activists while calling for an end to EU-Israel Association Agreement, a bilateral trade and economic policy framework.

“Israel is once again violating international law by assaulting a civilian flotilla in waters that do not belong to it,” Sánchez said on X. “Our government is doing everything necessary to protect and assist the detained Spaniards. But that is not enough.

“The EU must suspend the association agreement NOW and demand that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu comply with the law of our seas.”

On the other hand, US State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggott condemned the flotilla as a “pro-Hamas initiative” and called on allied countries “to take decisive action against this meaningless political stunt”.

The United States provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid and diplomatic support including repeated vetoes of United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions for Gaza.

Israel maintains that its actions were legal. Its officials have repeatedly invoked the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea — often shortened to the San Remo Manual — to justify the interception and seizure of flotilla vessels attempting to reach Gaza on the high seas.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of cities including Athens, Barcelona, Gaza City, Istanbul, Madrid, Milan, Naples, Paris, and Rome on Thursday as protesters showed solidarity with the flotilla members and condemned Israel’s actions.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan held a phone call today with his Spanish counterpart to discuss the illegal Israeli intervention against the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters off Crete.

The intervention has endangered the lives of numerous civilians and… pic.twitter.com/ZbVlGdFYNl

— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) April 30, 2026

Meanwhile, Gazans continue to suffer from Israel’s bombing and blockade, which have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened around 2 million others.

Earlier this week, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari said that despite “some improvements in access and aid delivery… food security remains a challenge, while essential services, particularly water, sanitation, and health, are again on the brink of collapse”.

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.

Republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons licence.

In middle of this month, two regencies in Papua again became epicentres of grief and national controversy.

Puncak Regency in Central Papua and Yahukimo in Mountainous Papua were struck by shooting incidents that claimed more than a dozen lives.

The tragedy reopened old wounds about how armed violence too often misses its target, making innocent people victims.

• READ MORE: Wenda calls on Indonesia to halt crackdown on peaceful Papua protests
• Stop selling arms to Indonesia, West Papuans urge Netherlands
• Other West papua reports

More than that, the events ignited a serious dispute between the official account of Indonesian state security forces and survivor testimonies, calling into question the credibility of the state’s response amid a genuine humanitarian emergency. The wounds and sorrow run so deep that no remedy seems capable of healing them.

The deadliest incident occurred in the Kembru sub-district of Puncak Regency. Initial reports spoke of an exchange of fire between the Indonesian military (TNI) and an “armed criminal group (KKB)” — as Indonesian authorities describe resistance groups — on April 14.

But the public was truly shaken days later when the Minister of Human Rights revealed that 15 civilians had been killed and seven wounded — overwhelmingly non combatants, including women and children.

What is striking is that the minister’s statement was delivered in the context of a “firefight” between the TNI and the armed resistance.

Meanwhile, the TNI, in a clarification on April 21, offered a different narrative. According to the TNI source, there were two separate incidents: first, a shootout that killed four members of the Free Papua Organisation (TPNPB/OPM), and second, a massacre of civilians carried out by the OPM itself.

With that statement, the TNI implicitly denied that its troops had fired on civilians. Sorrow splits between the official version and the cry for truth rising from the earth.

When survivors speak: ‘They were in uniform’
The contradiction peaked when the media interviewed survivors in hospitals. One survivor stated unequivocally that people in military uniforms shot him and other villagers. This is no mere rumour.

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), which conducted an initial investigation, found that several survivors consistently identified state security forces as the perpetrators.

Even more troubling, a report by the Papua People’s Assembly (MRP) for Central Papua stated that TNI soldiers from the Habema, Maleo, and Damai Carstenz units chased and attacked civilians in Makuma, Milome, and Kembru villages. The assault involved four helicopters, drones, firearms, and grenades.

One father, whose child was among the victims, told the Governor and Vice Governor at the hospital that villagers were attacked from the air around five or six in the morning, with grenades dropped from helicopters and drones. Some grenades, he said, were thrown directly into honai — traditional Papuan houses.

“They threw grenades by hand from above,” he said, cradling his wounded child.

Civil society reports indicate the military operation actually began on April 13, when the TNI attacked a TPNPB base in Pogoma District — previously acknowledged as a battlefield.

Two days later, the assault expanded to refugee camps in Kembru District, where thousands of civilians were sheltering. The result: innocent civilians became targets.

The MRP recorded at least nine civilian deaths, including a baby in the womb whose mother was also killed, plus 14 wounded. Komnas HAM reported 12 civilian deaths, while the Ministry of Human Rights said 15.

The discrepancy reveals a lack of coordination and verification at the central level, let alone the difficulty of accessing isolated locations.

More harrowing is the testimony of a woman seven months pregnant, treated at Dian Harapan Hospital in Jayapura. She was shot in the lower jaw.

In a soft but firm voice, she said the perpetrators were state security forces. She described troops attacking the village with helicopters and ground forces, using grenades and firearms. Even after the shooting, she said, uniformed soldiers posed for photos with the victims.

If true, this incident can no longer be called a mere “firefight” — it is a potential gross human rights violation. Physical wounds can be treated, but the trauma of being betrayed by those who were supposed to protect you lasts a lifetime.

Local government’s fast action amid the controversy
Amid the deadlock, the local government moved with noteworthy speed. The Governor of Central Papua, Meki Nawipa, together with Vice Governor Deinas Geley, visited Mulia Regional Hospital on April 17.

The governor declared that the provincial government would cover all medical costs and guarantee education for children who lost parents. An integrated emergency team, including the Indonesian Red Cross, was formed for data collection, evacuation, and psychosocial support.

The Regent/Mayor of Puncak Regency, Elvis Tabuni, unable to hold back tears, distributed aid and condolence payments. Yet challenges remain because access to the Kembru sub-district is difficult, isolated and prone to armed clashes.

The villagers’ sorrow was somewhat eased by the presence of local leaders, but the root wound — the uncertainty of justice — remains embedded.

Yahukimo, different pattern, same grief
Almost simultaneously, Yahukimo Regency was rocked by the shooting of a state civil servant, Yemis Yohame, head of the Housing Subdivision. He was found dead from gunshot wounds on April 21.

Unlike in Puncak, the response was relatively clearer. The Regent/Mayor of Yahukimo quickly stated that the shooting was a criminal act by an “armed criminal group (KKB)”, with no political agenda. The TNI and police launched an operation to hunt the perpetrators.

The contrast is stark. In Puncak, a large scale armed clash caused widespread civilian harm, with strong allegations of state human rights violations. In Yahukimo, the action was a targeted assassination.

For Yemis Yohame’s family, the grief is just as deep. The problem of violence in Papua is not homogeneous. But the most alarming case is Puncak, because it involves potential gross human rights violations by state forces.

If state troops shot civilians, that is not merely “imprecise fire” — it is a serious violation of the right to life and safety.

Komnas HAM stressed that any attack on civilians — by state or non state actors — violates international humanitarian law, and urged the TNI commander to evaluate operations by the Habema Task Force and pursue transparent legal action.

Without such steps, the wounds of Puncak will remain open.

Church leaders also condemned the violence. Father Yanuarius Yance Yogi criticised both sides for sacrificing innocent civilians.

“Both parties have sophisticated equipment. Yet why must civilian lives be sacrificed?” Reverend Dominggus Pigai said the situation in Papua is a military and humanitarian emergency zone. Reverend Benny Giay said the indiscriminate attack on civilians proves the state does not want Papuans to live on their own land.

Displaced grief: A humanitarian emergency
Reports indicate the military operation has triggered a massive wave of displacement. Of the twenty-five districts in Puncak Regency, only two have not seen their people flee.

Thousands of civilians are scattered in forests, neighbouring villages, and other regencies such as Timika, Nabire, and Jayapura. They live in fear, lacking food, clean water, and health services.

The Indonesian Red Cross has carried out cremations, but medical care on the ground remains extremely limited. The displaced endure an uncertain existence: driven from their own villages, stripped of shelter, and haunted by the trauma of grenade blasts and helicopter roars.

The hope of Papuans
The tragedy in Puncak presents the administration of President Prabowo Subianto with a profound test of the state’s commitment to protecting its citizens and upholding human rights. In addressing this complex situation, the government is respectfully encouraged to consider a series of measured and transparent steps that prioritise truth, justice, and the welfare of all Papuans.

First, the administration may wish to break from the pattern of contradictory official narratives by publicly acknowledging the credibility of survivor testimonies and the preliminary findings of Komnas HAM and the Papua People’s Assembly.

Rather than denial or ambiguity — which risk deepening perceptions of a legitimacy gap — the government could demonstrate leadership by establishing an independent, joint fact finding mission.

Such a mission would ideally include Komnas HAM, respected Papuan civil society leaders, church representatives, and, where appropriate, international observers, all operating with full access to affected villages and operational documents.

The objective would be to uncover the factual truth about what transpired, why civilians became victims, and who bears responsibility, without prejudging outcomes. Should evidence confirm gross human rights violations, the administration is respectfully urged to ensure that legal proceedings move forward genuinely.

Beyond the investigative track, the administration is encouraged to recognise that Puncak has already entered a humanitarian emergency. The displacement of thousands of civilians from nearly all districts demands a coordinated, large scale response that goes beyond the commendable but limited efforts of local authorities and the Indonesian Red Cross.

The government could consider declaring a temporary humanitarian corridor to enable the unhindered delivery of food, clean water, medical supplies, and psychosocial support to displaced populations hiding in forests and neighbouring regencies.

Evacuation plans, with special attention to pregnant women, children, the elderly, and the injured, would offer immediate relief. Working in partnership with the provincial government, the central administration might also commit to documenting every displaced family and restoring their basic rights to shelter, health, and education before any discussion of return.

Without such humanitarian action, broader peace and development efforts risk being seen as hollow.

Concerning the security sector, a diplomatic but firm reassessment may be timely. The administration could consider ordering a temporary suspension of offensive military operations in civilian populated areas of Puncak pending the outcome of the independent investigation.

The current approach — relying on aerial surveillance, drones, and ground manoeuvres — has, according to multiple testimonies, failed to consistently distinguish between armed group members and non-combatants, as illustrated by grenade attacks on honai homes and the wounding of a pregnant woman.

A review of rules of engagement, with specific prohibitions on the use of air delivered explosive weapons in or near civilian settlements, would align security practices with international humanitarian law.

Furthermore, the administration might explore a gradual shift from a military dominated posture toward a strengthened civilian led security framework that places the protection of civilians at its centre. Allegations that soldiers posed for photographs with victims, if substantiated, point to serious breaches of military ethics; in such a case, transparent court martial proceedings would help restore public trust.

Equally important is a broader political and developmental strategy that addresses the root causes of recurring violence. The administration is respectfully encouraged to initiate a genuine, inclusive dialogue process that brings together not only security forces and armed groups but also traditional leaders, church authorities, women’s organisations, and civil society representatives from across Papua.

Such a forum would be empowered to discuss not merely ceasefires and humanitarian access, but also longstanding grievances related to economic exploitation, land rights, political representation, and historical injustices.

In parallel, the government could reconsider the scale and nature of development spending in Papua, shifting from large scale extractive projects that often displace communities toward locally controlled economic initiatives that create tangible benefits for Papuan families.

Education, healthcare, and infrastructure built in genuine partnership with Papuan communities would likely build more trust than any number of military operations.

Finally, the administration may find value in engaging other stakeholders constructively. Komnas HAM deserves enhanced resources and political protection to conduct long term monitoring of both the investigation and the humanitarian response. Church leaders across Indonesia can be important moral partners in demanding accountability while accompanying Papuan communities in their grief.

International partners, while respecting Indonesia’s sovereignty, could be invited to offer technical assistance for independent investigations and humanitarian operations, and to continue diplomatic dialogue on civilian protection in Papua.

The media, too, has a role in connecting past and present violence to hold power accountable, rather than treating each tragedy as an isolated event.

Ultimately, what happened in Puncak and Yahukimo in April 2026 shows that the cycle of violence in Papua has never truly stopped. The discrepancy between survivor testimony and official statements cannot be left unresolved.

A purely security based approach has never been enough. A humane approach, dialogue, and equitable economic development must become mainstream. As the Regent of Puncak, Elvis Tabuni, said through his tears, they are citizens who should be protected — not turned into targets.

The wounds and sorrow left by this tragedy may never fully heal — at least, not as long as the truth remains hidden and justice is not upheld. Time will tell whether the state can uphold its constitutional mandate, or whether it will allow the land of Papua to remain soaked in the blood of its innocent children.

And for those who survived — who every night still hear the screams of their fallen friends — that wound will continue to sing in the silence: a sorrow that remains unhealed.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta. He is also an honorary member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and an occasional contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

A leader of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) has called on Indonesian security forces to halt their crackdown on peaceful protest in the wake of this month’s massacres in Dogiyai and Puncak.

Interim president Benny Wenda accused Indonesian authorities of suppressing peaceful action in order to “stoke a cycle of violence in West Papua in order to strengthen their colonial grip over our land”.

“intensified militarisation serves Indonesia’s economic interests,” he said in a statement.

• READ MORE: Stop selling arms to Indonesia, West Papuans urge Netherlands
• Other West papua reports

Wenda said the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) had organised “numerous peaceful demonstrations against Indonesian colonialism” since the military (TNI) had “murdered 15 West Papuans in the Puncak massacre” on April 15.

In response, the TNI and Indonesian police had launched a brutal crackdown, dispersing protesters with water cannons, tear gas, and beatings.

“The latest crackdown occurred [on April 27], after protesters gathered in front of the Mimika Dormitory in Waena, Jayapura,” Wenda said.

“They were met by a heavily armed TNI squadron, who broke up the peaceful protest by firing tear gas canisters and blasting activists with water cannons.”

Part of strategy
Wenda said violence committed against the KNPB and allied student protesters was part of Indonesia’s strategy in West Papua.

“By deploying additional troops and establishing new checkpoints, Indonesia protects their investment and creates a pretext for new destructive economic developments,” his statement said.

“Chaos and violence are good for business: this is Indonesia’s reason for keeping hold of West Papua,” he said.

This crackdown demonstrated that democracy did not exist in West Papua.

“We have never been allowed to peacefully voice our demand for self-determination, whether under the Suharto dictatorship or so-called democratic rule,” Wenda said.

“West Papuans will never achieve justice through colonial systems.”

The ULMWP appealed to solidarity groups and their parliamentary allies to apply pressure on Indonesia to “stop this crackdown, withdraw their military, and facilitate a visit to West Papua by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights”.

“Our own actions are not enough — international pressure is the only language Indonesia understands.”

Indonesian authorities have not responded to these comments by the ULMWP.

1news tonight featured a report on the War in Ukraine. The reporter, a foreign war correspondent, explained to viewers how Ukrainian soldiers were increasingly using long-range high-tech drones to target Russian infrastructure.

Now while not explicitly stated, the narrative being delivered through our particularly “Western-centric” media lens is that Ukrainians are legitimately resisting and defending their homeland from an evil invader.

While for some this narrative may be contentious, what’s interesting is when you apply this same narrative to the people of Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. Because when we apply these same values of “legitimate resistance” and self-defence of homeland in the context of Palestine or Lebanon or Iran, we see the contradiction of Western exceptionalism.

• READ MORE: Trump says Iran requesting end to US blockade; Israel kills three medics
• Other war on Iran, Gaza and Lebanon reports

For Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranian people, the rules around what constitutes legitimate resistance — whether militarily or otherwise — do not apply. At least they do not apply within the framework of the Western narrative, the narrative that’s seemingly ever-present in our mainstream media institutions like 1news.

There is another narrative of course, one whose legitimacy is not tied to the notion of Western exceptionalism. This narrative points out the hypocrisy of a Western exceptionalism which assumes itself as the sole determinant in defining what is or isn’t “legitimate” resistance.

Many journalists from the Middle East such as the Palestinian author Mohammed El-Kurd in his recent book Perfect Victims: And The Politics Of Appeal describe this “contradiction” in great detail.

Yet his and the many other voices which could help our comprehension of what is happening in places like Palestine, Gaza, Tehran and Southern Lebanon are consistently — and some might argue deliberately — overlooked.

Jason Brooke is a New Zealand hospital worker and activist on environmental social justice issues.

A woman whose great-grandparents — all eight of them — were Girmitiya labourers has put their stories into her debut novel.

The result is Banjara, a novel partly based on what she found, which is told through the eyes of two women more than 100 years apart.

Author, Shana Chandra told RNZ Nine to Noon she knew her grandparents were Girmitiya, but nothing of their origin stories.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji literature reports

“I knew that they were part of this larger geopolitical movement under colonialism, but I didn’t have their personal stories,” she said.

“I didn’t know where they came from in India. I didn’t know what made them vulnerable to coercion. I didn’t even know their names. So really, writing the story was a way for me to write their origin story not only for me, but for them.”

Chandra said the former head of New Zealand’s Girmitiya Foundation told her that Indo-Fijians were prohibited from writing about indenture.

“It felt very important for me to write this origin story, because there was so much silence – I think, because there was so much shame over what happened.

‘Angry about the silence’
“And it was my way of saying to my ancestors, they no longer need to be silenced, and… thank you, in a way, because I used to be quite angry about the silence, but then I realized it was their gift to me, and their gift to all of us — they didn’t want us to be burdened with what they endured.”

Chandra said a lot of research went into the book, but historical records only tell so much.

“When I saw my great-grandmother’s immigration pass, she boarded the Hereford, which is actually the same boat that Avani, my character, boards in the book.

“She was only eight when she boarded, and she boarded the boat with her younger brother, her older sister and her father, and there was actually no record of her mother being on board. So because of the way indentureships were partitioned with men on one side and women and children on the other, I know that those women on board would have helped my great-grandmother and her siblings survive in a myriad of ways.

“One day, I just had this compulsion to wake up and say all of those women’s names because I knew that they would have helped them survive.”

There were shocking discoveries, too. One immigration pass was that of a 15-day-old baby who had died.

“And on the left-hand side, written in cursive writing by a colonial official, was that her mother had suffocated her. And though I know that could be true, there was something about that intuitively that just didn’t sit right in my body.”

Real oral histories
Chandra later came across a post from a site called Cutlass Magazine, featuring real oral histories.

“One about a woman who said that when her grandmother was indentured, the women on board had to hide the children because crew members would find them a nuisance and want to throw them overboard.

“And there was an actual story from an indentured man who kept on repeating the same story, how on his ship that had a particularly rough passage, the captain came, took a newborn baby and fed it to the sea as a sacrifice.

“Even just me writing the names of those women afterwards, just burst into tears… It was important to weave those other stories, those oral histories, into the book to show that other side of history.”

Chandra believes a lot of labourers were duped into signing the labour agreements, and many were promised a “paradisical island full of abundant opportunity”.

“But what they actually faced …was hard labour up to 14 hours a day or over six days a week. And a lot of them were subjected to brutal physical and sexual abuse.

“At one point, Fiji had the highest suicide rate in the world due to indenture.”

The ‘women’s gang’
Chandra said there was “amazing forms of resistance” from the women.

“There’s something known as the women’s gang.

“These women would form these gangs, and they would go to known abusers and use the only thing, only weapons they had, which was their bodies, and retaliate and beat their abusers. So my book really showcases that female solidarity.”

She said it was tough to navigate all the cultural practices and language of the time to be accurate. But what also became important was the “emotional truth”.

“That emotional honesty was almost just as important, because that’s what it’s really trying to capture, but I was lucky. When I was writing this novel, it did feel like something larger was guiding my hand. So I do partly dedicate this novel to my ancestors, who felt like they were conspiring with me from the heavens.

“I think what’s so amazing to me is that, and this is what I hoped the book would do — it would provide an emotional landscape for other Indo-Fijians to rebound off and to start talking about these stories.”

• Shana Chandra will be appearing as part of the Auckland Writers’ Festival next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

MEDIA FREEDOM: By David Robie

In a week’s time next Sunday, it is World Press Freedom Day on May 3. And already our whānau of journalists who are facing horrendous danger at the hands of the Israeli killing machine have had a shocking few days.

During our 133 weeks of protest we have become painfully accustomed to how one journalist after another has been brutally assassinated, some even alongside their family members.

Far more than 260 journalists — the actual number varies with different media freedom monitoring agencies and different methodologies — have been slaughtered in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023.

• READ MORE: Journalist Amal Khalil killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon: RSF retraces events and denounces war crimes
• ‘We had Amal Khalil by her hand’s grip. Then Israel murdered her’
• Other Gaza and Lebanon media freedom reports

And some of you may have seen the chilling photograph circulating on some social media channels. It shows 8 Lebanese journalists – four men and four women – smiling and giving peace signs.

Eight Lebanese journalists killed in a month by Israel https://t.co/Fqeji5D3M8

— Pen MacRae (@penmacrae) April 23, 2026

They have all been murdered in the last month, including the tragic killing of Amal Khalil, who died last Wednesday under building rubble in the town of al-Tayri, southern Lebanon, after a double tap attack and then the Israelis fired a stun grenade on the ambulance rescue workers preventing them trying to save her.

But before I talk more about her tragedy and what it means– she was just buried yesterday with thousands at her funeral — I want to show you another photo.

This is Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist working for the Arabic channel Al Jazeera who was a highly popular household name right across the Middle East if not the world.

She was known as the “daughter of Palestine” and she was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces on 11 May 2022 — just eight days after Media Freedom Day that year.

I have this photo hanging on the wall of my office, thanks to Palestine Youth of Aotearoa, to remind me daily of the brutality and global impunity of the Israelis.

With my experience as a media freedom defender for Pacific Media Watch and Reporters Without Borders since 1996, I have come to a chilling and shameful conclusion:

The fact that there was no accountability for her murder and the US authorities and Biden administration orchestrated a cover-up – even though she was American — signalled to the Netanyahu government that they could target journalists and those bearing witness with absolute impunity.

So this is where we are at now, the Israeli killing machine launched into a bloody massacre of more than 72,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past two plus years, especially targeting journalists, doctors and medical workers, teachers, and aid workers.

And the hypocritical Western countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, have barely offered a timid bleat.

The Israeli bloodlust has now spread to Lebanon and other countries. The IDF claims that its military is the “most moral in the world”. That claim is an obscenity.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect journalists (CPJ), Israel is by far the world’s biggest killer of media workers.

On its monitoring website it lists the following:

• 260 journalists and media workers killed by Israel, of which:
• 207 were Palestinians killed in Gaza
• 2 Palestinian killed in Gaza during the Iran war
• 2 Palestinians killed in Israeli detention centers
• 31 Yemenis – out of a total of 32 – killed in Yemen
• 6 Lebanese in Lebanon during the war on Gaza
• 9 Lebanese in Lebanon during the Iran war
• 3 Iranians in Iran during the 12-day war

To return to the targeted murder of Amal Khalil, who worked for Al-Akhbar, she was with another journalist, Zeinab Faraj, who was rescued and survived.

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in a statement by its Middle East desk chief Jonathan Dagher:

“The Israeli army has very likely committed two more war crimes on 22 April, by targeting journalists who were identified as such, obstructing rescue operations and continuing strikes that killed one journalist and injured another.

“Responsibility for these crimes also lies with Israel’s allies, who continue to allow the Netanyahu government to commit them with impunity.”

RSF published a compelling and disturbing timeline of how the IDF blocked her would-be rescuers for seven hours.

CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director Sara Qudah said:

“We knew [Amal] was alive beneath the rubble – a real, breathing presence. Not in the abstract, not as rumour or hope.

“The 40-year-old female journalist, Amal Khalil, whose voice had just reached her family and colleagues, her survival depended on whether the machinery of rescue would be allowed to operate as it is supposed to under international law, and the law of humanity.

“That is what made what followed so difficult to process — not only emotionally, but structurally.

“Because this was not a case of disappearance in the fog of war.

“It was a case of proximity to survival that collapsed into confirmed death while rescue was still theoretically possible.”

Qudah added that her death could not be understood only as an individual tragedy, “although it was that to everyone who knew her, every journalist in the region”.

“It must also be understood as a stress test of the systems that are supposed to prevent this outcome — early warning, protection, humanitarian access and accountability. On each of these dimensions, the case raises unresolved questions.”

Israel is not only killing journalists, it is systematically torturing them — along with hundreds of other Palestinian hostages. CPJ’s recent report, “We returned from hell”, where the watchdog published the in-depth testimonies of 59 media prisoners released from jail since October 2023 is shocking reading.

I would like to finish with a quote by Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who visited New Zealand in 2023 to launch his  book The Palestine Laboratory about how the Israeli killing machine exports in brutal technologies — a book that has been translated into many languages and had a profound influence in the world.

“With some notable exceptions, too many in the international media, journalists, editors and owners, have refused to take appropriate action against Israel. No official sanction.

“[They are] still interviewing Israeli spokespeople and politicians as normal. Not treating this as a monumental crime and outrage. Instead, often deferring to unproven Israeli claims that every journalist murdered was a ‘terrorist’.”

This complicity by many journalists — even in our own region — must be widely condemned.

Dr David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch and a media defender with global groups including RSF. He gave this short address at the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) rally in Auckland on Anzac Day.

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has appealed to ACT MP Nicole McKee to condemn Israel’s deliberate bulldozing of New Zealand war graves in the besieged Palestinian Gaza enclave.

PSNA co-chair John Minto has asked for the MP to take this action after McKee had posted on Facebook yesterday a message of strong support for looking after NZ soldiers’ graves wherever they are.

Minto said in a statement on Anzac Day: “Israel’s destruction of New Zealand war graves was not an accident of war. It was the deliberate bulldozing of the graves by the Israeli military”

• READ MORE:  Revealed: Israel bulldozed part of Gaza war cemetery containing allied graves
• New Zealand World War I graves among those bulldozed at Gaza cemetery
• No rest for Taranaki soldiers in Gaza grave

“They have bulldozed dozens of Palestinian cemeteries as standard practice to erase Palestine from Gaza,” he said.

“They didn’t think twice about bulldozing our war graves, knowing there would be no reaction from our government and they were right.”

In her Facebook post McKee wrote:

“We talk a lot about honouring our fallen — but real respect is shown in what we do, not just what we say.

“Across New Zealand, volunteers from the NZ Remembrance Army have quietly restored hundreds of thousands of service graves, preserving the stories and dignity of those who served. They do it efficiently, carefully, and with genuine respect.

“What’s been holding them back is layers of inconsistent rules and bureaucracy.

“ACT is committing to cut through that, back these volunteers with funding, and make sure this work can continue at scale.

“Because if someone was prepared to give everything for this country, the least we can do is ensure they are remembered properly.”

Call for ‘real respect’
Minto responded in the PSNA statement today by saying: “We agree with McKee when she says ‘real respect is shown in what we do, not just what we say’.

“Let’s see some respect for our soldiers who died in Gaza [in 1916-18] with a rousing government condemnation of the deliberate destruction of these war graves.

“We won’t hold our breath. The government can’t even condemn Israel for the mass killing and mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza — a campaign of physical and cultural destruction which continues today.”

PSNA has long called on the government to condemn Israel’s deliberate destruction of war graves in Gaza. In a statement on February 9, it said: “PSNA is calling on the government to condemn Israel’s desecration of New Zealand war graves in Gaza.

“Israeli bulldozing of the graves was confirmed last week but the New Zealand government has not responded with any comment.”

Palestinian Essam Jaradah, who had tended the New Zealand graves for 45 years, confirmed their destruction in an interview with The Guardian newspaper.

“Common decency demands we condemn Israel for this abuse of our war dead,” Minto said in he February statement. “If it happened anywhere else in the world the government would register shock and be appalled.

Australian responded, not NZ
“Australia has spoken out but nothing from New Zealand. No protest expressed, no demand Israel apologise, no request for access to inspect the damage. Nothing.”

“Neither has there been any response from the New Zealand Returned Services Association.”

Minto said Israel relied on what he called “huge and sympathetic media attention” for more than two years, demanding the return of the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza.

“It seems the only human remains which matter are Israeli ones. Over a period, Israel has systematically destroyed Palestinian cemeteries and now the war graves of our soldiers.”

There were 23 graves of New Zealand First World War soldiers in the Commonwealth War Cemetery, plus another two from the 280-strong Rarotongan Company from the Cook Islands, which also fought for Britain to capture Palestine from the Turkish Ottomans.

An official of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) praised this month’s High Court judicial ruling over New Zealand Superfund “unreasonable and unlawful” investment policies towards Israeli companies — but warned that the fund management would need to shape up.

Speaking at the PSNA rally at Te Komititanga Square today in week 133 of protests over Israeli genocide in Gaza, national secretary Neil Scott also gave a verbal bouquet to all the activists and lawyers who had achieved the victory after a 20-year struggle.

He named Phil McNeale as one of the activists who began pushing for the Superfund to divest from Israeli companies funding illegal settlements in the Occupied West Bank about two decades ago.

• READ MORE:  PSNA says High Court Superfund decision a victory for Palestinian rights
• NZ’s $86 billion Super Fund failed to properly address human rights, court rules in Palestine case
• The High Court ruling on the NZ Superfund policies
• Other PSNA reports on Palestine

PSNA earlier issued a statement declaring that this was an “important and timely win for Palestine” and expressed confidence that the Superfund would “quickly divest from the four companies [where] it holds investments” which were on the UN Human Rights Council list involved in building and maintaining illegal Israeli settlements.

Scott recalled that during 2020 and 2021, PSNA had called on the Superfund chief executive Matt Whineray to divest from Israeli banks.

“We know Israel cannot build the illegal colonies in the West bank without bank funding,” he said.

“Essentially, our NZ Superfund was investing in funding war crimes. On our behalf.”

‘Shameful policy’
On each communication about the “shameful” policy, Whineray had rejected the PSNA protest.

“In 2021, PSNA got a King’s Counsel (KC) lawyer to review the investments in Israeli banks and then sent a letter to then Minister of Finance Grant Robertson setting out the legal opinion,” Scott said.

“Robertson refused to respond to us. But soon after, the Superfund divested from four Israeli banks. Yes, we won then.”

However, Scott said that in 2021, just after the divestment decision, the Israeli Institute was “all over the Superfund with a flood of OIA requests — six of them”.

“A bunch of private individual OIA requests also went in,” Scott said.

“Usually, the Superfund received about 3 or 4 OIA requests a year. In 2021, it received 11.

“So, it seems as if massive pressure was put on the NZ Superfund to change its policies on ethical investments — to benefit Zionist Israel.

‘Gutting ethical investment’
“In 2022, it did just that. Gutting the ethical investment policies so that even investments in Israeli banks wouldn’t have been excluded.”

Scott said the Superfund dropped any reference to the “UN Global Compact” and the “Principles for Responsible Investment” — two of the main ethical investment policies in the world.

“It did this, sliding the changes through in the shadows without letting anyone know. Just slid it through in the shadows.”

PSNA kept on calling the Superfund to divest from the UN Divestment list. However, the Superfund responded by claiming that the companies cited “did not meet their, now secret, threshold”.

Late in 2024, PSNA decided to call for a judicial review of the Superfund’s investment in four companies.

“We briefed two KCs on the call. They agreed that it would have a good chance of winning,” Scott said.

“During the process of discovery, the KCs found that the Superfund had secretly changed its ethical investment policies during 2022.”

Who is responsible?
Scott said the PSNA was now determined to find out who were responsible for changing the ethical investment policies for the “benefit of a foreign country”.

He named a minister, chair of the board and the chief executive at the time of the change, saying that as a result of the High Court ruling, the Superfund “has a duty to reformulate the policy documents consistently with the [NZ Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001]”.

Scott praised the team responsible for winning the case: PSNA co-chair John Minto; co-chair Maher Nazzal, a Palestinian; Palestinian Rawaa Elhanafy; Rodney Harrison KC (who wrote the original letter to then minister Robertson in 2021); Francis Joychild KC; and B A Mugisho.

He also gave a final message to the cheering protest crowd: “A word of advice to everyone in the management of the Superfund — Aotearoa is our country. Not racist, ethnic cleansing, land thieving genocidal Zionist Israel.

“You work for Aotearoa. Do your job.”

May Day ‘Stop war’ rally
Among other speakers at the protest, Stop Wars Aotearoa organiser Joe Carolan appealed for support at next Friday’s May Day “Stop the fuel crisis and stop the war” rally at 6pm at Karanga-a-Hape Station.

“High fuel prices are driving workers reliant on cars off the roads. Our rightwing coalition government rules for the rich and doesn’t feel the pain of the cost of living crisis. We need solutions, not excuses,” Carolan said.

“The Solution: Free, frequent public transport for all, funded by taxes on the oil companies and the super rich.”

The Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition is demanding:

• Immediate free transport as a climate and cost-of-living solution;
• Permanent, 24 hr, frequent and fare-free transit for all, paid for by taxing corporations and billionaires; and
• Prioritised fuel for essential services, not luxury, while transitioning to renewables. New green jobs in a massive expansion of public transport and rail.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) has called on the Netherlands to stop selling arms to Indonesia.

Representatives of the ULMWP were this week at the Dutch Parliament for a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the human rights situation in West Papua.

In a video relayed to the Dutch from ULMWP members in Papua, the pro-independence group called on the Netherlands to stop selling weapons to Indonesia.

• READ MORE: Indonesia’s human rights body to investigate deaths of 12 Papuans in military operation
• Other West Papua reports

“We, the people of West Papua, urge the Dutch government to stop cooperation and the supply of weapons to Indonesia, because these transactions between Indonesia and the Netherlands, especially weapons, are being bought and used to carry out killings against us.”

This comes amid a recent escalation of violent conflict between Indonesia’s military and Papuan pro-independence fighters.

Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission this week said it was investigating the deaths of a dozen West Papuan civilians last week as the result of a military operation in Central Papua.

Former colonial power
The Netherlands was the former colonial power in West Papua and the rest of Indonesia. As such, the liberation movement said the Dutch had a responsibility to respond to ongoing human rights violations and conflict in Papua.

Current and recent Dutch military exports are largely tied to the Indonesian Navy and concentrated on naval vessels, ship systems and supporting weapons.

A spokesperson for the Dutch Embassy in Indonesia said all licence applications for the export of military goods from the Netherlands were examined carefully and on a case‑by‑case basis, within the framework of the Arms Trade Treaty and the EU Common Position on arms export controls.

“Central to this assessment are the end user of the goods, the intended end use, and the situation in the country of destination.

“In conducting these assessments, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs systematically takes into account all relevant information, including political, security and human rights developments.

“Licence applications are refused where the assessment identifies an overriding risk that the military goods in question could be misused by the end user. The Ministry does not exclude any end users in advance,” the spokesperson said.

RNZ Pacific has sought comment from the Indonesian govenment. Previously, Jakarta has refused to acknowledge the ULMWP has any legitimacy.

At the Parliament hearing in the Hague, the president of ULMWP’s provisional government, Benny Wenda met with some Dutch lawmakers from parties, including the Christian Union and the Progressive Party.

Also in attendance was the British Labour MP Alex Sobel, the chairperson of International Parliamentarians for West Papua.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

REVIEW: By Lee Duffield

The journalist, professor and peace activist Dr David Robie, was one of a media party on the ill-fated voyage of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before its sinking by French security operatives in Auckland Harbour.

He wrote a definitive book about the lead-up in the region to the fatal sinking of the ship with limpet mines; unmasking of the plot made in Paris; attempts to obtain justice and a long aftermath with demands for empowerment by former “colonial” people to prevent such outrages in their island homelands.

The book is Eyes of Fire, first published in 1986, then successively updated as the story unfolded, with new facts and consequences of the outrage coming to light.

It ran to three revised editions, the latest out now to commemorate 40 years since the attack took place. It therefore marked 40 years since the death of the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese-born Dutch national, aged 35, father of two children, Marelle and Paul, drowned on board after the second of two blasts that hit the ship.

Eyes of Fire is a highly professional work of journalism, built out of investigation and documentation of facts, then fashioned into an accessible read; illustrated also with easy-to-comprehend maps and diagrams, showing where the ship travelled and where the bombs were planted against its hull, plus photographs from a copious accumulation built up as the Greenpeace movement generated publicity for its actions worldwide.

Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior
One section describes the Rainbow Warrior, appreciatively and affectionately: a former fisheries research vessel, a trawler type, 50-metres in length, with some difficulty converted for sail as well as power, made into a “proud campaign ship”, painted a strong green with a long rainbow-emblem along the sides.

“The wheelhouse was rather lumpy and unattractive but the rest of the ship was appealing. She had a high North Sea prow, graceful sheerline and round-the-corner stern.”

For the record…
The Rainbow Warrior sailed from Hawai’i on the Pacific Voyage — taking on board seven journalists and some leading figures from the Pacific communities, to the Marshall Islands — where it evacuated the inhabitants of a nuclear afflicted island, Rongelap, to an uninhabited island Mejatto on Kwajalein Atoll.

Pacific distances are great. They transported 350 people — with house lumber and belongings — in four trips, 250 km there and back.

The islanders were suffering from contamination by the infamous upwind explosion of the experimental thermonuclear weapon, Castle Bravo, in 1954 — causing thyroid disorders, cancers and constant miscarriages and birthing disorders.

Dissatisfied that health officials sent by the United States administration were more interested in research than care, they decided to leave. The key instigator was the late Marshall Islands legislator Senator Jeton Anjain. He was one of two Pacific Islands leaders with prominent roles in Robie’s narrative.

The other was Oscar Temaru, a nuclear-free town mayor in Tahiti, also elected as the territory’s President on five occasions.

Temaru, now 81, spoke for many when he said:

“The sad truth is that the only ones who tried to help us are the Greenpeace ecologists…”

According to folklore among Greenpeace founders, a native American woman named “Eyes of Fire” told of a legend that where there was dispossession and despoilation of the land and culture, in time mythical warriors — deliverers — would come, who would mend and restore both. So the peaceship offering aid would be a “Rainbow Warrior”.

The author, Robie, in his news despatches for Radio New Zealand and other media (for which he was awarded the 1985 NZ Media Peace Prize, judged the evacuation project a change for Greenpeace towards humanitarian work connected with environmental destruction:

“This isn’t a game or the sort of action publicity stunt that Greenpeace would do so successfully.”

But the next part of the journey was another dramatic action, in Marshall Islands, at the US missile testing base on Kwajalein Atoll. A party from the ship went ashore, got through perimeter wires and hoisted a banner inscribed “Stop Star Wars” onto a space tracking dome, escaping before the arrival of security guards.

The banner was a reference to the American Strategic Defence Initiative, “Star Wars”, testing for which had increased the heavy traffic of missiles of different levels at the Kwajalein range (dubbed by the empire as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Site).

The scene was then being set for the tragedy as the vessel made its way 5000 km to Auckland through friendly territory, calling in at Kiribati, the country hosting the former Christmas Island base for British nuclear tests (1957-58), and Vanuatu, where the leader of the then five year-old Republic, Father Walter Lini, a champion for a nuclear free Pacific, organised a big public welcome.

The strike
Celebration fitted the mood of the “Warrior” crew a lot of the time, in this account; a group of 11 skilled and idealistic younger people, sharing a mission they considered important to the world, and enjoying it as an adventure. They wanted to protect nature and promote peace, never violent, but charismatic, given to direct action, often enough dangerous.

They had others on board — in the case of David Robie, for an extended time, 11 days, time enough to get to know the characters and introduce them to readers in his book.

A further leg of the voyage was intended, to take them to Moruroa Atoll — where France was continuing with underground nuclear testing — as flagship for a flotilla of protest boats. In the event, the flotilla sailed, led by another Greepeace ship, Greenpeace III. One boat was arrested penetrating the 12-kilometre territorial limit around the atoll, where a series of tests was about to begin.

The planned disruption of activities on Moruroa may have been the death warrant for Rainbow Warrior — a solution to the riddle of what purposes its destruction was supposed to serve.

As the ship made its way towards Auckland, two French infiltrators got to work in that City, penetrating the Greenpeace operation. A group of military divers from a training base in Corsica was en route to New Zealand on a charter boat and two officers of France’s security service, DGSE, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, flew in under cover as a honeymoon couple.

Rainbow Warrior came in on Sunday, 7 July 1985, surrounded by an escort of small boats and was sunk at the dock in shallow water just before midnight on 10 July.

Divers using an inflatable boat set off the two explosions. Prieur and Mafart were spotted picking up one of the divers on a beach by men doing night watch at their boat club, who got the number of their vehicle, enabling the police to apprehend them, and begin a tortured process to try and secure justice.

Aftermath
Updating of the book takes in the negotiations over holding Prieur and Mafart, their eventual transfer to France and subsequent early release; the fate of other conspirators spirited home, promoted, decorated, “looked after” in early retirement; intensive and large scale work by the New Zealand police to find out about the charter boat carrying some of the divers, said to have transferred them onto a submarine, the Rubis; and investigative work by the French press to sheet home responsibility for the attack.

Very soon after Rainbow Warrior was sunk, the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, was sacked and the head of the DGSE Admiral Pierre Lacoste resigned. The book has a positive impression of the replacement Minister, Paul Quiles and the Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, who admitted the obvious — that it had been done by French agents and was apologetic.

Subsequent negotiations between New Zealand and France, under United Nations auspices were made very difficult; a formal apology was avoided for some time; eventually both New Zealand and Greenpeace received financial packages in compensation and exemplary damages.

After the 1996 death of François Mitterrand, French President at the time, an investigation by Le Monde turned up circumstantial evidence that he knew of the attack in advance and a statement by Lacoste that he had approved it. Fabius evidently had not known.

Mitterrand’s motive was said to have been realpolitik — to support nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union in tandem with the US, which supplied France with highly strategic computer technology.

Reviewer intercession…
Mitterrand, as a highly equivocal and manipulative politician, walked a tightrope, always watching his soft electoral margins — in this case knowing there was 60 percent support for nuclear testing in France.

In office for four years in 1985, it may have been a new government still failing to face down entrenched security identities, undisciplined, considering themselves to be “deep state”, attached to violent solutions, with potential to go rogue.

Most of Robie’s work here is a narrative, a strong true story, but it has space for analysis, and in particular registers the correlation between devastation brought by the nuclear testing, and colonial management and manipulation of islands affairs.

The post-war wave of independence had come to the Pacific, though not to French Polynesia nor New Caledonia. In addition, the United States still held its Micronesian dependencies in trust or, for Sovereign states, via signed compacts of free association, accompanied by substantial aid payments.

France’s position against independence is incentivised by maintaining colonies of more than 200,000 settlers; and in New Caledonia, the nickel deposits, around 15 percent of world resources, as well as the 200 kilometre territorial zone off the long coast of Grande Terre island, opening onto as yet unsurveyed undersea resources.

For the Americans, the priority has been both weapons testing and maintaining a strategic barrier against Russia, then China.

Old problems, future challenges
These considerations help to address the always unanswered question of what the plotters thought they had to gain. The book suggests a clumsy and excessive attempt to stop the ship leading a flotilla to Moruroa Atoll as most likely.

It goes on to identify same-old patterns of resistance in latter-day moves, successful, to get better recognition of the impacts of nuclear contamination and in the moves through international forums — such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, South Pacific Forum, United Nations agencies, the international courts — to get recognition and action on the impacts of climate change.

Pacific communities mindful of the rising seas, and other problems like impacts on sea-life, have struggled to get a hearing, finding, again, that “great powers” outside the region which hold resources that can help hold off the crisis, hold back their response.

Nuclear testing in the atmosphere was made to stop in 1974; tests underground on the atolls continued to 1996, leaving a very brief interregnum before global warming reared its head.

The current edition of Eyes of Fire has a prologue by Helen Clark, New Zealand Prime Minister from 1999-2008, a staunch keeper of the faith in a nuclear-free Pacific. Saying, “storm clouds are gathering”, she warns against renewed militarisation especially with Australia and perhaps other Pacific states acquiring nuclear submarines under the 2021 AUKUS agreement.

It is time for “de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific”, writes Clark in her contribution to the new edition. With its peace policy, New Zealand wanted to be “a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering”.

Clark warns withdrawal of funding from the United Nations, led by the US, is a new threat: “Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.”

David Robie reports on the 40th anniversary commemoration of the 1985 events by Greenpeace, sending the new purpose-built ship, the new Rainbow Warrior, sometimes known as Rainbow Warrior III, to carry out independent radiation research. He follows up the lives and careers of the crew members and the islanders they worked with, several of whom have passed away.

While the writer’s own message, as in much good journalism, emerges from true handling of the facts, Robie does privilege a quotation from the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, Russel Norman, on the crew of Rainbow Warrior, to close the story:

“They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific. Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?”

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (Little Island Press), 2025, 225 pages.

Dr Lee Duffield reported on Australia’s dispute with France over atmospheric testing for ABC News in Sydney and then from Paris as the ABC European Correspondent. His work entailed monitoring police actions against Kanak activists in New Caledonia, including the killings on Ouvéa Island; confrontations with French Ministers over the test programme; and negotiations between France and New Zealand, in Paris, on Rainbow Warrior, especially the jailing then early release of Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart. He later taught Journalism at QUT in Brisbane and was a contributor to Pacific Journalism Review. Dr Duffield is also one of the co-owners of Independent Australia, and the chair of its editorial board. This review is republished from the Independent Australia with permission.

By Wendy Bacon and Cathy Peters in Sydney

The person chosen for the role of Sydney University’s antisemitism chief is Michael Abrahams-Sprod, chair of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies. His role is to help roll out a training programme for “front-line” staff on issues facing the Jewish community, including antisemitism in “contemporary settings”.

University staff only learned about the appointment through a staff intranet notice earlier this month. A university spokesperson told Michael West Media that Abrahams-Sprod’s new position began on January 1, 2026 and continues until December 2027.

Asked to specify the date the position was approved and from whom the vice-chancellor sought advice, the spokesperson said it was approved on the recommendation of the USyd Senate People, Culture and Safety Committee on March 6, 2026.

• READ MORE: Pro-Zionism influence at universities

This was two months after Abrahams-Sprod started his special advisor job. He was previously campus coordinator of Sydney University’s branch of the pro-Israel Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism and works alongside the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal.

This MWM investigation can also reveal that even before his new appointment, Abrahams-Sprod was funded to work on anti-semitism issues by the University.

In 2025, he worked on a collaboration with the Special Antisemitism Envoy, Jillian Segal, and the Sydney Jewish Museum, developing an antisemitism awareness training programme funded by the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne.

Antisemitism training programme
In his new role, Abrahams-Sprod will co-deliver 12 sessions with the Sydney Jewish Museum to 120 USyd staff in key areas including Human Resources, Protective and Risk Services, the Student Affairs Unit and the Office of the Vice-Chancellor.

These key front-line staff administer policies, communicate with staff and students  staff and respond to complaints.

After completing the training of administrative staff, Abrahams-Sprod will advise on training for all staff within an “overarching anti-racism framework … to align with the expectations of the Australian Human Rights Commission”.

In response to MWM questions, a spokesperson said that Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment recognised “his unique skills and experience, ongoing work supporting our Jewish and broader community and his existing role as an academic leader at the University.”

He will “consult with relevant communities … on how to tackle antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and build a campus that’s safe and welcoming to all”.

Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment is a win for the pro-Israeli lobby.

Equally, it aims to silence other staff and students and deter protests in support of Palestine.

Claims of exceptionalism
Last week, USyd Staff for Palestine called on Mark Scott to reverse the Special Advisor appointment and abolish the role.

They accused the university of “exceptionalism” and drew attention to a recent Australian Human Rights Commission finding of high rates of racism experienced by students and staff from First Nations, African, Asian, Jewish, Māori, Middle Eastern, Muslim, Palestinian and Pasifika backgrounds.

In an open letter, they stated that “in creating a unique special advisor role for antisemitism, the university has signalled that racism against Jewish people is being uniquely prioritised above other forms of discrimination”.

Abrahams-Sprod will work across the university sector to fulfill requirements of Segal-appointed former conservative Australian Catholic University VC Greg Craven, who has been tasked to oversee her punitive universities Report Card initiative.

As reported in The Guardian, Craven accused universities of being a ”major factor in making antisemitism respectful” and referred to campus protesters as “mutant radical groups”. Government funding could be withheld from universities found to “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.”

Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism makes sweeping claims about antisemitism in Australian universities, which have been strongly critiqued by the Australian Human Rights Institute.

The assessment will be based on the contentious IHRA definition of antisemitism. This definition is rejected by many Australian university staff and students, including Jews and students from Middle East backgrounds whose families deal with the daily horror of Israel’s genocide, violent occupation, bombings, denial of humanitarian aid and other war crimes.

Bowing to Zionist pressure
Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment can be seen as a response to continuous pressure from October 2023 onwards from Abrahams-Sprod and fellow Zionist staff members on senior university managers to discipline staff and students for pro-Palestinian advocacy. Zionist leaders described ($) Scott as

“arrogant and dismissive” at a meeting in April 2024.

Their anger against anti-Israel sentiment grew after a student encampment began that month.

Scott’s initial reaction was to maintain neutrality regarding the protest, assuring the university community that he understood the right of protesters to peacefully assemble and the right of free speech.

However, by July 2024, after the two-month Gaza encampment had disbanded, USyd launched into defensive action, introducing its new Campus Access Policy, which clamped down heavily on future student or staff protests and political speech.

This policy was strongly criticised, including by the university’s Law School, which published this open letter.

Bowing further to orchestrated pressure on Scott and the university, it then commissioned an external review by Bruce Hodgkinson AM SC about the university’s handling of claims of campus antisemitism in relation to the encampment. The External Review Report made 15 recommendations, including strengthening the restrictions on protests and the imposition of a New Civility Rule with strong penalties for breaching it.

In September 2024, a contrite Mark Scott apologised to Jewish students and staff at a Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry for “failing them” in his handling of the encampment.

But key lobbyists, including Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Liebler, said Scott had lost credibility and continued to call for his resignation. Scott publicly promised ($) to fix the situation.

One of the ways to “fix” the situation appears to have been to

turn the coordinator of the Zionist complaints into a leader in his own office.

Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A)
When announcing Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment to all university staff earlier this month, Scott praised the “wealth of knowledge, experience and critical expertise” that Abrahams-Sprod brings to the new role. He did not mention his activities as the coordinator of the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A).

5A is a network of academics working to counter antisemitism in universities and medical institutions that was formed in November 2023. It claimed in its opening statement to the NSW Inquiry into Antisemitism that, “they [Jews] are hated because of their nation state, Israel. Anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism disguised as wine but truly an old poison, rebottled, labelled with new academic terminologies that misrepresent and deceive.”

5A’s linking of Jewish identity with the state of Israel, its misrepresentation of anti-Zionism and the BDS movement are antisemitic strategies that the Israeli government has generated over many years to deflect and misconstrue focus on Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It claims that campuses post October 7, 2023, became “epicentres of antisemitic activism” and that this was rooted in “protests, university encampments and cancel culture.”

This puts it on a collision course with thousands of pro-Palestinian and human rights focussed staff and students.

In his role as coordinator, Abrahams-Sprod collated at least 100 complaints against fellow staff and students, many of whom he assisted. This puts him at the centre of the campaign to pressure Scott. According to 5A, the number of complaints emanating from USyd far exceeded the minuscule number submitted from the other four large universities in Sydney.

5A labelled campus protests as antisemitic because they “delegitimise the state of Israel”. Similarly, stating that Israel is an apartheid state or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is also considered antisemitic, even though these are widely accepted findings of UN inquiries and international lawyers.

The Roth/Segal connection
Abrahams-Sprod is also connected to Jillian Segal through the funding of his own senior lectureship. Segal is married to property developer John Roth and was the sister-in-law of Stanley Roth, who died in January this year.

For more than 20 years, charitable foundations associated with the Roth family, along with several other philanthropists, have helped fund the discipline of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies.

In November 2024, the Roth family established the Roth Senior Lectureship in Jewish Civilisation, Education and Israel Studies to which Abrahams-Sprod was appointed. The university spokesperson said that the funders played no role in his selection.

In addition, the Roth family has provided funding to Youth Mental Health at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre.

After his death, Stanley Roth was celebrated as one of Australia’s strongest supporters and most generous funders of Israel. The brothers also received widespread publicity as directors of Henroth Investments, which donated $50,000 to the far-right group Advance Australia in 2023/4.

Given Abrahams-Sprod’s highly partisan role, his appointment will only stoke division rather than build a safe and civil environment on campus. Staff for Palestine has accused the university management of being “hijacked by supporters of Israel”.

But VC Scott’s appointment has done more than signal his capitulation to the pro-Israel pressure and disdain for the pro-Palestinian supporters.

• As we will explore in part two tomorrow, it also raises conflict-of-interest issues for the university.

The heads of Israel, Russia and the United States are leading the destruction of global human rights, says Amnesty International, describing them as “voracious predators” intent upon economic and political domination.

“A global environment where primitive ferocity could flourish has been long in the making,” Agnes Callamard, the head of the global rights group, wrote in an annual report on the state of the world’s human rights that was released yesterday.

In 2025, “sharp U-turns were taken away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars, and constructed slowly and painfully, albeit insufficiently, over these past 80 years,” she said.

• READ MORE: The State of the World’s Human Rights: April 2026
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

In a news conference in London, Callamard said that most governments tended to appease the “predators” rather than confront them.

“Some even thought to imitate the bullies and the looters,” she said.

Spain, however, which is an outlier in Europe for its criticism of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and US-Israeli attacks on Iran, “is standing above the double standard that is destroying the international system”, Callamard said.

She argued that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who in 2022 sent his forces into neighbouring Ukraine, have had an “absolutely dramatic” impact on the world.

Their conduct is “emboldening all of those that are tempted by similar behaviours,” said Callamard.

“It is allowing for the multiplication of copycats around the world, and therefore what we are confronting now is much more aggressive and ferocious than what we had to confront three or four years ago.”

Amnesty shocking report – Global rights collapse    Video: Al Jazeera

‘Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide’
Amnesty’s review of the state of the world’s human rights makes for grim reading, documenting attacks on fundamental civil liberties in most nations.

“Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide”, the report reads, before running through abuses alleged in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe in 400 pages.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Russia’s “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war on Iran were noted as examples of conflict in which international laws have been ignored.

In a section on repression, the United Kingdom is blamed for cracking down on the Palestine solidarity movement and Palestine Action, the direct-action group that targets sites associated with the Israeli military and is currently fighting a legal battle against its UK proscription as a “terrorist” organisation.

Afghanistan’s Taliban was responsible for further gender-based discrimination in 2025, the report noted, citing measures excluding women from education and work, while Nepalese authorities were said to have failed to investigate instances of gender-based violence against Dalit women.

Amnesty’s report comes as multiple conflicts rage across the world.

US-Israeli assault on Iran
The US-Israeli assault on Iran has killed more than 3000 people, while Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed nearly 2400.

In Gaza, the confirmed number of people killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 has surpassed 72,500 as the decimated territory is continually threatened by Israeli bombardment.

In Ukraine, more than 15,000 have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago.

Conflicts in the Middle East are a “product of the descent into lawlessness, made possible by a vision of the world in which war-making and the killings of civilians are normalised,” said Callamard.

“No effective steps have been taken against Israel for its repeated, constant violation of basic standards of humanity.”

However, there is some room for optimism, Amnesty said.

AMY GOODMAN: To look more at the latest developments in Lebanon and the Middle East region, we’re joined by Dr Rami Khouri, a Palestinian American journalist and distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

Rami, we began talking about the Iran-US second round of negotiations, went to this news of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, though Hezbollah wasn’t a party to those talks. Your overall comments on what’s happening right now in the region, where you think it’s all going?

RAMI KHOURI: Well, there are so many different dynamics going on at the same time within individual countries, among countries in the region and between the region and the global powers, especially the United States, but also China and others, and Israel, of course.

My comments are that one of the striking things about this situation is that we’ve seen now, in the last six weeks, Iran and Hezbollah almost single-handedly checking — not defeating, but checking — the two biggest military powers in the region, which is the US and Israel.

They forced them into two ceasefires: one in Iran and now one in Lebanon. Now, this is not a finished story. This is still going on. This might collapse, and the war may resume.

US and Israel ‘forced into two ceasefires’                 Video: Democracy Now!

But the fact that the US and Israel have been forced to enter these ceasefires, I think, is a sign of the evolving balance of power across the region. And you’re going to see this reflected, for instance, in many Arab countries, who are — especially in the energy-producing Gulf region, who are going to recalibrate their relations.

They’ll still be very close friends with the US, buy a lot of weapons and buy a lot of tech stuff, but they’re also going to recalibrate to have more meaningful ties with Iran, with Türkiye, with China, with Russia and other people like that.

So we’re seeing a slow-motion evolution of the entire balance of power in the region, with the background being that the overwhelming majority of people in the Arab region and Islamic Türkiye and Iran, about three-quarters of a billion people, the overwhelming majority of them see Israel and the US as their main security threat.

So, something historic is going on here in slow motion.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does, Rami Khouri, these negotiations between Israel, the United States, Iran and Lebanon impact on the current situation in Gaza? Talk also about the role of the other armed groups, like Hamas, the Houthis. If you can talk about what’s happening across the region?

RAMI KHOURI: Yes. The Palestine-Israel conflict remains the starting point for all of these other conflicts. So, Iran and Israel, Hezbollah’s birth, Israel-Hezbollah, all of these tensions and conflicts ultimately derived from the unresolved battle between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism and the state of Israel.

So, it’s crucial for any attempt to get a permanent peaceful situation across the region, in the Arab countries, Iran and Israel — it’s crucial to address the Palestine issue, which means right now looking at Gaza.

Now, Gaza is in a situation of reconfigured colonial domination by the United States and Israel, with carpetbaggers from around the world, like Tony Blair and others. I call it the joint venture of the carpetbaggers and the carpet bombers. They’ve all come together on this to dominate Palestine, destroy Gaza, and now they’re looking to do the same thing in Lebanon.

But the fact that the Iranians were able to pressure the Americans, to pressure Netanyahu to enter into this ceasefire is a significant sign that the group of movements and countries that have been involved in the so-called Axis of Resistance, which pushes back against Israeli hegemony and American militarism, that group of actors is still effective.

They may not dominate the region, but they’re strong enough to do what they’ve just done, which is force the Americans, to force the Israelis to enter into a ceasefire that the Israelis did not want. The Israelis wanted to keep bombing and attacking and occupying and creating more buffer zones. But they’ve done that.

This is the seventh time, seventh time since the late 1960s, that Israel goes into Lebanon militarily in a big way, occupies land, moves millions of people around. And every time, they’ve had to pull out because of the resistance they’ve met and because they could not achieve their goals, which is an acquiescent, passive Lebanese state that agrees to be a vassal state of Israel.

And they still refuse to do it.

So, finding the negotiated mechanism to arrive at a point where the Lebanese have their sovereign rights and security protected and the Israelis have the same rights, that’s the big challenge that lies ahead. It can only be done if it is accompanied by a serious effort to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict on a permanent and fair basis.

Republished from Democracy now! Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

A South African-born New Zealand critic of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing today delivered strong praise for his home country’s genocide case filed with the International Court of Justice.

Israel is currently on trial on allegations of genocide with the ICJ in The Hague and South Africa has been joined by at least 15 other countries as accusers — but New Zealand is not among them.

Noting how global iconic leader Nelson Mandela spoke out in his lifetime in support of Palestinian rights, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) campaigner Achmat Esau said South Africa was not speaking out of convenience, “but out of principle”.

• READ MORE: Global protests mark Palestinian Prisoners Day
  
• Israel passes mandatory death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism, drawing widespread condemnation
• Other Palestinian and Iran human rights reports

Speaking at the combined Banners of Humanity and Banners of Palestine exhibition and concert at the Corbans Art Centre, Esau paraphrased the Irish poet and essayist W B Yeats’ famous 2019 poem “The Second Coming”:

“In a time when the world feels like it is unravelling, we must choose to be that centre — to hold the line for justice, dignity and humanity.”

A veteran activist of the 1981 Springbok tour anti-apartheid protests, he told the audience he was speaking about “camaraderie — a spirit of shared struggle, trust and solidarity” and how it shaped South Africa’s decision to take legal action against Israel at the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

On 29 December 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the ICJ, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention in the besieged Gaza Strip.

By January 2024, the court found these genocide allegations “plausible” and ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide, a legal order Tel Aviv has since ignored.

Support for South Africa
“Since then, multiple countries have joined the lawsuit action, and South Africa has submitted extensive to support its case,” Esau said.

Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Iceland, Ireland, Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Palestine, The Netherlands, and Türkiye are among countries joining the lawsuit.

The ICC has also issued arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders (all since assassinated).

“in response, South Africa has faced intense pressure — particularly from the United States — through political threats, legal opposition and public condemnation,” said Esau.

“So why does South Africa persist? The answer lies in our history.

“Under apartheid, our struggle for freedom was sustained by international solidarity — by comrades who stood with us in our darkest hours.

“That solidarity shaped who we are.

“Countries such as Cuba, Palestine, Libya and Iran actively supported our liberation.”

Mandela’s message
On Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island jail after being imprisoned for 27 years, he “honoured them, calling them brothers, comrades and leaders , because they stood with South Africa when it mattered most”.

Esau also cited Mandela’s famous pledge, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Many other speakers, singers and musicans took part at the Banners for Humanity event, which was a fundraiser for the global medical charity MSF — Doctors Without Borders.

The performers included Simon Frost and his daughters; PSNA’s co-chair Maher Nazzal; Taipua Kipa and Delta Johns, Waitakere College rangatahi; Lebanese singer Eva Maria Chasson; Mama Lema Shamaba, of the Democratic Republic of Congo; West Papuan Dr Mary Joku Ponifasio; Fatima Sanussi of Sudan; and Bibi Amina, speaking about Iran.

Masses of protest banners on display included “End genocidal capitalism — Palestine forever”, “IDF = Murder Machine — your silence is complicit with murder”, “Luxon! Sanction Netanyahu now: End U$rael Illegal War$”, and “The more you oppress — the more we will resist”.

Earlier in the day, Achmat Esau had also spoken at a PSNA rally in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square to mark the Red Ribbon Global Action to stop Israel’s plan to execute Palestinian hostages on the 132nd consecutive week of Gaza protests.

‘Prisoners’ in street theatre
A street theatre performance led by the Artists for Sumud Ensemble and Under the Same Moon featured hooded prisoners (the protesters) and most of the crowd. The group was led by singers Acacia O’Connor and Eva Maria, and Uruguayan artist-filmmaker Eloiza Montaña.

Speakers included Maya Swaid from the Palestinian community and social justice engineer Syed Iqbal, chair of Support Beyond Boards.

Israel is currently holding more than 9600 political prisoners hostage — an 83 percent increase since before the genocide began in October 2023.

Swaid related how many prisoners were arbitraily “taken from their homes, prosecuted and then incarcerated” in prisons notorious for torture under a military court system where they had no rights.

“There are also many women housed in these prisons and more than 3500 people who are not charged with any crime at all,” she said.

“No charge, no trial, no conviction. They are jailed under ‘administrative’ detention based on ‘secret evidence’ that they are not allowed to see in a system where they cannot defend themselves.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s latest report has warned that Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent” and that “torture has effectively become state policy” since October 2023, reports Democracy Now!

Earlier this month, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed a law enabling mandatory executions of Palestinian prisoners by a 62-48 vote that has stirred global protests and condemnation by human rights groups.

Many American apologists cannot see the forest for the trees and think that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz represents a huge win for the United States and that Iran has caved in. Wrong.

When the Iran ceasefire was first announced by US President Donald Trump on April 8, it was meant to cover Lebanon as well.

Even the Pakistanis, who were the mediators said it covered Lebanon. But that war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to wreck the peace process and so bombed Lebanon viciously and committed genocide once again, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent Lebanese.

• READ MORE: Iran warns US blockade of ports must end as Strait of Hormuz opens

Trump tried to rein him in but Netanyahu refused to stop the genocide and the two got into a shouting match in the early hours of the morning. The Americans just could not control the Israelis.

So Iran maintained their vice-like closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With each passing day, the world was moving towards an economic precipice and people all over the world were blaming Trump and the Americans for starting the stupid war.

Trump eventually read the riot act to Netanyahu and unilaterally imposed the ceasefire in Lebanon. The Israelis were stunned.

The ceasefire resulted not because of talks between the Lebanese and the Israelis, but because of the leverage Iran has over the Strait of Hormuz. That is why the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that because of the ceasefire in Lebanon, Iran is reopening the Strait — and Trump thanked the Iranians profusely for it.

As for Trump still maintaining the blockade of the Iranian ports, this is pure posturing by him to show that he is strong. It means nothing.

The Iranians have already warned him that if he continues with the blockade, they will not only close off the Strait of Hormuz again but also the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea and also the Gulf of Oman.

That would plunge the entire world economy into a depression and no oil from the Gulf would flow.

Trump as usual is blustering, but in reality he is praying every minute that the Iranians will go back to the negotiating table, and give him the peace deal he so desperately needs to extricate himself from the mess he created in starting this war.

Iran is showing its maturity and displaying the might of a new global power. It will soon control the entire Middle East together with the other great power — Türkiye.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph is being acquired by a German-based media giant — and now its journalists are formally expected to support Israel.

The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared the takeover by Axel Springer SE. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has written to Telegraph staff “outlining his commitment” to the paper.

An employee at The Telegraph has sent me that letter. It is deeply revealing.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine and Iran media reports
• Owen Jones on Substack

Döpfner insists that the values of The Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer — dubbed “Germany’s Rupert Murdoch” — are aligned. They are, he says, “Freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech”.

He goes further. Axel Springer, he explains, is “guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in its “Essentials” — “core values to which we are firmly committed”.

There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism”: only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”

And yet, having invoked “freedom of speech” as a foundational principle, he insists these Essentials are not partisan — but rather “define a socio-political framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”

‘We support the right of Israel to exist’
Döpfner then sets out those ‘Essentials’:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democracy.
2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.
3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.
4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.
5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits: second.

‘Freedom’ — within limits
Döpfner emphasises that editorial independence will be protected, including from pressure by politicians, celebrities, or advertisers. “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression,” he writes.

But the description of the Essentials is, frankly, Orwellian.

It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for “maximum journalistic freedom” while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.

Out of 193 UN member states, only one is singled out in this way.

No state has a “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination — a right denied, in this case, by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonisation and genocide.

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

To be firmly told by our new parent company-to-be’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning.

It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.

As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.

What ‘Israel’s right to exist’ means in practice
In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes — from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting “all forms of discrimination”. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, “oppose all forms of antisemitism” is fused directly with “support the right of Israel to exist”.

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.

So how, exactly, might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of antisemitism”?

‘Free Palestine’ is a ‘pro-Hamas topic’
There are very strong clues, let’s put it that way.

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.

He further added:

The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy, wherever and whenever it can be provided – in the European Community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.

He described this as a “German duty”.

In June 2021, when employees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Mathias Döpfner responded:

I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.

He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May.

In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV — part of the Axel Springer empire — was dismissed: he says it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refuse to comment on “individual personnel matters”.

In an internal email which was leaked that year, Döpfner reportedly summarised his political worldview with the phrase: “Zionism über alles” — “Zionism above all.”

He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks, or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding “massive, unstiting political, financial and military support”.

On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed “a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for the Hamas’ actions.” He argued that “an almost global wave of Anti-Semitism suddenly showed its ugly face”, which he described as a shock, despite knowing “that it is here and there, well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as Anti-Zionism or “Woke-ism” or whatever.”

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

“Concretely, more than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag of #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics. And only 50,000 something, 53,000 posts basically standing by Israel.”

“Free Palestine”, he argued, was a “kind of pro-Hamas topic”.

Conflating antisemitism with critique of Israel
When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was “surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed:

the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly antisemitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterised not only by racist undertones, but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.

In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with antisemitism.

A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th which included: “A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.” The claims that Israeli children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked.

He went on to write that:

justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged.

The piece further criticised the German government — Israel’s most loyal European defender — for “massively” restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision meant that “From now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to conditions.”

He described the recognition of Palestinian statehood “as a reward for the barbarism of October 7″.

Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into German tabloid Bild, a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE, headlined “The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specialising in Anti-Palestinian Incitement’.

Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a “terrorist”, denied famine in Gaza, and published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The newspaper, reported Al Jazeera, had also “consistently demonised pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labelling them as “mobs”, “Israel-haters”, and “anti-Semites”.

Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.

We can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.

Extracted and republished from Owen Jones’ article on his Battlelines substack. Read the full article here.

At least 262 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war against the besieged enclave, marking one of the deadliest periods for media workers in recent global history, reports Al Jazeera.

Despite newsrooms being destroyed and reporters losing their lives, coverage continues through a new generation of young, often untrained correspondents determined to document the conflict.

With international media access severely restricted, the responsibility of reporting increasingly falls on local journalists who work in makeshift shelters and tents amid rubble, facing constant danger.

• READ MORE: Foreign press access to Gaza: RSF and partner organisations call on Israeli Supreme Court judges to accelerate proceedings
• Other Gaza media reports

For many, journalism has shifted from profession to urgent responsibility.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reports from Gaza City on the new generation of journalists, many of them young women.

Gaza’s young journalists document Israel’s war crimes       Video: Al Jazeera

It is the people of the Global South, not governments, who must resist this subversion of the concepts of the “nation’ and of non-alignment.

The Indian government’s position on the US-Israeli war against Iran shows an unbelievable degree of pusillanimity.

India attended the recent meeting of about 50 countries called by the United Kingdom where Iran was strongly criticised for closing the Strait of Hormuz, but not a word was uttered against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

• READ MORE: Iran war’s big winners: Wall Street, weapons firms, AI and green energy
• ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump
• Iran hasn’t survived decades of hostile sanctions, assassinations and sabotage by accident – it’s by strategy
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Likewise, India was one of the sponsors of a resolution at the UN General Assembly which criticised Iran for attacking other countries in the Gulf (though Iran was attacking only the American military bases located in those countries). Yet again, not a word was uttered in that resolution condemning the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

It is also noteworthy that India took several days before expressing any grief over the assassination Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several weeks before expressing any shock over the brutal killing of 175 innocent schoolgirls in Minab.

Such pusillanimity, however, is not confined to India: as many as 135 countries were co-sponsors of the dishonest and duplicitous UNGA resolution mentioned above, afraid that they would otherwise offend the Americans.

In fact, apart from a handful of countries in the entire world, none has had the gumption to condemn unambiguously the blatantly illegal and immoral war unleashed by the US-Israeli combine against Iran.

Extreme concern
This is a matter for extreme concern, for the attack on Iran abrogates the concept of sovereignty of nations that had been the core concept in the struggle for decolonisation and had underlain the entire post-colonial order. It destroys, in other words, the very rationale for decolonisation.

This pusillanimity on the part of Third World countries is also a matter of great puzzlement. After all, these are countries that have had long and arduous anti-colonial struggles to achieve the status of independent and sovereign states; how can they remain silent when this very sovereignty is being violated in the case of a fellow Third World state by the armed might of US imperialism?

The answer to this question, no doubt complex, must nonetheless incorporate recognition of at least two fractures that neoliberalism has introduced into our world. One is the fracturing of the concept of the “nation” whose coming into being had been accomplished by the anti-colonial struggle.

This concept of the “nation” had differed fundamentally from the European concept that had developed in the wake of the Westphalian Peace Treaties in at least three ways: first, it was inclusive and did not identify any “enemy within”; second, unlike European nationalism it shunned any imperial ambitions of its own, in the sense of having designs over the resources of distant lands; and third, it did not apotheosise the nation as standing above the people whose “duty” supposedly was to serve it.

The coming into being of this inclusive concept of the “nation” was in turn a reflection of the fact that the anti-colonial struggle was a multi-class struggle; and the dirigiste economic regime that was erected after independence, though it promoted capitalist development, also sought to put curbs on rampant capitalism in the name of achieving “national” development.

This was in the interests of preserving its multi-class support base, which even the monopoly capitalists were not averse to at that time, since they had wanted a trajectory of development where the state exercised relative autonomy vis-a-vis imperialism. The existence of a large public sector was a part of this trajectory.

Further, the policy of non-alignment pursued by these dirigiste regimes had complemented this quest for development in relative autonomy from imperialism. Michal Kalecki, the Polish Marxist economist, had erred in calling such regimes “intermediate regimes” and suggesting that the middle classes held decisive power in such regimes; but he had been right in identifying state capitalism (public sector) and non-alignment as the two most distinctive features of these regimes.

Monopoly bourgeoisie
With globalisation of capital, however, things changed. The domestic monopoly bourgeoisie integrated itself with globalised capital and abandoned its agenda of pursuing a development trajectory that was relatively autonomous of the metropolis.

Sections of the upper professional and bureaucratic segments of society, keen to send their children to study and settle down in the metropolis, joined in as supporters of the neoliberal regime that emerged under the aegis of this globalised capital.

The landed rich too sought their fortunes within this new neoliberal order, which not only promoted rampant unrestrained capitalism, but came down heavily against workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, petty producers and the lower salariat. A schism was effected within the class alliance that had been forged in the course of the anti-colonial struggle.

It was no longer the “nation” against the metropolis that was in focus, but big capital including multinational capital against those social groups which stood in the way of instituting rapid “development” defined exclusively in terms of GDP growth-rates.

The interest of big capital was, by a sleight of hand, identified as “national interest”, and the duty of all classes was to promote it.

This shift in the meaning of the term “nation” meant in effect a fracturing of the “nation” whose coming into being was the desideratum of the anti-colonial struggle. Freedom of the “nation” from imperialist domination, far from being the over-riding objective, was no longer even a desired or a relevant objective for the government within a neoliberal setting.

This is the first instance of “fracturing” referred to above. Because of this fracturing, the criterion on the basis of which the government of a neoliberal regime takes decisions is not whether a particular stance defends national sovereignty, but whether it promotes the material interests of big capital which are considered identical with those of the “nation” in its new meaning.

Deafening silences
Siding with the US-Israeli alliance appears, on balance, more advantageous than standing with Iran, the victim of aggression, from the point of view of the interests of big capital in countries of the Global South. This would go some way to explain the deafening silences, mentioned earlier, in the UNGA and other resolutions.

There is also a second “fracture” brought about by the neoliberal regime. While the neoliberal regime is “sold” to the Global South as ushering in export-led growth that would bring about a higher GDP growth-rate for all countries compared with the earlier dirigiste regime, this claim is completely false.

Since the growth rate of aggregate world demand does not increase when more countries pursue an export-led growth strategy, the neoliberal regime that generalises this strategy among all countries is, in effect, forcing them to engage in Darwinian competition against one another, that is, to pursue a “beggar-thy-neighbour” strategy.

Some countries’ higher growth-rate than before under the export-led growth strategy, it follows, must be at the expense of other countries that now experience lower growth-rate than before.

Countries engaged in a race to outdo one another can scarcely be said to be “co-operating” with one another. The effect of a general pursuit of the neoliberal strategy, therefore, is a de facto abandonment of non-alignment, of a trajectory where countries of the Global South stood with one another to face up to imperialism.

Now, countries of the Global South, each obsessed with achieving higher GDP growth and hence, within the neoliberal paradigm, obsessed with drawing in larger metropolitan investment for this purpose, would rather curry favour with imperialism in order to outdo their neighbours.

This leads to a fracturing of the non-aligned movement, which is the second fracturing we mentioned earlier.

The silence of most countries of the Global South in the face of the US-Israeli aggression on Iran, which may appear puzzling at first sight, is not so puzzling after all.

Subverting both ‘nation’, ‘non-alignment’
Neoliberalism has been at work for quite some time in subverting both the concept of the nation and the concept of non-alignment, abandoning the anti-imperialist core that characterised these concepts, and substituting in their place alternative concepts that prioritise the task of currying favour with imperialism over everything else.

The outcome of this process is what we see today.

Capitalism is invariably hostile to any collective praxis against it, even if this collective praxis takes the form of just trade union action. It believes in atomising economic agents.

Neoliberal capitalism, which represents a return to unrestrained and uncontrolled capitalism once more, brings to the fore this tendency toward the atomisation of economic agents, through a break-up of the class alliance that had participated in the anti-colonial struggle, and through a subversion of the non-aligned movement that had stood for collective opposition by countries of the Global South to imperialist hegemony.

It is for the people of the Global South, not the governments currently promoting the interests of the ruling big bourgeoisie, to extend solidarity to the people of Iran. The struggle of Iran against the US-Israeli alliance is of crucial importance for recovering the sovereignty of the Global South.

Dr Prabhat Patnaik is professor emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal. This article is republished from Newsclick.

The managers of the New Zealand’s $86 billion Super Fund failed to properly address human rights issues when considering whether to exclude companies from its investments, the High Court has found

Justice Simon Mount granted an application by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) for judicial review of Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation’s policies relating to ethical investment.

In a decision released today, Justice Mount declared parts of the fund’s policy documents, standards and procedures, and its sustainable investment framework were “unreasonable and unlawful”.

• READ MORE: Illegal Israeli settlers kill Palestinian during raid on occupied West Bank village
  
• How Israel’s record budget will finance expanding illegal settlements
• Other PSNA Super Fund reports

The court also ordered the crown entity to pay PSNA’s legal costs.

PSNA co-chair John Minto said the decision was a victory for Palestinian rights, while Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation said it was considering its next move.

The sovereign wealth fund was created in 2001 to help provide for New Zealander’s superannuation costs.

By law, Guardians are required to invest the funds on a prudent commercial basis, manage and administer the fund with best-practice portfolio management, and avoid prejudice to New Zealand’s reputation as “a responsible member of the world community”.

Backbone of case
That last duty formed the backbone of the case taken by PSNA, who have long lobbied the Guardians to divest from companies it claims to be complicit in human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Guardians excluded development, construction and technology companies involved in settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2012.

In 2021, following years of lobbying by PSNA, the Guardians also excluded five Israeli banks from its portfolio on the grounds there was an unacceptable risk the banks were materially contributing to breaches of human rights standards and that engaging with the banks themselves was unlikely to be effective.

PSNA continued to request the exclusion of other investments due to alleged human rights breaches and focused on four companies that featured on a United Nations Human Rights Council database of companies trading with illegal Israeli settlements — Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and Motorola.

Justice Mount said the chief executive of the Guardians replied to the group in mid-2024 noting none of the companies “currently meets the exclusion threshold under our Sustainable Investment Framework”.

In later correspondence, the Guardians’ head of sustainable investment reiterated that stance, which led PSNA to indicate it would seek the judicial review.

In his findings, Justice Mount noted the Guardian’s 2020 policy documents identified several standards and benchmarks that were later removed — including the Principles for Responsible Investment, principles of the UN Global Compact, and a broad reference to “other good practice standards”.

Earlier policy removed
The earlier policy referred to several sets of standards described as “universally recognised by the world community — with signatories including investment managers, investee companies and the peers of Guardians — and unlikely to be superseded”.

The 2020 policy stated its applicable principles were based on the UN Global Compact, in particular the requirements to support and respect human rights and “no complicity in abuses”.

It also set a threshold for excluding government bonds where there was “widespread condemnation or sanctions by the international community and New Zealand has imposed meaningful diplomatic, economic or military sanctions”.

Justice Mount noted the almost 3000 pages of evidence filed for the judicial review allowed him to gain a picture of how the Guardians had used their policy documents in practice.

The judge noted the Guardians’ approach to excluding investments was not entirely coherent and the policies failed to meet the basic requirements of the law when alleged breaches of human rights standards were concerned.

The Guardians had a duty to reformulate its policy documents to be consistent with the Act, he said.

Minto celebrated the court’s ruling.

Fund raking in money
The group was confident the Super Fund would divest from Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and Motorola once it had rewritten its policies to comply with the law, he said.

The High Court judgment showed the Super Fund had invested $67 million in the four companies.

Minto said the fund was raking in money from appalling breaches of international law by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The country’s leading sovereign wealth fund should be setting the benchmark for all New Zealand investment funds, not deriving money from war crimes and massive human rights abuses, he said.

The lack of a clear grounds to exclude companies from investment because of human rights abuses were particularly problematic, Minto said.

“This is beyond outrageous. Our largest sovereign wealth fund, owned by the government on behalf of the people of New Zealand, has no specific references to human rights standards in its investment exclusions policy.”

The case had revealed the exclusions policy was weakened and direct references to human rights standards were removed the year after the fund divested from five Israeli banks, Minto said.

Replaced with vague policy
“The Super Fund replaced a principled policy with an entirely vague and subjective assessment of companies which meant they could resist pressure from human rights groups such as PSNA.

“The fund was entirely making up legal sounding excuses as it went. It meant they could now keep on their books other companies which abuse the human rights of Palestinians,” he said.

“The Super Fund owes us all an apology and in particular an apology to Palestinians here and in Palestine, whose suffering is helping pay the price of the fund’s increasing wealth.”

Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation chief executive Jo Townsend said the crown entity was still considering its response to the decision.

“We recognise that we are investing on behalf of all New Zealanders, and that gives people a legitimate interest in how we manage the fund,” she said.

“We will thoroughly evaluate today’s decision and determine how best to respond to it,” she said.

The UN Human Rights Council database featuring the four companies is from a list of 97 companies involved with illegal Israeli settlements.

The database came about following a 2016 UN Security Council resolution, co-sponsored by New Zealand, that led to diplomatic rupture between the two countries and Israel recalling its ambassador.

Israeli media reported at the time that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully proceeding with the resolution wold be considered a “declaration of war”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The war on Iran is not only being fought on the battlefield, reports France24 — it is also playing out online.

Iran’s state media recently took a leaf out of the White House’s own social media playbook, mocking US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an AI-generated propaganda video styled like a LEGO animation.

The clip suggested that Trump launched the conflict to distract from scrutiny over his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

• READ MORE: Iran slams YouTube ban on pro-Iranian group’s Lego-style AI videos
• Trump says war on Iran ‘close to over’; Israel pounds Lebanon
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The video quickly circulated online, highlighting how artificial intelligence is being used as a tool of political messaging and satire in modern conflicts.

A massive Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition rally and march on the US Consulate took place in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau last Saturday, 11 April 2026.

“We’re going to stand up for the people of Iran, stand up for the people of Palestine, stand up for the people of Lebanon, stand up for the people of Venezuela, stand up for the people of Cuba, stand up for this fight against the American empire,” declared organiser Joe Carolan.

US and Israeli imperialism was strongly denounced by political, civil society, human rights and migrant speakers.

Protesters staged a “die-in” on the street in front of the consulate to mark the targeted slaughter of 168 children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab by US bombs. This tragedy took place on February 28, the opening day of the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on the Islamic Republic.

Photographs: David Robie

• See other images and video clips
• Full story — Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ

Stop Wars Aotearoa

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The planning and policy committee of New Zealand’s largest city today voted decisively to review its procurement policies to ensure it is in step with the UN Human Rights Council which has listed companies complicit with illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestine Territory.

Auckland Council is the local body governing a “super city” with a population of more than 1.8 million people — almost a third of the country’s total population.

The council’s policy, planning and development committee voted 14 to 2 with 4 abstentions to call for a review report by July about sanctioning UN-listed companies over illegal Israeli settlements.

• READ MORE: NZ’s third-largest city sanctions Israel over illegal Palestine settlements
• Other Occupied Palestine reports

“Israel has been stealing Palestinian land and moving Israeli settlers onto the land in defiance of international law,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair Maher Nazzal.

“The local Palestinian community and our supporters sincerely thank the Auckland councillors who today have voted for steps to refuse to procure goods or services from any of the companies involved in building and maintaining these settlements,” he said in a statement.

“Auckland ratepayers deserve to know their rates are not being used to support Israeli war crimes, as designated by the UN General Assembly, Security Council, international conventions and the International Court of Justice.

Councillor Julie Fairey moved the resolution calling for the report “on the alignment of Auckland Council policies and practices with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334”.

She rejected the arguments of councillors who opposed it by arguing that the council should “stick to its knitting”.  She responded that decisions should be made so that “the needles and the wool don’t have blood on them”.

Six local bodies have acted
The resolution was seconded by councillor Sarah Peterson-Hamlin.

Councillor Maurice Williamson voted against the resolution.

However, as a cabinet minister of the Key/English National government at the time, he stated he had supported New Zealand co-sponsorship of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 in 2016, calling Israeli settlements “a flagrant breach of international law”.

Williamson then went on to attack the UN Human Rights Council, falsely claiming it was chaired by Iran, when in fact its current president is Indonesian Ambassador Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro.

PSNA’s Kathy Ross presented a submission in support of the motion.

“Already six different local bodies have taken this step — it’s good to see Auckland following along the same path,” Nazzal said.

New Zealand’s third-largest city, Christchurch, voted to sanction Israel in October 2024.

A strong contingent of supporters for the Auckland resolution were present for the debate and delighted with the result.

As an Iranian living in New Zealand, I wake up every morning to the quiet green hills and the calm sea, but my mind is always thousands of kilometres away in Iran.

The news from home hits differently when you are far away. You feel helpless, but you sometimes also see things more clearly.

For years, I have watched the same old story from Washington and Tel Aviv: they want to change the regime in Iran. Not because they care about Iranian freedom, but because they want more power in the Middle East, control the oil routes, control the region, control everything.

• READ MORE: Diplomatic efforts to revive US-Iran talks intensify amid Hormuz blockade
• Iran a hugely ‘friendly’ country behind the sabre-rattling
• Other Eugene Doyle Solidarity articles

They tried it openly in the 12-Day War last year. They bombed, they threatened, they hoped the whole system would collapse. It didn’t. And now they are trying again, waiting for the Iranian people to rise up and do their job for them.

But it is not happening, and it will not happen.

From my small house here in New Zealand, I talk to family back home almost every day. They are tired, yes. Life is hard with sanctions, constant threats and bombings.

But Iran isn’t run by stupid people. The authorities in Iran have planned for this for a long time. If top figures are targeted, there is a chain ready to continue. It is not a secret. They have built it step by step.

Americans, Israelis don’t understand
The Americans and Israelis don’t seem to understand this because they do not know the religious and cultural soul of Iran. Without that knowledge any plan is blind. You cannot bomb a country and expect surrender when the children in every school learn about resistance from the first grade.

Take Imam Hussein, for example. Most people in New Zealand and other countries have probably never heard the name, so let me explain it simply. Imam Hussein was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

In the year 680, in what is now Iraq, he and just 72 of his loyal companions including women and children stood in the desert of Karbala against an army of tens of thousands sent by a tyrannical ruler. They were cut off from water for days. They knew they would be killed.

Yet Imam Hussein refused to swear loyalty to a corrupt leader. He chose death with dignity over a life of submission. Every year during the month of Muharram, Iranians mourn this event not as a defeat but as the ultimate symbol of resistance.

We cry, we march, we tell the story to our children: standing for justice is worth any price.

That lesson is not ancient history. It is taught in schools today as a living example of how a small group can defy an empire. How do you expect a nation raised on that story to give up when missiles fall?

We have many such examples from the revolution to the war with Iraq to every pressure since. According to many political analysts, this is exactly why the West keeps making the same mistake.

They don’t see the culture
They look at Iran through their own eyes. They see maps and weapons and money. They do not see the culture that turns every attack into fuel for survival.

The diaspora is another story. When I first came to New Zealand years ago, the Iranians overseas were split into two main groups. One part supported the Islamic Republic, the other part, mostly louder in the West, wanted the return of the monarchy and backed the king in exile. They argued online, but at least the lines were clear.

Now everything is different. The attacks on Iran have created real splits and even anger among those who used to be against the regime. Some of them trusted Trump and Netanyahu. They said on social media and in interviews that the bombs would bring freedom.

Instead, the bombs are bringing destruction, dead civilians, ruined houses, fear in the streets.

Now you see fights breaking out in the comments, in the Persian TV channels, even in family online group chats. The ones who still wave the old flag blame the Islamic Republic for every death.

But many others who once hated the government are saying, “This isn’t freedom. This is an attack on our country.” They feel betrayed. They realise the “liberators” they cheered for only wanted a weaker Iran they could control.

And the war does not look like it will end soon. I speculate it will drag on in this strange way that gets tighter then loosens a bit, then tightens again. Iran will keep using its asymmetric tools: missiles that reach far, drones that are cheap, friends in the region who act when needed.

The system will not fall
The economy will suffer, people will suffer more, but the system will not fall. The Iranian people have closed ranks around the idea of independence. Those in the diaspora who hoped for quick regime change will stay disappointed. The ones who begged for American and Israeli action are now watching their own relatives bury the dead and should be asking themselves what “freedom” really means when it comes with foreign bombs.

Living here in New Zealand, I sometimes feel guilty for the safety I have. I go to work without air-raid sirens. But every time I see the news, I remember why Iran will not break.

It isn’t because the government is perfect. Far from it. It is because the alternative they are being offered is not freedom. Instead, it is humiliation and loss of dignity.

The Americans and Israelis think they are playing chess. They do not realise they are fighting a nation that has turned resistance into a religion, a culture, a memory passed from mother to child for centuries.

I do not know how long this round will last. Maybe months, maybe years of shadow war. But one thing is clear from my quiet corner in New Zealand: regime change from outside will not come.

The Iranian people have decided, consciously or not, that they will decide their own future, even if it is painful. The planners in Washington and Tel Aviv should study Karbala again. They might understand then why their plans keep failing.

Kaveh is an Iranian who has been living in New Zealand for many years. Having travelled across many different countries, he takes great pride in contributing to various communities through his professional work and community activities in New Zealand. Republished with permission from Eugene Doyle’s Solidarity website.

This US naval blockade is meant to strangle the Iranian economy by preventing it from exporting oil — the economic lifeline of Iran. It will do nothing of the sort.

Please study the infographics below. Before the war started, Iran was furiously loading tankers with oil at 3 times the normal rate and sending them off to the Far East, with the ultimate destination being China.

China buys 90 percent of Iranian oil, with many of its private refineries — known colloquially as “tea pot” refineries — depending on Iranian crude.

• READ MORE: Trump claims Iran wants a deal ‘very badly’ as US blockade begins in Hormuz
• Iran threatens retaliation over Gulf ‘piracy’ in Trump’s naval blockade
• Global Sumud Flotilla heads from Barcelona to break Gaza blockade
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

There are presently at least 158 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting in some 96 tankers anchored near the Malaysian state of Johor. There, ship-to-ship transfers take place, before the shipments go off to their final destinations in China.

So this naval blockade will cost the Americans billions of dollars to maintain, but the only thing it will achieve is to make countries dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf such as Australia, Britain, Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh cry.

American voters will get mad at Trump for the surging prices at the pump and give the Republicans a shellacking in the mid-terms.

Iran rolling in cash
Iran will be rolling in cash from the sale of these 158 million barrels of oil already at sea and far away from any naval blockade, and the Iranians will be laughing at the stupidity of the Americans.

Isn’t this the classic illustration of the saying  “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”?

Let us see how long Trump can afford to keep up with this charade.

You would think that American intelligence would have the wherewithal to better advise their President what a harebrained idea his naval blockade is.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

AMY GOODMAN: Ship traffic has halted again in the Strait of Hormuz after President Trump ordered the US military to begin a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas starting on Monday.

Iran denounced Trump’s move as an illegal act amounting to “piracy”. Iran has threatened to strike Gulf ports in retaliation.

Trump ordered the blockade after the US and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war following 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The negotiations marked the highest-level talks between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. US Vice-President JD Vance headed the U.S. delegation, which included US envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Iranian negotiators had flown to Pakistan on a plane they called “Minab 168” as a tribute to the 168 people killed in a US missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab on February 28. The plane carried images of the dead schoolchildren, along with blood-stained school bags recovered beneath the rubble.

Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.

We’re joined now by Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the author of several books, most recently, Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’État. His forthcoming book is 1979: An Inevitable Revolution.

So, your response to what transpired in Pakistan, the deal that was not reached between Iran and the United States, and what this means, Professor?

Trump orders naval blockade of Iran            Video: Democracy Now!

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think both sides actually presented, basically, ultimate demands which the other side couldn’t accept, so it was a false start. But the implications of the failure is going to be actually quite drastic on the United States, because Trump’s main concern has been to actually put a limit, a lid, on the oil prices going up, and they’ve already jumped from $88 a barrel to over $100. They’re going to increase more with the present crisis, with the embargo on the Strait of Hormuz.

And as the crisis escalates, I think the US will start bombing Iranian oil installations. Iran will retaliate by bombing the Gulf’s oil installations, gas installations. The oil prices then could really zoom up.

Some people expect it to reach $200 a barrel. In that case, you know, it will have long-term implications for Wall Street and the whole American economy, not to mention the world economy. So, things that Trump has tried to avoid, he has got, actually, himself into the major crisis, economic crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Robert Malley, who had previously been involved with talks with Iran, saying, “Twenty-one hours was 20 hours too many if the goal was to reiterate a demand Iran had already rejected. It was many hours too few if the goal was to negotiate.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He’s exactly right. And I think, I mean, what Iran sees as the present crisis is an existential one, because although the talk has been regime change, the Israeli policy, clearly, in the last 10 years has been more than regime change. It’s basically been the destruction of the Iranian state, Iranian nation. So Iran sees this as an existential threat.

There was a speech that Trump made when he launched the attack on Iran a couple of weeks ago. It was actually quite an interesting speech. He talked about various ethnic minorities being oppressed in Iran, and they were dying to be liberated from Iranian control. And he listed obvious ethnic groups, but then there was one ethnic group that, really, I’d never heard of.

So I scratched my head. What is this group? And I did what most people do: You google. And lo and behold, this ethnic group actually exists in the other side of the Caucasus Mountains in Dagestan.

So you wonder what reason they had for putting this ethnic group that doesn’t exist in Iran as one of the ethnic groups, unless there’s some sinister idea the Israelis have of a civil war in Iran, where they will recruit, actually, mercenaries from the other side of the Caucasus to bring into Iran.

Of course, this sounds far-fetched, but this is what actually happened in Syria. You had a lot of Chechens actually brought in to fight against Assad. So, the Israelis may be thinking in those terms of actually a long civil war in Iran, where they would be bringing in mercenaries from outside. So, for this reason, I think Iran sees this as a real, serious, existential war. It’s not just a question of a minor sort of fine tuning of relations with the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written about oil in Iran a great deal. Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, tweeted on Sunday, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4-$5 [per gallon] gas.”

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the price could go up to $200 a barrel, even more than that, if, basically, the Gulf oil — it’s not just Iranian oil, but the whole Gulf oil and gas — is actually cut off from the world market.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what Iran wants right now and what the US wants. Ten o’clock am — we’re broadcasting right before that — Eastern time is when the US Navy blockades, apparently, the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

What exactly does this mean? How will the Gulf nations be affected? How will Iran be affected? Because it both exports oil, but, of course, it needs oil and makes a great deal of its own oil.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, I mean, it won’t break Iran, because it has — Iran has other ways of actually exporting oil. It’ll obviously be a hardship, but it’ll be a much worse hardship on the Gulf states, if Iran actually dismantles their oil installations.

And that affects directly United States economy, because so much of Gulf oil money, gas money actually goes into high-tech United States. And much of the American, basically, modern technology is funded by subsidies from the various Gulf states. So it would have drastic repercussions on US economy.

AMY GOODMAN: What does Trump want? His latest, and what Vance said — right? Vance leaves the Hungarian prime minister, campaigning for him, Orbán, who was soundly defeated, and then goes to Islamabad to lead this negotiation. He says it’s all about nuclear weapons. Vance said, “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them [to quickly] achieve a nuclear weapon.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Exactly. I mean, that’s exactly what the Obama agreement was.

AMY GOODMAN: That Trump pulled out of.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, which Trump pulled out of. But if you look at that agreement, basically, it said Iran had the right to enrich, but it had to be supervised to make sure it couldn’t enrich to the level of nuclear weapons.

So, Netanyahu cries it was vague agreement. In fact, it was very precise. Iran could enrich to 3.67 percent of uranium. That’s as precise as you can get. It was limited to 200 grams of enriched uranium. And also, it was — everything was supervised.

There were 140 international monitors, including American monitors. So, this was an incredibly tight procedure to make sure that Iran would actually fulfill its promise not to go into nuclear weapons.

When Trump pulled out of that, he basically unwound the whole system. And the best he can get is going back to that. So, demand that Iran should have no nuclear enrichment is a nonstarter. The best he could get is to go back, permit Iran to have enrichment, but with monitoring that it would not be weapon enrichment.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute. In a call with the Russian President Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said a deal is, “not out of reach.” So, if you can talk about whether — where you see this all headed?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, there are people in Iran in the — basically, in the National Security Council, including Pezeshkian, who think that they can make a deal with the United States. And they’ve been there a long time.

But there are also people now, I think, hardliners, who are stronger now than before the war, who are arguing that you can’t make a deal with Trump. Even if Trump makes a deal, he could, the following week, decide he’s going to pull out. So it’s a nonstarter, from their point of view, unless US can actually make full commitments. And I don’t see how they can do that, because Trump is basically untrustworthy.

So, from their point of view, I think the hardliners in Iran could argue, persuasively, the more the pressure they have, the more the prices are going to go up; the more it goes up, sooner or later, the patient will have a heart attack or a stroke. So they have an upper hand at the moment.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

A group of 39 boats known as the Global Sumud Flotilla has set sail from Barcelona to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, with organisers saying more vessels are expected to join along the route — making this their largest mission so far, reports Al Jazeera.

Israeli security forces illegally intercepted and detained crew from a similar flotilla last year, but organisers say rough sea conditions mean the journey will be slower this time.

The fleet is expected to reach international waters later this week.

• READ MORE: States must ensure safe passage for Global Sumud Flotilla as a civilian mission challenging ongoing genocide
• Other Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

Organisers accused Israel of repeatedly violating the ceasefire and expanding control in Gaza.

They said the flotilla aims to challenge what they describe as an illegal blockade.

About a total of 80 boats from around the world carrying about 1000 people are expected to join the flotilla.

Al Jazeera reporter Mohammad Saleh said from the dockside in Barcelona: “The aim is to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza and to deliver life-saving aid and relief to a besieged population.”

Global Sumud Flotilla heads from Barcelona to Gaza            Video: Al Jazeera

One of the New Zealand supporter crews, Palestinian-Syrian Rana Hamida, said: “On the Global Sumud Flotilla, resistance songs have proved that encouraging comrades and showing our spirits can’t be crushed IS essential activism.

“Dissent comes from singing our truth, sailing toward freedom, and standing firm in solidarity.

“Every voice, every wave, every stance breaks through the siege. Our strength is collective, and our will is unbreakable.”

#breakthesiege
@globalsumudflotilla
@speakupdotcom

The Territorial Assembly of French Polynesia has for the first time shown a new configuration during its first administrative sitting on Friday, following a mass resignation of a group of young elected members of the ruling Tavini Huiraatira.

This follows the mass resignation of a group of 15 members of the Assembly, now headed by 25-year-old member Tematai Le Gayic.

The mass resignation de facto brings down Tavini’s majority to 22 within the Territorial Assembly (of a total of 57 MPs).

• READ MORE: Rift widens within French Polynesia’s ruling party following municipal election losses
• Other French Polynesia reports

The outcome of the rift within the ruling party is that now, for the first time in its history, it is divided into two groups.

One consists of the remaining “old guard”, headed by historic pro-independence “radical” members such as former president Oscar Temaru, 81, and his closest ally, Antony Géros (currently Speaker of the Assembly and vice-president of the Tavini Party).

On the other side, the breakaway group of Tavini members from a younger generation, called A Fano Tia (Stay the course) now gathers some 15 members.

A Fano Tia is also reported to be close to French Polynesia’s government President Moetai Brotherson, whose father-in-law is Temaru.

To mark their differences with their former party, under which they were elected during the territorial elections in May 2023, A Fano Tia members appeared in the chamber dressed in white in contrast to Tavini’s light blue.

The sitting was marked by heated debates between the two groups, while the opposition “pro-autonomy” (supporters of French Polynesia remaining part of France under the current Autonomy Status) essentially stood as spectators.

‘Independence … can be neither imposed nor rushed’ – Brotherson
As a preview to future debates and local Assembly’s modus operandi, until the next territorial elections, in 2028, questions have been raised as to how a more divided house could function.

There could be more open opposition during debates for future Bills, especially those which are related to points of notorious contention (such as the notion of independence).

Tavini’s hard line, defended by Temaru, favours a short-term process to gain French Polynesia’s independence, including a more confrontational approach towards France.

Speaking last Friday, Brotherson elaborated on the divergence of views regarding independence.

“Independence is not an end in itself . . .  it’s a choice, but this choice can be neither imposed nor rushed,” Brotherson said last week in the chamber.

In earlier statements, Brotherson had favoured a more gradual process within a window of “10 to 15” years.

More than ever, every Bill is likely to be treated on a case-by-case basis and alliances formed accordingly around the vote.

More alliances likely
This could also involve, on the same principle, more alliances between A Fano Tia and pro-autonomy Tapura Huiraatira, as well as a handful of independent MPs.

It could involve more open opposition from the “historic” Tavini, which could oppose future Bills from Brotherson’s government.

The other components of the Assembly include 16 from the opposition pro-France (pro-autonomy) Tapura Huiraatira and 4 others not registered under any party.

No party has an outright majority.

The rules have changed, but no one wants to topple the government

Sometimes floated during earlier Tavini internal debates, the notion of Brotherson’s departure or resignation as president was not regarded as a solution.

“Since we were elected and until 2028, there won’t be any no-confidence motion,” Géros publicly assured.

“We’re asking [Brotherson] to carry the weight of his presidency until 2028,” he told MPs.

Tapura said it was not prepared to “contribute to government instability”.

“We’ll always be here in a constructive way,” Tapura wrote in a release posted on social networks.

However, it deplored that during this session the floor had been “confiscated” by Tavini’s internal bickering.

Any no-confidence motion requires the approval of at least 35 of the 57 MPs.

Crucial legislative committees
At the sitting last week, the allocation of chairs for the Assembly’s influential legislative committees was also renewed.

A Fano Tia said it did not intend to bid for any of them because it did not want to be accused of being “opportunistic”.

As a result, Tavini retained the chair of key committees such as Economy, Finance and Budget, Education, Youth and Sports (which could turn crucial as French Polynesia is hosting the 2027 Pacific Games), as well as Tourism and Culture.

Opposition pro-autonomy Tapura also retains Employment and Public Service and gains one more committee (Health and Solidarity).

Other parliamentary committees (Institutions and International Affairs, Housing, Land and sustainable development, Transport and Public Works, as well as Agriculture and Marine resources — another point of contention between the historic Tavini and A Fano Tia — were allocated to other Assembly groups.

“Unfortunately, today, [Assembly] debates were confiscated by political statements. And at the end of the day it is [French] Polynesians who will be forgotten,” said French Polynesia’s representative at the French Senate Teva Rohfritsch.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

On the night of February 28, the Israel-US airstrike killed his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his wife, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

According to a recent report from Reuters, Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei suffered life threatening injuries and apparently lost his leg and has a disfigured face.

The report said he communicated through written statements read by TV anchors and audio conferences with senior officials.

• READ MORE: US military says it will block all Iranian port traffic in Hormuz Strait
• US delegation ‘failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’
• Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ​
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

I don’t want to believe Reuters or any puppet media from the West but I would like to believe that the new supreme leader is not in full capacity as expected.

Well, despite all that, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is still grounded, strong and with no signs of collapse.

They lost 40+ senior leaders but still fought two superpower countries to a ceasefire. They still control the Strait of Hormuz and have thousands of missiles and drones left.

This simply points out to the fact that IRGC is in control and guess who is the leader?

Led IRGC for decades
Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the martyred Ali Khamenei, who led IRGC for decades with a hand injury over a bomb explosion in a tape recorder in 1981.

Imagine you were Mojtaba who has just lost all your family to a brutal attack that claimed even more lives in your country.

In one way or another you survived and you have people taking instructions from you.

At this point I don’t think death scares you anymore because you saw death in its true colours and even had a conversation with it.

Back to myself, what if I was Mojtaba Khamenei? First, no surrender. I would fight to the last microsecond and die fighting but surrendering is where I draw the line.

Second, the Strait of Hormuz is non-negotiable. It is our territorial waters and remains under our control. We do with it what we want. It’s ours, period.

After all, it was open and safe for all until someone decided to attack us and now we call the shots. It’s either you agree with our terms of gerrarahia!

Two options on missiles
On our missile programme, two options. It’s either we maintain our missile programme or develop nukes.

We won’t sit here and be at the mercies of aggressive enemies like Israel and US with no options to protect ourselves.

It’s either we can nuke you or we can missile you one or both options. Imagine just being there and being limited to defensive missiles capabilities yet those asking you to do that are the same people attacking you during negotiations!

Uranium enrichment. Let everyone enrich uranium and use it however they want. It’s either everyone can or no one can’t. No selective privileges.

Lastly, if I was Mojtaba Khamenei, those who murdered my family would definitely pay, not by dollars, not by Shekel and of course not by propaganda but by blood.

What would you do, if you were Mojtaba Khamenei?

Bonface Chisutia is a writer and academic based in Nairobi, Kenya. This commentary is republished from his Facebook account.

When news reports first indicated that US Vice-President JD Vance was going to lead the Americans in the negotiations with Iran, the country the US and Israel are waging a foolish war against, there was a sense that someone even as young him may have recognised the train wreck that Donald Trump was creating.

Former top negotiators real estate developer Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, had already proven to be self-enriching charlatans like Trump.

If someone understood a little — only a little — more about the state of affairs, they could be excellent replacements to Witkoff and Kushner and save America from a crisis of its own making.

• READ MORE: US military to block all Iran-bound ships from transiting the Hormuz Strait
• US delegation ‘failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’
• Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ​
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

As it transpired, that person was not Vance.
​
In the negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, the US vice-president proved to be no more than a minion to Trump, not someone who can rise to the occasion and stop the stupid war that is taking down the American military and the global economy.
​
If you cannot see how disastrously America and Israel are conducting the war, here is Professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on European history, parsing it for you in plain language on March 18, just two weeks after the war started:
​

“[Trump] took the greatest military force in world history, lost the war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else.

I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.”
​

By now, it is an open secret that Trump is being blackmailed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who holds evidence of degenerate behavior by the US president from his devilish days on disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But even in a moment of incompetence, incredible loss, and national humiliation for America like this, Vance had a chance to save his country.
​
Now we know for certain that everyone who has ever worked for Trump is diminished by it. Vance was an exception only for a second.
​
IRNA News Agency is state-controlled media.

Thousands of protesters took part in the “Stop Wars Aotearoa” rallies across New Zealand today, calling for an end to the illegal war on Iran and the brutal onslaught on Lebanon this week breaching a fragile two-week truce.

While high-powered delegations from Iran and the United States were arriving in Islamabad for historic mediation talks being brokered by Pakistan, protesters in Auckland, Christchurch and other places across New Zealand were challenging the US and Israeli “warmongering” and criticising the New Zealand government’s “shameful” stance.

Led by US Vice-President JD Vance, the Americans arrived to take part in direct talks with their Iranian foes for the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

• READ MORE: Historic Iran-US talks to continue for a second day; Israel pounds Lebanon
• ‘Ten minutes of terror’ – Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s ‘Black Wednesday’
• Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Ironically, Americans living in New Zealand were among those protesting in Auckland.

Kelby Dalton of Americans Abroad Against the War told the cheering crowd in Aotea Square that many of his compatriots condemned the US warmongering under President Donald Trump and were leaving the US in droves – not because they hated America, but because “we love America” and want the destructive political direction to change.

Stop Wars Aotearoa organiser Joe Carolan declared the protesters opposed all wars and championed freedom – “We’re going to stand up for the people of Iran, stand up for the people of Palestine, stand up for the people of Lebanon, stand up for the people of Venezuela, stand up for the people of Cuba, stand up for this fight against the American empire.”

Carolan said: “We will not be provoked by those who believe in violence down at the US Consulate, those who say that violence can bring freedom, those who think that Netanyahu can guarantee women’s rights in Iran.

“Are you joking?

Counter-protest
He was referring to a small counter-protest of Israel-supporting and monarchist Iranians outside the US Consulate in downtown Auckland who were calling for resumed bombing of Iran.

“These people are guilty of a genocide where 60,000 people have been killed [in Gaza].

“No liberation for women – or anyone in Iran – can come from the pedophile Donald Trump or the genocider Netanyahu.”

The protesters marched to the US Consulate at the Citygroup Building in Customs Street and staged a “die-in” to mark the targeted slaughter of 168 children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab by US bombs.

This tragedy took place on February 28, the opening day of the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on the Islamic Republic.

Bill Bradford of the Workers First Union and Filipino community advocate Mikee Santos and a group of Filipino union activists spoke out about how the US military machine and imperialism had exploited migrant communities around the world, especially in the Middle East.

A wide range of speakers, politicians, civil society leaders and trade unionists earlier addressed the main rally, including Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa’s co-chair Maher Nazzal — “we cannot all be free until Palestine is free” — Labour Party’s Phil Twyford; Green Party’s Ricardo Menéndez-March, Alliance Party’s Victor Billot, Council of Trade Unions’ president Sandra Grey and the union choir.

‘Standing with peace and justice’
Two displaced Afghani women speakers thanked everybody for “standing up against American and Israeli imperialism — and for standing with justice and peace”.

Miriam Majud recited a 13th-century humanist poem “Bani Adam” (“Sons of Adam” or “Human Beings”) by Iranian Sufi poet Saadi Shirazi, in Farsi (Persian) and in English.

Bibi Amena gave a speech highlighting Iranian achievements for women in contrast to mainstream media reports.

“I am not from Iran, and I have never visited Iran. But I want to talk about what Iran has done for my people,” she said.

“In 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Iran opened its borders for us. In 2001, when American and NATO forces invaded and brutally occupied Afghanistan, Iran once again opened its borders.

“For 40 years, Iran hosted millions of Afghan refugees — not in camps, but in cities among their own citizens. They gave us homes, schools, hospitals. They gave us a life of dignity.

“Now the same America that destroyed my home Afghanistan attacks Iran. The same Israel that bombs Gaza bombs Iran.

Today I stand with Iran because yesterday Iran stood with my people — just as Iran has and continues to stand with Palestine, with Yemen, Cuba, Lebanon, Venezuela and with every other oppressed nation fighting for freedom from the chains of neocolonialism.”

She pointed out that while the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv “love to pretend they care about women’s rights – it’s only while bombing them”.

“Today, Iran’s female literacy rate is 99 percent, one of the highest in the world. Over 60 percent of Iranian university students in science and engineering are women,” she said.

“Again, one of the highest statistics in the world. 49 percent of doctors in Iran are women.

“Iranian women are engineers, pilots, doctors, judges, parliamentarians, and professors. They lead pro-government rallies, they guard their bridges and power plants against US and Israeli bombs.

“They’re not waiting for permission from Tel Aviv or Washington.”

‘We can bring change’
In Otautahi Christchurch, Iranian-Kiwi columnist and writer Donna Miles told protesters that New Zealand and the world ought to leave Iran to sort out its own future free of global interference.

“We can bring change. We have brought change. And we can do so if Iranians are left alone — if sanctions are lifted, if the middle class in Iran are able to breathe. And if civil society is able to thrive.

“This is what we need. Leave us alone. America needs to get out of the Middle East.

“Peace in the Middle East is possible. It’s not unachievable. Israel needs to end its occupation of Palestine and America needs to end its imperialism.”

Miles also questioned the New Zealand government?

“How shameful it was to see [Foreign Minister] Winston Peters standing next to [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio soon after Trump made those tweets threatening extremist war crimes wiping out an entire civilisation, ending a country in one night, taking it back to the stone age — and we have a minister who stood there silent.”

Her critical comments came just days after her article in The Press warning that US President Trump “can’t kill off Iranians’ resilient spirit”.

AMY GOODMAN: As the US and Iran prepared to hold ceasefire talks in Pakistan today, Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon.

The death toll from Israel’s massive attack on Wednesday topped 300. More than 1150 people were injured. In a span of 10 minutes, Israel struck 100 sites across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The Financial Times described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as, “one of the deadliest single bombing campaigns in the history of a country wracked by decades of war and destruction”.

• READ MORE: Vance in Pakistan to lead US-Iran ceasefire talks; Israel bombs Lebanon
• Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel and the US have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal does not include Lebanon, but numerous other nations disagree — and the ceasefire mediator Pakistan provided written evidence that Lebanon was included.

Foreign ministers of Pakistan and France condemned what they called “serious ceasefire violations made in Lebanon”. CBS News reports Trump initially agreed Lebanon was included in the ceasefire, but his position changed after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US is expected to host talks between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday. As Israel continues to attack Lebanon, Hezbollah has retaliated by firing missiles at Israel.

At the United Nations, a spokesperson for the secretary-general spoke.

STÉPHANE DUJARRIC: With the announcements of the ceasefire between Iran and the United States, the ongoing military activity in Lebanon poses a grave risk to the ceasefire and efforts towards a lasting and comprehensive peace in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the war began in late February, Israel has killed more than 1530 people in Lebanon, including at least 130 children. In Beirut, grieving families gathered at hospitals to identify bodies after Israel’s attacks on Wednesday.

MOHAMMED: [translated] I had dropped off my sister. She went up into the house. I went on a little trip, and they hid. I came back and didn’t find the building.

I didn’t find my sister, and I didn’t find my family, any of them. I found my brother, and his son was in the rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s an award-winning Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her books include No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. Her latest piece in New York magazine, headlined “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rania. Why don’t you describe those scenes of a day of carnage in Beirut? We have a four-second delay, so we will wait.

Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s Black Wednesday    Video: Democracy Now

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was 10 minutes of terror, a day that the Lebanese are calling Black Wednesday. It was hard to tell what was blowing up where, because those hundred or so attacks were all happening simultaneously, and not just in the capital Beirut, but also in other parts of the country.

They targeted very densely populated parts of the capital, neighbourhoods in the capital that were themselves hosting people who had been displaced from other parts of the country. In the Beqaa, mourners at a funeral in a cemetery were targeted. In Beirut, workers at a well-known roastery were removed by Civil Defence personnel as charred corpses.

So, it was a very, very ugly day. And as we speak, the — I can’t say “rescue,” because there’s — unfortunately, the people are dead, but search teams continue to try and locate and find and retrieve the remains of people who were killed in the rubble of their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel will “continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required,” but later said he’s approved direct talks with Lebanon as soon as possible. Can you talk about what’s happening with these negotiations?

You had the Belgian foreign minister who had come to Beirut to meet with the Lebanese President Aoun, and the bombing hit very close to their quarters, as he was congratulating the Lebanese president on saying that he would directly negotiate with Israel, then condemned the attack and said Lebanon had to be included with the ceasefire.

Can you take it from there? What’s happening now? Where do you understand these talks will take place?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the first thing is that the talks remove Lebanon from the wider ceasefire talks that are due to take place between Iran and America tomorrow. That has many Lebanese worried, because they wonder: What sort of leverage does Lebanon have? It doesn’t exactly have a Strait of Hormuz, whereas Iran seems to have a stronger negotiating position.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam made it quite clear. He said that Lebanon, the Lebanese government, will negotiate for Lebanon, and that nobody else will do so.

So he has very clearly drawn the line between whatever Iran negotiates and what he hopes his government will be able to negotiate with the Israelis. Now, the Iranian foreign minister has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition of tomorrow’s talks, so it’s unclear whether or not they are going to go ahead.

So, in addition to the question of what sort of leverage does Lebanon have, some Lebanese are also worried because there is a precedent. There is a 15-month so-called ceasefire, where the — this is the second war in less than two years — and there was a 15-month ceasefire between the two.

During that period, the Lebanese government was supposed to negotiate indirectly with Israel, through something called a “mechanism” — which was US and French-led — to ensure that each side fulfilled its requirements under the terms of that ceasefire. During those 15 months, Israel continued to occupy five hilltop positions that it had newly seized in the war.

It was supposed to withdraw from them under the ceasefire. It didn’t. It was supposed to withdraw its troops back across its border under the ceasefire. It didn’t. So the Lebanese government was unable to get Israel to adhere to any of the conditions of the ceasefire. So some Lebanese wonder what it will be able to achieve now.

In addition, I have to say that the — just the mere fact of direct talks not only breaks a taboo here in Lebanon, it also breaks a very longstanding law. Since the mid-1950s here, it is considered an act of treason to have any direct interaction with an Israeli.

But the Lebanese president himself, General Joseph Aoun, about a month ago, called for direct talks with Israel, breaking that massive, massive taboo. He had four conditions for these talks that were supposed to be followed sequentially. The first condition was an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Condition number two was that the Lebanese Army is strengthened. Third was that the Lebanese Army would continue its efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

And then fourth was the direct negotiation. So it looks like the Lebanese state has jumped over the president’s own — you know, three of his conditions to go straight to the fourth one.

So, Hezbollah, for its part, has said it does not think that Lebanon should be negotiating under fire, because it puts it in the weaker position. Some Lebanese fear that this is a ploy by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prolong the war under the pretext of, you know, having these talks under fire.

The proponents of the talks, I have to say, say that it is an issue of Lebanese sovereignty that Lebanon will negotiate any sort of deal with the Israelis. They also say that Lebanon is not a card for the Iranians to wield or to use in any negotiations. And they point out that, well, you don’t exactly talk to your friends to make deals; you talk to your enemies.

So, it’s a very, very divisive issue. The Hezbollah secretary-general is due to give a speech where he will, no doubt, address the issue of the talks. And there’s supposed to be a protest here in Lebanon, just behind me, actually, in front of the Grand Serail, which is where the prime minister’s office is, against the idea of these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to the questions you raise in your latest New York magazine piece, “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.” First of all, “How much of Lebanon is Israel prepared to destroy while claiming to target Hezbollah and its infrastructure, and will the world just watch as it does so?”

And your second question: “Can Israel even defeat Hezbollah militarily or is it, as many Lebanese suspect, trying to exact so painful a price from fellow Lebanese that they turn on the group, plunging the country into civil strife?”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Israelis have made no secret of what they want to do in Lebanon. Officials, from the defence minister, Smotrich, the finance minister, they have all talked about Lebanon being part of their Greater Israel project. They have talked about seizing and occupying southern Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, which, at its deepest, is about 30 km away from the Israeli border.

Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said that he wants to turn that area, that lush, verdant agricultural area, into a wasteland that resembles what the Israelis did in Gaza. He has threatened that the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced from there will not be allowed to return.

So, that’s what the Israelis have indicated that they want to do.

In terms of what they’re able to do, they have, according to Israeli media reports, had to scale back some of those ambitions because of the fierce resistance that they’re facing on the ground from Hezbollah fighters.

Let me give you the example of a town in southern Lebanon called Khiam, where there are Israeli forces in this town, but they have been fighting for weeks and weeks to try and take control of it, and they have been unable to.

So, according to the Israeli media reports, they now say that they want to occupy about a three-to-four-kilometre strip of territory. And Hezbollah will, no doubt, fight and try and prevent them from doing that, too. So, that’s what the Israelis want to do.

In terms of Lebanese turning on each other, Israeli officials called up — there are a couple of Christian villages down in the south. There are also Sunni. There are Druze, as well as the Shiite villages down south. It’s a mixed area.

And the Israeli officials called up some of those Christian towns, where the people refuse to leave their territory, and told them, “Listen, do not shelter your Shiite neighbours; otherwise, you will come under attack.”

So, that’s a very clear sort of indication of what the Israelis are sort of hoping to foment in terms of civil strife and turning, literally, neighbour against neighbour.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play a clip from a Beirut resident. Naim Chebbo survived a bombing on Wednesday, said he’s now afraid to sleep. He said he wants the fighting to stop, and blamed Hezbollah.

NAIM CHEBBO: [translated] We want peace. We don’t want problems with anyone anymore. Eighty percent of Arab countries have peace with Israel. Why doesn’t Lebanon have peace, so that we can end all these problems?

As long as Hezbollah is in Lebanon, Israel will strike Lebanon. That’s it. Hezbollah is not defending Lebanon. It’s defending Iran’s agenda. That’s it.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, how common or typical is this comment of a Lebanese who survived the bombing on Wednesday, Israel’s bombing?

RANIA ABOUZEID: The Lebanese are very divided over the issue of Hezbollah and its weapons, and they always have been, but more so now in this recent war, because it started on March 2, and Hezbollah lobbed about six rockets into Israel, claiming that it was in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as, “in defense of Lebanon.”

So, many Lebanese saw it as a war of choice almost by Hezbollah.

Now, Hezbollah and its supporters say that after those 15 months of a ceasefire — that wasn’t really a ceasefire, because, according to the UN, Israel violated Lebanon’s sovereignty about 15,000 times during that period. There were thousands of attacks, resulting in the deaths of more than 350 Lebanese.

So, Hezbollah supporters say they were patient for those 15 months, and now they have chosen to respond.

But, certainly, there are Lebanese who are very angry with Hezbollah. They don’t want any war. I mean, no Lebanese wants war, even the hundreds of thousands of displaced, many of whom might be Hezbollah supporters. Everybody wants to go home.

You know, war is not the option for anybody. But it’s a question of: Under what circumstances, for example, will Lebanon negotiate with Israel? Will it be under the Iranian umbrella in these talks tomorrow, or will it try and forge another path? And which is better?

I mean, look, there are some Lebanese who don’t care if aliens will negotiate on behalf of Lebanon as long as it can secure a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to, finally, ask you about what’s happening on the ground. According to the World Health Organisation, some of Lebanon’s hospitals may run out of lifesaving medical supplies within days and attempt to treat patients wounded by the Israeli airstrikes. This is WHO representative in Lebanon, Dr Abdinasir Abubakar.

DR. ABDINASIR ABUBAKAR: There are some shortages, some of those essential chronic medications, the insulin, but also some of the, you know, dialysis supplies.

If the current situation and the current demand actually continue and the current escalation continue, probably the country may be facing a very real risk of critical shortage, including trauma supplies, surgical materials, blood products, chronic medications.

And any other further disruption could seriously hinder the ability of providing timely, adequate care for both emergency and ongoing health needs.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, your final comments on what you think is about to happen? And do you think Iran will insist on including this in the ceasefire, joined by many countries around the world who are saying Lebanon has to be included, or, as you write in your column, “many Lebanese are wondering whether Iran will forsake Hezbollah and allow Lebanon to be pounded”?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Very difficult to tell, Amy. That’s the honest truth. But, you know, Iran also has its considerations. If it does forsake Hezbollah and goes it alone, well, then, you know, Hezbollah is part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. There are other allies in the region who will see this and wonder if Iran might forsake it, too.

So it’s a question of its broader network. There are the Houthis in Yemen. There are various militia groups in Iraq who will be watching very carefully to see what Iran does, if it stands by its ally, Hezbollah, or if it doesn’t.

There are also — it also has domestic considerations. You know, Iranians have been pounded now for weeks and weeks. They want a reprieve. They don’t want to return to war.

So, the Iranians will be juggling those, their own sort of conditions, as well, in terms of what their ultimate stance is with regard to heading to the negotiations with or without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Rania, I mean, you are there in Beirut. Israel struck central Beirut, southern Beirut, gone beyond the Litani River to the Zahrani River, some are wondering if they’ll take over that whole land, about a fifth of Lebanon. But you, yourself, are you afraid to walk in the streets?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It depends on what streets, Amy. It depends on where, what part of Lebanon, because that’s the thing about Wednesday’s attack, is that it shattered the sense that any place is safe, because you just don’t know.

The neighbourhoods that were targeted were very far, for example, from the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has some institutions — not that that justifies striking a very densely, you know, populated area. The southern suburbs are home to hundreds of thousands of people.

But it was anybody’s guess. Like, why target a street with a roastery? Why target during rush hour when children were leaving school and civil servants were heading home? So, that’s the thing. The sense of safety anywhere has been shattered.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start.

• READ MORE: This illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran is also an assault on the United Nations
• Israel says no ceasefire with Lebanon, US-Iran talks due
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel dazzled Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.

The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the US, and probably a redline for Israel.

Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in 2018.

The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty.

It is crucial to note that the UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate.

The UN was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it.
Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarised as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after the First World War.

Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich favour Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine.

America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.

Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by US Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996.

We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.

This is not to say that the US lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.”

On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.

In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike — essentially a replay of the US operation in Venezuela.

It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by the New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that US intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted.

Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Kushner and Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Rubio and Ratcliffe).

Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire
Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to the Third World War. The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in US presidential history.

Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.

The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes.

A permanent US-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.

Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the US to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason — to have unchecked freedom to terrorise and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit.

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognised borders of June 4, 1967.

Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace — if the US accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace.

That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the US and Iran in the next two weeks.

American views clear
The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavourably, the highest unfavourability in history. Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it. Iran’s proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement.

The question is whether the US will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Republished under Creative Commons.

Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah has been killed in an Israeli drone strike in the Gaza Strip, the Qatari television news channel reports.

The air strike caused the car to burst into flames, sources told Al Jazeera.

Israel has been targeting journalists in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023.

• READ MORE: Gaza journalist deaths reach 262 as Al Jazeera correspondent killed during ceasefire
• Trump threatens action if Iran fails to comply with ‘real’ ceasefire deal
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The Gaza Government Media Office said at least 262 journalists had been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since then.

In a statement, Al Jazeera Media Network said it “strongly condemns the heinous crime of targeting and killing Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent, Mohammed Wishah”.

“This constitutes a new and flagrant violation of all international laws and norms, and reflects a continued systematic policy of targeting journalists and silencing the voice of truth,” it said.

“As Al Jazeera mourns its correspondent Mohammed Wishah, who joined the network in 2018, it affirms that his killing was not a random act but a deliberate and targeted crime intended to intimidate journalists and prevent them from carrying out their professional duties,” the statement continued.

Israeli ‘ceasefire’ violations
Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, says the fact that Wishah was killed while travelling on the main road in Gaza City shows “the situation is getting much more dire in light of the ongoing Israeli military’s ‘ceasefire’ violations”.
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“It’s nearly six months since the US-brokered ‘ceasefire’ came into effect, and the Israeli violations continue – targeting journalists like Wishah, who has been covering the genocidal war since day one,” he said.

Attacks on Gaza – Al Jazeera reporter killed                     Video: Al Jazeera

The Gaza Government Media Office says the Israeli military has committed about 2,000 violations since the “ceasefire” took effect.
‘Systematic targeting’

The office also said the killing of Wishah was an example of the “systematic targeting and assassination of Palestinian journalists” by Israel.

It called on the International Federation of Journalists, the Arab Journalists Union and media bodies worldwide to “condemn these systematic crimes against Palestinian journalists and media workers in the Gaza Strip.”

The office appealed to the international community and relevant organisations to “stop these repeated attacks,” prosecute those responsible in international courts, and “exercise serious and effective pressure to stop the crime of genocide” and protect journalists in Gaza.

More than 72,000 people have been killed and over 171,000 others injured in the Strip since October 2023. The assault was halted under a US-backed ceasefire that took effect last October.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 733 Palestinians have been killed and 2034 injured in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire.

Having launched an illegal, destructive war that brutally struck the entire planet’s economy (and confirmed once again Europe’s combination of irrelevance and hypocrisy), and after threatening Iran with genocide and “civilisational annihilation,” President Trump ultimately backed down on everything.

Like a Roman Emperor during the Empire’s declining years would declare victory and stage triumphs in Rome following massive defeats of his legions at the hands of Gothic warriors, so now does this modern American Nero struggle to convince us that he “won”.

In reality, Iran now decides which vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz and, for the first time, charge them tolls for so doing.

• READ MORE: US, Iran announce two-week ceasefire; Israel claims truce excludes Lebanon
• Pope Leo XIV hails ceasefire between US and Iran as “sign of real hope”
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The demands of the White House, which Trump had set as prerequisites for stopping the bombings, have bitten the dust.

The surrender of Iran’s enriched uranium, the demand for the destruction of Iran’s missiles, the vain hopes for regime change, the designs on Iranian oil — all of these goals were forgotten.

What has not been forgotten, and will not be forgotten, are the 180 schoolgirls that the US murdered on the first day of their attack by striking their school — along with the thousands of other killed and maimed civilians.

False sense of relief
Lest the world be overtaken by a false sense of relief, it is crucial to brace ourselves for the long-lasting economic repercussions of Trump’s idiotic war.

Make no mistake: the shockwaves of economic hardship caused by the US attack on Iran may wane but it will not be averted.

The wave of soaring prices, the blow to employment, the increase in interest rates and foreclosures will not disappear with this ceasefire.

On the contrary, because of the oligarchic cartels that also see this crisis as an opportunity, it will take political pressure by the many on the very few to reverse the negative consequences of this criminal war, as well as all the various crises that preceded it.

Republished from Yanis Varoufakis’ X feed.

There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Michael West Media reports on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.

Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

“I’m offended by crocs,” says man apprehended by many police & special ops for wearing “F… Israel” t-shirt

The footage #andrewbrown #legend #auspol pic.twitter.com/fc1p3f911d

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.

The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with.

A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.

It never does.

More than 72,000 people killed so far. More than 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.

Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck.

Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by 18 months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.

Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.

They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.

Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force.

And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.

Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.

The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

The pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue

without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.

That fiction is now dead.

The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months.

None of that is over there.

The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it.

Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.

Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.

Complicity is not passive.

When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.

The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.

Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.

The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for 18 months.

But a 40 percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.

The people who protested over Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.

Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.

And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.

That shelf life has expired.

A rift within French Polynesia’s ruling party Tavini Huiraatira deepened during Easter weekend with a mass resignation from a group of 14 members.

The resignation was tendered by a group of young members of the local Territorial Assembly.

In their resignation letter, the members of the local parliament, writing to Tavini’s historic 81-year-old leader Oscar Temaru, insist that their decision was “carefully considered” and “does not question the respect we have [towards Temaru].”

• READ MORE: Other French Polynesia reports

The mass resignation reduces Tavini’s majority to 22 within the Territorial Assembly (out of a total of 57 MPs).

This also means Tavini no longer has an absolute majority within the House.

The Assembly is scheduled to convene at its next sitting this week on 9 April 2026.

Crucial Assembly meeting on Thursday
Any motion of no confidence requires the approval of at least 35 MPs.

The other components of the Assembly include 16 from the opposition pro-France (autonomists) and 5 others who are independents.

The 14 resigning MPs belong to a group of “moderate” members of the Tavini, who were mostly elected at French Polynesia’s last territorial elections in May 2023.

Tensions have since surfaced between the newly-elected members of the “new generation” and the founding members of the Tavini, including party president Oscar Temaru and the party’s number two, Antony Géros (who is also the Speaker of the Territorial Assembly).

At the recently-held municipal elections, Géros lost his position of Mayor of the small city of Paea and in the capital city of Pape’ete, pro-autonomy figure Rémy Brillant won — well ahead of two pro-independence figures, Tavini-backed Tauhiti Nena (who secured 11.03 percent of the votes) and 25-year-old Tematai Le Gayic, 25 (who scored much better with 23.3 percent).

In the wake of the municipal elections, Le Gayic was the first to signal the split with his party.

The next territorial elections are scheduled to be held in 2028.

The group of dissident MPs is perceived as close to Brotherson, 56, who became French Polynesia’s President in May 2023.

Géros was not chosen at the time.

Less confrontational approach
Brotherson has since embodied a less confrontational approach, especially with regards to his perceived good relationship with the French government, as opposed to a more confrontational approach from his party’s historic leadership.

Among the most often cited causes of the rift between Tavini’s old guard and the younger group of MPs are such issues as French Polynesia’s undersea mineral resources exploitation (which Temaru favours, as a key to the French Pacific territory’s independence).

The younger Tavini MPs, as well as French Polynesia’s Tavini President Moetai Brotherson (who is also Temaru’s son-in-law), are opposed to this exploitation of resources.

This anti-deep sea mining exploitation is also the official stance of the French government, which is warning of potential environmental damage from such operations.

Brotherson’s general stance over independence is also more nuanced and contrasts with the party’s support for a short timeline and process.

Since the resignation, Tavini has held several “emergency” meetings in a bid to reconcile the two opposing factions.

But none of those have been conclusive.

Some of the views expressed by militants support a resignation from Brotherson, which he is opposed to.

Others recommend a one-on-one meeting between Temaru and Brotherson to try and iron out their differences.

“If nothing comes out of this meeting, then Tavini Huiraatira will take action on April 9,” the party wrote on social networks at the weekend.

“If we start entertaining diverging views of the party’s objectives, we’re in trouble”, an irate Géros told local media.

Biblical references
Temaru and his son-in-law have separately commented on the Easter weekend crisis.

On Good Friday, they both used biblical, religious metaphors and direct references to Easter.

“Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” said Temaru, quoting crucified Jesus Christ during his Easter martyrdom.

But he also admitted there were “reasons to be worried”.

Meanwhile, Brotherson posted on social networks: “While some are meeting in tribunal mode, on this Good Friday, I prefer to leave it to God.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Reports from West Papua say as many as five people have been shot dead in Dogiyai regency in an alleged retaliatory attack after a policeman was killed.

A joint police and military operation was launched in the regency in Indonesia’s Central Papua province to respond to the killing, by apparent stabbing, of a police officer — a Papuan — in Kamu District’s Moanemani town on Tuesday.

According to Papuan news media outlet Suara Papua and the Human Rights Monitor group, security forces are alleged to have indiscriminately opened fire in a series of villages in Moanemani.

• READ MORE:  West Papuans massacred by Indonesian police in Dogiyai
• At least six Papuan civilians killed and two injured by bullets in Dogiyai
• Other West Papua reports

The Papua-based human rights and peace NGO Solidaritas Rakyat Papua, cited by Suara Papua, reported that four Papuan civilians including a 12-year-old boy, were shot dead by the security forces, and another four were injured, adding that one police officer was earlier killed and another injured.

However, Human Rights Monitor reported that at least six Papuans were shot dead in the alleged retaliatory operation, while at least two others sustained gunshot injuries.

The Indonesian Embassy in New Zealand confirmed the officer’s death, attributing it to an “armed criminal group”, the government’s label for West Papuan independence fighters.

But it said it was not yet able to confirm further casualties as the incident was still being investigated.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) statement claimed on Thursday that at least five Papuans had been killed in the unrest in Dogiyai. The dead Papuans were named in the statement.

The embassy accuses the ULMWP of often claiming its members as civilian casualties.

Human Rights Monitor said the violent crackdowns occurred amid escalating tensions and heavy deployment of security forces across Dogiyai Regency in the past month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

An Easter message. There’s no mystery about why wars start. They happen because someone, somewhere, decides that negotiation is more dangerous to them than to the people being bombed.

Look at what was happening this “Good” Friday. Iran. Gaza. The West Bank. Lebanon.

Thirty-six days of missiles and a Strait of Hormuz sealed shut while oil companies post record profits and defence contractors book forward orders through 2031. No one in those boardrooms is losing sleep over a negotiated settlement.

• READ MORE: Iran slams Trump’s Strait of Hormuz threats as ‘incitement to war crimes’
• Eugene Doyle: Who will pay billions in reparations to Iran? We will
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

That would be the one outcome they cannot monetise.

The choice of war over negotiation is always deliberate. It’s what happens when the institutions built to make negotiation workable — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the mechanisms of international law — are systematically defunded, vetoed into paralysis, or simply disregarded by those states powerful enough to ignore them without consequence.

When accountability is optional, war is always cheaper than compromise. For the people making the decision, not for the people paying for it in blood.

And here is what makes this moment different from others: we’re not even pretending anymore. Israeli ministers speak of erasure openly. American officials wave away civilian casualties with the language of collateral necessity.

Actions become shameless
The international community issues statements of concern and then approves the next arms shipment. The gap between what is said and what is done has closed — not because the words have become honest, but because the actions have become shameless.

Negotiation requires recognising the humanity of the other party. That’s precisely why it’s rebuffed. You can’t negotiate with someone you have spent 20 years or more dehumanising. Make them monstrous enough and war stops requiring justification. It becomes necessary.

But nothing about this is inevitable. Wars end when the people with the power to end them decide the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of stopping.

That calculation is being made right now, every day, by people who are not dying. The question is not when they will choose peace. It’s when the rest of us will make their continuing refusal untenable.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and futurist, and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

New Zealand’s government was taken to task today for its lack of a principled stand against Israel’s Gaza genocide and the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran.

Several speakers at a rally in the heart of Auckland expressed disappointment and anger at Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s failure to condemn the war of aggression against Iran, one of the major supporters of Palestinian self-determination and justice.

The speakers from several cultures were scathing about New Zealand’s weak stance in the rally at Te Komititanga Square with a theme of “Welfare not warfare”.

• READ MORE: US-Israel attacks hit petrochemical, nuclear sites in Iran
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• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The criticism comes as US President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking a record $1.5 trillion in “defence” spending for the coming year along with massive social cutbacks, according to a White House details released yesterday, while New Zealand’s budget allows for an unprecedented NZ$12 billion four-year plan to overhaul the country’s military.

Bibi Amena, a twice-displaced refugee from Afghanistan who has experienced the devastation of war and lost family members while resisting the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, said the illegal assassination of a high profile head of state and respected figure among Shia Muslims around the world should have been condemned.

“At the very least our government should have condemned America and Israel in the strongest words possible,” she said.

New Zealand should have distanced itself from America and Israel “and their crumbling empire”.

Helen Clark quoted
She quoted former prime minister Helen Clark who at the beginning of this war described New Zealand’s response as “a disgrace” and that it was in the country’s best interests to keep advocating for international law.

“New Zealand is not a mighty country, and if we trample international law and forego an independent foreign policy, we are left at the mercy of countries far bigger and far stronger than us,” Amena said.

“Let’s be loud and clear when we say that Israel and America’s war on Iran is illegal — it’s illegitimate, unprovoked and immoral.”

A Tehran-born psychology student, Ali Reza, who migrated to New Zealand in 2013, was also strongly critical of the government’s weak stance over the war.

“Some politicians seem to have trouble with their spines. Iran has many excellent spinal surgeons who could help them with that.”

He praised the Palestinian resistance in the face of the 76th years “brutality, occupation, mass murder and mass displacement” by Israel.

“Meanwhile, the Sudanese people were suffering through a devastating civil war caused by the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and its master Israel. The enemy’s lies set records displaying psychotic levels of manipulation and exploitation,” he said.

“The enemy renewed their specialisation in the discipline of evil wrongdoings, pioneering in numerous fields, followed by their murderous campaign in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, all funded by the United States.”

Choice for Aotearoa
Leeann Wahanui-Peters of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) called for a choice for Aotearoa — one between “the security of our whānau and the lies and profits of warmongers and their masters in Wall Street, the City of London, and the shadow bankers of Black Rock and company”.

“A choice between a home, a warm home and weapons,” she said. “A choice between a future of justice, peace and prosperity for all and a past of war and exploitation for the few.

“For decades, we have been told that the world is dangerous and that the only way to be safe is to spend more on the military.”

“This is a lie,” Wahanui-Peters said.

“The greatest threat to the safety of a child in Aotearoa isn’t a missile from a distant land. It is the coldness of a house their parents can’t afford to heat, or living in a car.

“It is their hunger in their stomach because their school lunch has been cut. It is the despair of a future with no jobs and no hope.”

And yet, said Wahanui-Peters, New Zealand’s “coalition regime” chose to be “fiscally irresponsible” and chose military assets ahead of the best interests of the country’s people.

‘Gateway for hell’
Bibi Amena said New Zealand’s silence over Israeli crimes in Palestine “opened the gateway for hell” in Iran.

“In the past 30 days of aggression, Israeli and American bombs have slaughtered over 3000 innocent Iranian children, women and men.

“They have attacked and destroyed energy and water supplies, civilian infrastructure, oil facilities, schools and hospitals. All of these attacks are illegal under international law.

“So why has our government remained silent? Why do we allow America and Israel to commit war crime after war crime with impunity?”

Amena referenced the first day of the illegal war on Iran, an American Tomahawk missile targeting a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab, killing more than 160 girls aged between 7 and 12.

She ended her speech with a short quote “which went viral on social media” by Professor Foad Izadi from the University of Tehran: “Iran is fighting the Epstein class of the world, that either rapes little girls, or bombs little girls.”

Organisers of the Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition said there would be a major rally with the theme “No More Wars” in Auckland’s Aotea Square and a protest march to the US Consulate next Saturday, April 11, at 2pm.

A Constitutional Reform Bill dedicated to New Caledonia was rejected on Thursday by the French National Assembly (Lower House) without debate, by a gathering of opposition parties by a score of 190 to 107.

The rejection came in the form of the endorsement of a preliminary Bill filed by a left wing opposition, Emmanuel Tjibaou, on behalf of the GDR group (Gauche démocrate et républicaine).

The “prior rejection motion” means that if the rejection motion is adopted, then it closes the current sitting on the matter and the Bill would then have to come back to the other House of Parliament, the Senate, following the “shuttle” rule.

• READ MORE: Thousands take to Nouméa streets ahead of French Parliament debate on New Caledonia
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Tjibaou, who is an indigenous Kanak pro-independence leader, is one of the two MPs representing New Caledonia in the Assembly.

The text was originally tabled for a vote to be held on 1 April 2026, but this was later delayed by one day, following an announcement by Speaker Yaël Braun-Pivet.

However, on Thursday, during a sitting that only debated motives from the government and its Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou, the rapporteur Philippe Gosselin and representatives from all parties present, it quickly became clear that most of the opposition parties were going to support the rejection motion, and vote against the text without further debate.

The sitting only lasted 01 hour 40 minutes.

Tjibaou, speaking in support of his rejection motion, stressed that the Constitutional Bill, in his view, was “not consensual”, because his party, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) was opposed to the text and that the Bill “did not seek to reach a compromise” between all stakeholders.

Tjibaou said this was in contradiction to the previous Matignon-Oudinot (1988) and Nouméa Accord (1998), which initiated a decolonisation process for New Caledonia.

The present Constitutional Bill derives from talks held in July 2025 and January 2026 between New Caledonia political stakeholders and the French government. This was on two occasions — in the small city of Bougival in July 2025 and later in January 2026 in Paris, at the French Presidential palace of Élysée, and the French ministry of Overseas territories in Rue Oudinot.

Hence the name of Bougival-Élysée-Oudinot (BEO) for a text and an expanded project.

The project also envisions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, with a correlated “New Caledonia Nationality” available to people who are already French citizens.

Other participating parties pro-France and pro-independence (two pro-independence members of FLNKS) have since split to create their own “UNI” (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance).

They have maintained their commitment to the BEO process, including their legislative adaptation (in the form of a Constitutional Amendment and an “organic Law”, which would de facto become New Caledonia’s constitution).

Tjibaou: ‘a logic of assimilation’
But the BEO text, in August 2025, was unequivocally opposed by the FLNKS, one of the main components of the pro-independence movement.

The FLNKS later explained it saw these, as well as a planned process of transfer of more powers from Paris to Nouméa, was, in their view, just a “lure” of independence.

Tjibaou said on Thursday the text was at best “symbolic”.

“To us, this amounts to a perennial status within France… It’s a logic of assimilation… It cannot be compared to a decolonisation in accordance with the UN resolutions and the international law”, he told MPs.

He called on local elections to be held sooner than later, currently no later than 28 June 2026.

Tjibaou said it was ironic that “a pro-independence” should tell the Minister that “when our Kanak country is damaged, it is also France that is damaged”… Because “when you make decisions that are leading us to chaos, you are also jeopardising France’s place in the Pacific”, he said at the tribune.

Moutchou: ‘There is no other agreement’
Moutchou, in her reply, said the rejection of the Bill would have repercussions on New Caledonians’ everyday life.

She stressed what New Caledonians needed, after the riots of May 2024 and a severe economic downfall since, was “visibility”, especially on the part of economic stakeholders who needed stability in order to restore confidence and investment.

“There is no other agreement. The Bougival process was approved by 5 of the 6 political parties of New Caledonia.

“Some are mentioning the absence of FLNKS. I’ve always maintained the principles of transparency, dialogue information for all. And the door was never closed”, she said.

“And the politics of the empty chair cannot dictate the future of a territory.

“So what do we do? How much longer do we have to wait… To be responsible, we move on with those who are here… Consensus does not mean unanimity, consensus is not perfection, it’s a point of equilibrium”, she replied to Tjibaou.

“And while we have this text that is not perfect, but opens a way, those who say, ‘we will wait and see later’ risk bringing us back to a confrontational situation”.

Metzdorf’s disappointment
The other MP for New Caledonia, pro-France Nicolas Metzdorf, also took to the tribune to express disappointment.

“I don’t know what more we should do. After the 2024 riots, you asked us to find a political agreement. We did this and we made big concessions, we, the non-independentists. We did this for the good of New Caledonia.

“Then you said we had to meet again to further clarify… On Kanak identity and the self-determination process. So now we are back with two political agreements.”

“And now you are sending us back home without a debate… You know, New Caledonia may be far from Paris, but tonight, many are watching this debate on TV and they’re thinking ‘What will happen to us?”

“Many have lost their home, their work, but even worse, they have lost hope to live in peace in New Caledonia”.

“What I am asking (MPs) today is just to have the common decency to debate on this (Bill)… These agreements are being supported by the majority of New Caledonia’s political class (including the moderate pro-independence parties within the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance), but also by the economic and business sector.”

“I’m asking for a vote on these accords and I’m asking to organise a consultation of New Caledonia’s people, because at the end of the day, we are the only legitimate ones to decide on our future.”

What now?
Following the rejection vote on Thursday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said all parties that had signed the Bougival-Elysée-Oudinot Accord would meet “next week”, because this is what was agreed in case of a deadlock.

Commenting on future options, Metzdorf told French media in Paris that “all options are now on the table”.

After the National Assembly’s rejection, another possibility was to bring the text back to the Upper House (the Senate).

Another option (that was almost implemented a few months ago, but later abandoned) would be to bring back a process of “consultation” directly in New Caledonia in the form of a de facto referendum for or against the Bougival process.

But the sensitive issue of who is eligible to vote at local elections remains for the looming provincial elections (which would now have to be held no later than 28 June 2026).

Pro-France parties are still determined to have those restrictions changed to allow the “frozen” electoral roll to be more open, if not fully “unfrozen”.

This could be the subject of separate negotiations between New Caledonia’s opposing parties in the coming days.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Thousands took to the streets of the capital Nouméa on Tuesday — hours ahead of a scheduled French Parliament debate in the National Assembly in Paris to discuss the French Pacific territory’s political future.

An estimated 2500 came in support of local Association Un Coeur, une Voix (UCUV–One Heart, One Voice) to oppose the prospect of the next local elections (to elect New Caledonia’s three provinces) being held under the current “frozen” electoral roll, which excludes people who have not resided in New Caledonia before 1998 or their direct descendents.

During a one-hour peaceful march in downtown Nouméa, the participants were brandishing tricolour blue-white-red flags and other placards denouncing what they described as “second-class citizens” treatment and their perceived condition of self-styled “victims of history”.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The march was designed to send a clear message to French MPs ahead of debates on New Caledonia later this week.

“I’m sorry for using harsh words, but it’s like we’re being robbed [of our rights],” UCUV president Raphaël Romano told local Radio Rythme Bleu.

“And now we have those MPs who are going to decide for us. They’re going to use New Caledonia for their own national political gains . . .  and make a mess”.

“If [MPs] can’t find an agreement, then they should let New Caledonians choose.

“It’s a shame for democracy, it happens nowhere else in the world”, Romano told local media.

His movement is strongly supported by several prominent pro-France parties, including Le Rassemblement and Les Loyalistes.

He said the situation affected all ethnic communities in New Caledonia.

“Those who can’t vote are men and women from all walks of life, all ethnic groups who live together in peace, every day,” he said.

“It’s hard enough to try and recover from the May 2024 riots, where people have lost their businesses and their job.”

The 2024 riots caused 14 deaths and more than 2 billion euros (almost NZ$4 billion) in material damage.

They were also initially triggered by peaceful protests against a plan to have the French constitution modified, especially regarding the electoral restrictions.

The protests turned violent and out of control in Nouméa on the very day debates started in Paris.

The “freeze” was enforced in 2009, as part of the Nouméa Accord, signed in 1998.

Originally designed as a temporary measure, the restriction currently excludes up to 40,000 people, many of them born in New Caledonia.

‘Counter demonstrations’
Meanwhile, pro-independence movements have called for other “counter-demonstrations” outside of Nouméa.

One gathering took place on Tuesday, including in the outer Loyalty Islands of Lifou, while another demonstration is scheduled on Wednesday, in Koné (North of the main island, Grande Terre).

The voting restriction measure was originally included in the 1998 Nouméa Accord as a measure to prevent any erosion of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak population’s voice.

The proposed text derives from talks held between New Caledonia political stakeholders and the French government.

This was on two occasions: in the small city of Bougival in July 2025 and later in January 2026 in Paris, at the French Presidential Élysée Palace and the French Ministry of Overseas Territories, Rue Oudinot.

Hence the name of Bougival-Élysée-Oudinot (BEO) for a text and an expanded project.

But the BEO text, in August 2025, was unequivocally opposed by the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), the main component of the pro-independence movement.

Other participating parties — pro-France and pro-independence (two pro-independence members of FLNKS have since split to create their own “UNI” [Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance]) — have since maintained their commitment to the BEO process, including their legislative adaptation (in the form of a Constitutional Amendment and an “organic Law, which would de facto become New Caledonia’s constitution).

The project also envisions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, with a correlated “New Caledonia nationality” available to people who are already French citizens.

The FLNKS later explained it saw these, as well as a planned process of transfer of more powers from Paris to Nouméa, as just a “lure” of independence.

Reacting to the UCUV march, FLNKS said the “freeze” was ruled constitutional by France’s Constitutional Council in September 2025 and could only be changed if a “consensual” agreement was found.

But FLNKS considers the BEO-derived text “is not a logical continuation of the Nouméa Accord”.

The BEO-derived Bill, if adopted, could eventually replace the Nouméa Accord.

But it is now still undergoing legislative process.

The French Senate endorsed it on February 24, with a comfortable right-wing majority.

But this week, the same text is to be debated in the Lower House of Parliament, the National Assembly, which has been divided since the July 2024 French national snap election following President Macron’s decision to dissolve Parliament.

Current predictions are that since there is no clear majority within the Lower House, the Bill, which comes in the form of a Constitutional Amendment (with the capacity to replace the Nouméa Accord) is likely to be rejected.

The opposition to the current right-wing group comes from the left (far-left La France Insoumise -LFI-, the Socialists (who say the Bill is “heavy with threats and dangers”), the Communists, the Greens) and Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN).

Last week, the Constitutional Bill came before the National Assembly’s Law Committee and suffered an initial rejection.

Parliamentary debates in the National Assembly are scheduled to begin on Wednesday (1 April 2026, Paris time) and could last for the next three days.

‘Barrage’ of three thousand amendments
Some opposition parties, especially the democratic and republican left (GDR, Gauche démocrate et républicaine, to which the pro-independence New Caledonian Kanak MP Emmanuel Tjibaou belongs) have already filed on the agenda a “prior rejection motion” to withdraw the Bill.

Some of those expressed strong reservations because the process and ensuing Bill was opposed by FLNKS and that, therefore, there was no unanimity.

Meanwhile, since last week, in a previously used barrage tactic, LFI has also filed over 3000 amendments.

Restrictions still apply under Nouméa Accord — French Constitutional Council
UCUV has been fighting for years to defend their rights, in front of what they term a “denial of democracy”.

Last year, they took their case to the French Constitutional Council, which ruled that in the present situation, the electoral roll “freeze” for local elections was part of the Nouméa Accord which was part of the French Constitution.

UCUV president Raphaël Romano said they now have no other option but to take their case before the European Court of Human Rights, even though they admit their hopes are “very weak”.

He said the deadline was 4 April 2026.

If the Constitutional Bill is rejected by Parliament, a new proposed calendar for implementation will automatically become obsolete.

And local provincial elections that have already been delayed three times since May 2024 will have to be held not later than 28 June 2026, instead of the proposed December this year.

If the BEO-derived text is rejected, then the Nouméa Accord applies again and the planned provincial elections will have to be held under the restricted — “frozen” — electoral roll system.

“The provincial elections will not be held under a frozen electoral roll. It’s just not possible”, Romano said.

Deadlock, imbroglio: what now?
Other possible alternative scenarios could include re-submitting a new, revised Bill, dedicated to the electoral roll, or organising a “consultation”, a de facto referendum with eligible New Caledonians.

Under the French parliamentary principle of the “shuttle”, the text could be sent back to the Senate.

Under the BEO text, people eligible for voting at local provincial elections can either be born in New Caledonia or having resided there for an uninterrupted 15 years (for the first five years of enforcement, then the minimum residence period would be reduced to 10 uninterrupted years).

From the French government’s point of view, an agreement on New Caledonia’s institutional future is the only solution to bring back stability and economic “visibility” for local and foreign investors.

“Everything is on the table to get things moving”, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told French media last week.

Overseas Minister Naïma Moutchou is still advocating for the benefits a parliamentary approval would bring to New Caledonia in terms of a “framework” for economic recovery.

France has earmarked some 2 billion euros in a “refoundation” pact, structured to put the economy, social services and the crucial nickel mining industry back on track, provided necessary reforms are carried out.

“Let’s give a chance to this process, because in New Caledonia, the alternative to an open political process is never quiet: it’s uncertainty and, over there, it always ends up weakening civil peace,” she told Parliament last week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

New Zealand’s national Māori radio network, Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori o Aotearoa, is considering litigation over a potential loss of government funding which it says threatens the survivability of iwi radio stations.

Chairperson Peter-Lucas Jones (Ngāti Kahu, Te Rārawa, Ngāi Takoto, Te Aupōuri) — who was also chief executive of Far North iwi broadcaster Te Hiku Media — told current affairs series RUKU Māori radio was a right under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, not a government handout.

Recent and proposed actions targeting iwi stations, implemented primarily through Te Māngai Pāho (TMP), disregarded the treaty and exposed the Crown to credible legal risk, he said.

• READ MORE: Other Māori broadcasting reports

“This issue is not about resisting change, iwi radio stations have themselves funded transitions to digital platforms and new media without Crown support.

“The issue is whether the Crown can, through an intermediary, dismantle a treaty remedy without Māori consent.”

There are more than 20 iwi radio stations across New Zealand, from Te Hiku in the North to Tahu FM in the South.

Stations receive funding through Te Māngai Pāho to promote Māori language and culture.

Time-limited funding
TMP currently has $16 million of time-limited funding, equal to almost 25 percent of their total annual funding, which is due to expire on June 30.

Te Māngai Pāho said that while 2026/27 appropriations would not be confirmed until the Budget announcement in late May, the impact of this funding loss would be felt across the whole Māori media sector.

“Te Māngai Pāho is consulting with the Māori media sector, including iwi radio, on the future of our funding allocations. We have requested feedback to understand how any reduction of funding will be felt across the sector.

“Feedback will inform the board’s final decisions around funding allocations. We understand that the stability of iwi radio stations and content creators is threatened by this funding cut.”

Jones said iwi stations unanimously agreed at a special general meeting they would not accept any decrease in funding and would consider legal action in response to any cutbacks.

“Decisions taken by TMP that materially affect iwi radio funding, structure or autonomy remain Crown actions for treaty purposes.

“The Crown cannot discharge its Treaty obligations by delegation and then rely on that delegation to insulate itself from responsibility.”

Rapidly changing audience
The iwi radio network said it had been grappling with a wide range of issues including, rapidly changing audience expectation and emerging technologies, numerous siloed media outlets and an inadequate investment in workforce development affecting the ability to grow and retain a skilled workforce.

Minister for Māori Development Tama Potaka said Māori media, including iwi radio, played a critical role in supporting te reo Māori revitalisation and connecting whānau and communities across Aotearoa, shaping public understanding by sharing Māori stories and te reo directly with whānau.

He said no final decisions had been made through the consultation between TMP and the Māori media sector and it was premature to confirm impacts on funding levels, services, or jobs, including claims about specific percentage reductions.

“Earlier financial support of $16 million in time-limited funding was put in place under the previous government and is now coming to an end. The current consultation process is focused on how best to manage that transition within existing funding,” he said.

“As Minister, I do not direct or intervene in Te Māngai Pāho’s operational funding decisions. Those are matters for the board.”

Potaka said the Crown’s role was to ensure a strong and sustainable system for te reo Māori revitalisation.

High quality content
“I expect the consultation process to reflect the importance of Iwi radio and the role it plays in communities across the country, while ensuring funding is used effectively to deliver high-quality content on platforms that meet audience preferences.

“Māori media entities continue to adapt to changes in funding and audience behaviour, and I expect decisions to prioritise value for money while supporting strong te reo Māori outcomes.

“Any organisation is entitled to raise concerns or seek legal advice. However, there is an established independent process underway, and it is important that process is allowed to run its course.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Israel’s Parliament has approved a one-sided death penalty measure to execute Palestinians.

It is one of the most extreme laws in the nation’s history, and will exacerbate the far-right government’s illegal system of apartheid.

Some members of the Knesset, including ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, were seen wearing noose pins in the Knesset yesterday, and celebrating with champagne on live TV after the bill passed.

• READ MORE: ‘Dangerous escalation’: World reacts to Israel passing death penalty law
• Other Palestine genocide reports

Ben-Gvir said hanging is “one of the options,” as is execution by the electric chair or euthanasia.

The law was passed with 62 votes to 48 in its final reading.

The bill drew international condemnation ahead of its passage, including from the European Union, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and Amnesty International. Human rights groups have vowed to challenge the bill in Israel’s Supreme Court.

The legislation, which has garnered broad public support in Israel, authorises executions for “terrorists” who kill “with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel,” according to Haaretz — effectively ensuring it won’t apply to any of the settlers who routinely murder Palestinians.

‘Confessions’ by torture
In military courts in the occupied West Bank, execution by hanging will now be the default punishment for terrorism. Only Palestinians are tried in these courts, and 96 percent of people are convicted, though cases are largely built on “confessions” extracted through torture.

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians condemned the bill yesterday ahead of the vote as an “extreme escalation in Israel’s genocidal policies against Palestinians”.

“The progression of the legislation marks not just a profoundly unjust and illegal act of discrimination under international law, but a far more sinister escalation of Israel’s apartheid legal systems,” the center wrote.

Israeli Knesset death penalty for Palestinians.       Video: Al Jazeera

Israel is currently imprisoning about 9500 Palestinians, according to the human rights group B’Tselem, and about half of them are held under administrative detention.

According to the group, the Israel Prison Service has already started to prepare designated execution facilities.

B’Tselem on Sunday called the bill “another official killing mechanism” that will further normalise the slaughter of Palestinians, as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza and intensifies attacks in the occupied West Bank.

Human rights violation
“The death penalty is a total violation of the most basic human rights, primarily, the right to life,” B’Tselem wrote.

“Israel enforces a comprehensive policy of killing and oppression against the Palestinian people in all the territories it controls. The Death Penalty Law gives Israel’s apartheid regime yet another tool for advancing that policy.”

On top of Monday’s bill, the Knesset is also considering another death penalty measure to impose on alleged October 7, 2023, attackers.

According to Amnesty International, that bill would effectively expand the unilateral powers of military judges and eliminate judicial safeguards.

A French senator walked into the Luxembourg Palace, opened his mouth, and basically set the whole room on fire. Politely. In a suit.

Claude Malhuret didn’t yell nor wave his arms. He just listed things… calmly, methodically, like a doctor reading a very long and very depressing diagnosis.

And by the time he was done, the entire Trump administration had been reduced to a punchline that wasn’t even trying to be funny.

• READ MORE: Senator Claude Malhuret’s ‘speech on the situation in the Near and Middle East’
• Iran warns of retaliatory attacks on US, Israeli universities
• Israeli police break up antiwar protesters in Tel Aviv
• Other US-Israel war on Iran and Palestine genocide reports

He started with an apology. Why? Because a year ago, he said, he had compared Trump’s presidency to Nero’s Court. He was wrong.

“It’s the miracle court,” he corrected himself on Friday.

And then he started naming names.

A former heroin addict running the Ministry of Health. A climate skeptic in charge of the economy. A TV host with a drinking problem commanding the armed forces. A lobbyist who used to work for Qatar now sitting as Attorney General. A woman who openly admires Putin in charge of national intelligence.

‘Clown in a palace’
Malhuret quoted a Turkish proverb for the occasion… “When a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king — it is the palace that becomes a circus.”

Nobody needed to ask who or what he meant. They just smiled.

And you know what? He wasn’t even being cruel. He was just being truthful and very accurate. Which, somehow, made it worse.

Then came the part that made people’s jaws drop a little.

Every time the Epstein files resurface, he said, bombs go off somewhere in the world. A new military strike. A fresh crisis.

Convenient timing. Every single time.

Malhuret didn’t call it a conspiracy. He just pointed at the pattern and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

Gulf investments
The US$400 million Boeing jet from Qatar got a mention. The Gulf investments. The stock market moves that only a small circle of insiders seemed to profit from.

Any one of these, Malhuret said, would have triggered impeachment proceedings in France.

“But we are not here,” he added. “We are in MAGA’s America.”

Here’s what makes this 5 minute speech different from the usual political noise. Malhuret didn’t just wave his hands and say “America bad.” He went person by person, scandal by scandal, conflict by conflict — and built a picture so complete that by the end of it, you couldn’t really argue with any individual piece without defending the whole rotten structure.

It’s the kind of speech American senators could give. If they wanted to. If they weren’t so busy trying not to offend anyone.

The world is watching. While Americans debate whether the speech was fair or too harsh or whatever, the rest of the planet has already formed its opinion.

One man. One very powerful seat. And a world that keeps catching fire while everyone argues about the Epstein files — which, funny enough, never quite get released fully, do they?

“Trump, the Mar-a-Lago golfer, is the only bull in the world who walks around with his own china shop. When a clown takes over the Palace, he doesn’t become King. It’s the Palace that becomes a circus”

French senator Claude Malhuret once again nails it. You won’t hear a better… pic.twitter.com/q2mpL7XFtK

— Alex Taylor (@AlexTaylorNews) March 27, 2026

Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

• READ MORE: US-Israeli war on Iran widens with first attack from Yemen
• US-Israel war on Iran: What’s happening on day 29 of attacks?
• Why is the West dancing to Israel’s tune? What’s leading us to disaster
• Other war on Iran and Palestine reports

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Rushed into war
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Joe Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli Parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US president Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same.

In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Obscuring the relationship
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job — the reason it is such an important client state — is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Mobilised by Zionist lobbies
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel — rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests — becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Desire to ‘disappear’ Palestinians
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria — as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused.

As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington — first under Biden, then under Trump — gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Indifferent to Palestinians’ fate
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons.

Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests — so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — short wrecking sprees — to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Similar Iran war analysis
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran — its only plausible rival in the region — being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick — threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey — and proffering a carrot — promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Effects on the global economy
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”.

Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Israel deployed its lobbies
Instead, Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons — hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials — who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran.

I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result — an illegal war on Iran — is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

Sole repositories of power
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics — the President, the Congress, the two main political parties — are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy — sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex — doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Curtailing Israel’s influence
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby — AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others — what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran — an idea already seeping into popular consciousness — may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay — and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

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 on the author’s Substack and reepublished with permission.

The Middle East is in flames. Britain is being dragged into an illegal war, the aims of which are entirely unclear, reports Richard Sanders of Double Down News.

“It’s a war of choice, and the man who chose it is Benjamin Netanyahu. Why, yet again, is the West dancing to Israel’s tune?

“I’ve made a number of videos exposing Israeli crimes. This one is different. It’s directed at conservatives and people generally who support the state of Israel.

• READ MORE: The End of Israel: The Ultimate Evidence — Richard Sanders
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“I believe our indulgence of Israel is not just morally wrong. It’s against the interests of the US and the UK and ultimately against the interests of Israel itself.

“It is leading us all to disaster. Palestine is the place you come thundering, crashing into the buffers, the limits of the Western liberal moral imagination.

“The tragedy and complexity of Israel is that it’s both a product of the most unspeakable racism and a cause of it. Zionism was born from the suffering of Jewish people in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, from a desire for a safe haven, a territory where Jews would for once be the hosts and not the eternal guests.

“It was framed as a return to a historic biblical homeland. and for its supporters. These two factors give it an entirely different complexion morally from other enterprises where predominantly European populations have settled far-flung parts of the world.

Dispossession and subjugation
“There’s no doubt that the Zionist dream has enormous emotional power. The problem, of course, is the other side of the equation, the people. It was inflicted upon the Palestinians whose experience of dispossession and subjugation was no different from that of countless other peoples subjected to European colonialism.

“In fact, arguably, it’s been considerably worse than many, precisely because of the licence and indulgence granted to the Israeli state.

“Let’s lay out the bold, indisputable facts. In 1948, more than 80 percent of the Palestinian population of what became Israel fled their homes. Now, if you want to believe this was not an act of deliberate ethnic cleansing, fine.

“What’s undeniable is that they were never allowed to return. In 1947, they were there. In 1949, they were not. The granting of the vote to that small fragment of the Palestinian population that remained provided a democratic fig leaf for the new state, one that was blown away once the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967.

The End of Israel                                     Documentary: Double Down News

“There Palestinians have no right to vote for the political entity, the state of Israel that controls their lives. Jewish settlers, on the other hand, occupying the same territory do.

“Even in East Jerusalem, which as far as the Israeli government is concerned has been formally annexed to Israel, Palestinians cannot vote. Political rights depend upon ethnicity. That is not democracy.

“Israel is and has always been a state whose defining feature is that it’s structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. What else does the term a Jewish state mean?

‘Elephant in the room’
“This is the elephant in the room. the simple, blindingly obvious, undeniable fact that the Western political media class has decided that we must never mention or acknowledge, despite the fact that all of the world’s leading human rights organisations, including the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, have denounced Israel as an apartheid state.

“Now scour the history of the modern world. No people has ever resigned itself to being second class citizens in their own country. Spend just 10 minutes at a checkpoint in the West Bank and you get it.

“The disfiguring dehumanisation, the humiliation of elderly men and women forced to stand in the sun for hours waiting for 18-year-olds to search them.

“The brutalisation of young men in particular, the daily control of rage that is the lot of every Palestinian. It is simply emotionally, psychologically intolerable.”

• Watch the full Double Down News video

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: An Israeli court has closed an investigation into the death of Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank who died in an Israeli jail six months after he was arrested, held without charges and accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

An autopsy showed Ahmad likely starved to death after suffering extreme weight loss, muscle wasting and untreated scabies. Human rights groups say nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli jails since October 2023.

Meanwhile, local and international media outlets report Israeli forces recently tortured a Palestinian toddler in Gaza to coerce a confession from his father.

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According to reports from Palestine TV, Al Jazeera and others, the child’s father, Osama Abu Nassar, was detained near the al-Maghazi refugee camp after he came under fire from Israeli soldiers.

He was forced to approach an Israeli checkpoint, where he was separated from his 18-month-old son, stripped naked and forced to watch as soldiers used a cigarette to burn one of the toddler’s legs while using a nail to puncture the other.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new UN report warns Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent”.The report, titled “Torture and Genocide”, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

In July, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on her over her report naming dozens of companies she says are profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International blasted the sanctions as a “shameless and transparent attack on the fundamental principles of international justice”. Francesca Albanese’s new book is When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out what you found in your new report, “Torture and Genocide,” that you just presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council?

Torture and Genocide — a new UN report.     Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Nermeen.

I’ve been investigating genocide for over two years now. So, five out of eight reports I’ve produced for the United Nations focus on genocide, acts of genocide, the context in which a genocide happens, why the genocide is not stopped, the layers of complicity from states and private companies, which is the reason why also I’m sanctioned by the United States, against which now my 13-year-old daughter, who’s an American citizen, is the only one to take action suing the Trump administration.

But of all the investigations I’ve carried out, this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people, considering the scale and intensity of torture.

And I monitored torture behind bars, collecting hundreds, hundreds of testimonies, directly and from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, but also analyzing what experts call torturous environment, meaning the cumulative impact of all the practices, of all the crimes that Israel has massively inflicted on the Palestinians — again, beyond the torture, sodomisation, raping in jail, the enforced disappearance, which is touching 4000 people.

This is new. This is a new crime, including for Israel, toward the Palestinians. But also starvation, constant forced displacement, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and home demolition, the fear of being always threatened with death or other crimes, it creates a torturous environment for the Palestinians, which is an essential element of genocide.

And it is genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, if you could elaborate on this point that you’ve just made and that you make in the report, namely, that torture has effectively become state policy for Israel since October 2023? So, what are the kinds of transformations you’ve seen, both in terms of Israeli security personnel, as well as settlers, against the Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I have to say that what I’ve investigated is something on which even the United Nations Committee Against Torture and the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel/Palestine had shed light already, the fact that Israel, after October 7, has massively used torture to punish the Palestinians vindictively.

In fact, the concept of torture has become a state policy is something that the Committee Against Torture found out recently.

I have zoomed in: What does it mean, and where does it come from? Surely, one of the main engineers or architects of this, what’s been called — what he has called the “prison revolution,” is Itamar Ben-Gvir, was — immediately after October 7, has declared that the Palestinians in jail will not be afforded luxury treatment or five-star treatment anymore, as if it was a five-star hotel, what the Israeli prison system afforded Palestinians before October 7.

By the way, in 2023, in July 2023, I produced a report showing how widespread and systemic was the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian detainees, so, just to give a context.

But the conditions have become more and more brutal, and intentionally so. What does it mean? Palestinians have routinely been abducted — I mean, detained without charge or trial. They’ve been arrested, because Palestinians, if they were specific professionals, like journalists and doctors or headed medical personnel, all the more.

Seventeen hundred Palestinian healthcare personnel have been killed. Hundreds remain in jail. And they have been shackled, blindfolded, beaten, humiliated, stripped naked, photographed, filmed, exposed to Israeli civilians, including settlers, coming in to document and to film, to participate into this orgy of depravity, of how a person can be humiliated.

But the most painful, excruciating thing — and I’ve read some of the testimonies — is how Palestinian women and men have been sodomised, have been raped, with bottles, with knives, with metal rods. Even the prisoner who was sodomised through — was raped with a knife, brought to the hospital.

Five Israeli officials were identified and pressed charged against, and now the charges have been dropped. And the person who leaked the video from within the military apparatus is under house arrest on top of it.

So, not only that I’ve documented the vindictiveness toward the Palestinians, the humiliation, the continuous abuses against them in jail, really to break their spirit once and for all as a people, but also the fact that there has been almost something celebratory against the mistreatment of Palestinians in jail among the society.

The legislative power, the Knesset, has been discussing the right to rape Palestinians, and so other members of the executive. The judiciary has not looked into it. And as I said, even those who were found, caught on video, committing this crime were released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca, in this last 30 seconds, what are you calling for?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, for justice. Justice. Israel must be stopped, because, Amy, I can’t even use the past tense. As we speak, there are still over 9000 Palestinian hostages, hostages to an unlawful occupation in Israeli jail.

The only thing this — International Court of Justice has spoken. Israel must withdraw the occupation, the troops, the colonies. And the exploitation of Palestinian resources must end.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to terrorise people. Very few Israelis are engaged against this. So member states must intervene, cut ties and stop weapons transfers to Israel once and for all, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesco Albanese, we thank you so much for being with us, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We’ll link to your report, “Torture and Genocide,” and have you back on to talk about your book.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.