New Zealand journalist and video story teller Cole Martin has given a heartfelt and challenging personal account of what it is like living in Palestine under siege.

At a recent public kōrero hosted by the Whānau Community Centre and Hub in Auckland’s Mt Roskill, he described the challenges and highlights of several extended visits to Palestine bearing witness as a Christian — the most recent trip for six months last year.

Since returning to Aotearoa New Zealand he has been giving kōrero at public meetings and church groups, talking to news media, and exhibiting collections of his photographic evidence.

• READ MORE: Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’ — Pacific Media Watch
• Other Talanoa TV reports

He spoke to hosts Nik Naidu and David Robie of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) for Talanoa TV’s Community Lens programme.

“I’ve been to Palestine a number of times over the last few years, mostly recently I was living there for six months in 2025,” he says.

“I first got became aware of what was happening and got involved when I travelled there in 2019 and I kind of saw the tip of the iceberg of how bad things were.

“And I was really shocked and when I came back to Aotearoa and hearing some of the narratives going on and the ignorance of what was happening on the ground — particularly narratives within my own Christian faith community.

“People were making the assumption that the modern state of Israel was a continuation of the ancient land of the Israelites, and a lot of other harmful narratives that go with that.”

Journalist Cole Martin on Palestine                 Video: Talanoa TV

• Sky TV Channel 83 Face TV : Community Lens Show
• Episode 05 – Palestine with Cole Martin, Rotuman Language Week 2026 Hula Fit, Kite Festival — as seen on TV

Community Lens is a programme “celebrating local events in our communities and conversations with leaders and residents”

It is a TV show that highlights what’s happening in our local communities.

We explore the stories, events, people, and grassroots initiatives that are shaping our neighbourhoods. And we help amplify the voices of community leaders, organisers, and residents.

Through celebrating and better understanding our diverse communities, Community Lens aims to improve social cohesion and help build a better future for all people and our beautiful nation.

Featuring and appreciation to :
Cole Martin
Dr David Robie
Asia Pacific Media Network
Niki Maro & the Hula Fit Team
NZ Rotuman Community Centre
Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group
Auckland Kite Show
and all other participants and interviewees

PRODUCER
The Whānau Community Trust

PRODUCTION MANAGERS
Ernestina Bonsu-Maro and Rachael Mario

Hosted by Nik Naidu, Ernestina Bonsu-Maro and Rachael Mario

A Talanoa TV Production with Face TV Sky Channel 83

Broadcast on 1 July 2026.

Fiji has become the 65th country to establish an “Israel Allies” parliamentary caucus, joining a global network of lawmakers aimed at strengthening political and diplomatic ties with Israel, reports FBC News.

The announcement was made by Israel Allies Foundation president Josh Reinstein, who said the newly launched Fiji-Israel Allies Caucus marked another milestone in the country’s growing relationship with Israel.

Speaking alongside Deputy Prime Minister and caucus chair Viliame Gavoka, Reinstein said the Israel Allies Foundation coordinated the activities of pro-Israel caucuses in parliaments and legislatures around the world.

• READ MORE: Fiji and Israel sign cybersecurity pact
• ‘We don’t want Israel in our country’, says Shamima Ali
• Other Israel in Pacific reports

“This is the 65th caucus to be launched. We’re active on six continents. We have 65 caucuses in 65 countries with over 1600 legislators.”

He said the foundation promoted what it described as “faith-based diplomacy”, encouraging legislators to translate their biblical support for Israel into political engagement.

Reinstein praised Fiji for what he described as its strong support for Israel, particularly following the country’s decision to establish an embassy in Jerusalem.

According to Reinstein, Fiji’s entry into the international network strengthened links between the country’s parliamentarians and legislators from dozens of other nations.

Platform for cooperation
He said the parliamentary caucus would provide a platform for cooperation between lawmakers while reinforcing diplomatic and economic ties between Fiji and Israel.

Reinstein also thanked Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Deputy Prime Minister Gavoka for supporting the establishment of the caucus, describing Fiji’s actions as demonstrating “courage” and “moral clarity.”

The Fiji-Israel Allies Caucus was officially launched last week, with Gavoka serving as its inaugural chair.

Meanwhile, Pacific Media Watch reports civil society groups in Fiji have stepped up their criticism of the country’s closer ties with “genocidal” Israel.

The Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network (Fijians4Palestine) has highlighted last month’s announcement of the signing of a Declaration of Intent (DOI) in the field of national security targeting modern training methodologies and law enforcement capacity building as “shameful news”.

It has also criticised Fiji’s MOU on diplomatic cooperation and training, and a plan to provide security cooperation with the Fiji police.

Israel has reopened its embassy in Fiji after 30 years and Fiji has established an embassy in Jerusalem in a move widely believed to be illegal.

“This is the last time you’ll see me… they brought me here to kill me.”

These chilling words by detained and tortured Palestinian paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya were cited by an Amnesty International advocate today at an Auckland rally denouncing the failure of New Zealand media to highlight his plight.

Dr Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told his lawyer this while on a visit earlier this month, explained Amnesty International’s people power manager Margaret Taylor.

Amnesty international is one of the many global human rights watchdogs and medical organisations that have been campaigning and demanding his release.

• READ MORE: Israel has stepped up its persecution of Dr Abu Safiya
• Gaza genocide – how many UN findings will the West ignore?
• ‘The essence of childhood has been destroyed’

Speaking to pro-Palestinian activists and supporters in the 145th consecutive week of protests since the genocidal Israeli attacks were unleashed on the besieged Gaza enclave, Taylor described Dr Safiya’s plight.

Taylor said lawyer Nasser Odeh had stated that since Dr Abu Safiya’s transfer to the notorious underground detention facility Rakevet, he had faced daily beatings, threats and abuse.

“Nasser observed fresh bruises and torture marks on Dr Abu Safiya’s head and across his body, leaving him barely recognisable,” she said.

“He also said that Dr Abu Safiya arrived at their meeting with his hands and feet shackled, and on the verge of losing consciousness.”

Question the ‘crime’
Taylor challenged the protesters to question the alleged crime — he has never been charged with any offence — that Israel had used as a pretext to “treat him so badly”.

“Is it because Dr Abu Safiya refused to abandon his patients even when the IDF bombed his hospital among many other hospitals in Gaza into inoperability?” she asked.

“Is it because he was one of the most prominent voices denouncing the devastation of Gaza’s healthcare system, the targeting of ambulances and the killing of fellow medical practitioners?

“Is it because Dr Abu Safiya — this specialist in child healthcare — could bear witness to Israel’s deliberate targeting, injuring and killing of Palestinian children?”

Sadly, said Taylor, since Dr Abu Safiya’s detention in December 2024 in increasingly more inhumane conditions, “we don’t need his evidence”.

“Most recently we’ve heard from [Australian expert on international human rights law] Chris Sidoti, talking [in New Zealand] to the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory’s most recent report,” Taylor said.

“Unequivocally, the commission found that Israeli security forces are perpetuating its genocide by deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children.

“More than 20,000 Palestinian kids killed, more than 50,000 Palestinian kids injured and all children living in a dystopian world of fear, death and inadequate access to all but the most basic food, healthcare, housing and education.”

‘Irrefutably documented’
Taylor explained how Amnesty International continued to “irrefutably document” that Israel had and was continuing to commit genocide in Gaza, apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

“All those crimes against humanity have also been witnessed by health practitioners like Dr Abu Safiya who have valiantly sought to repair and heal the innocents caught up in targeted attacks by an IDF armed and funded by Western governments.

“Dr Abu Safiya is guilty of no crime — yet he has been held without charge or trial for more than 18 months.

“He has been tortured and ill treated — including severe physical and psychological abuse and prolonged solitary confinement.”

Growing calls to release Dr Abu Safiya     Video: CBC News

Dr Abu Safiya had been denied adequate medical care and access to independent monitors, including the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC).

“Not only must the Red Cross have access to Dr Abu Safiya — but they must also be granted access to all other Palestinians detainees.

“One of Dr Abu Safiya’s sons was killed in a drone attack on Kamal Adwan hospital. Ibrahim was just 15 and despite that tragedy Dr Abu Safiya kept working.

Bravely speaking out
“His second son Elias continues to bravely speak out for his father’s release.

“Elias has urged us all to intervene before it is too late — ‘The world’s silence today could mean the loss of an innocent human life,’ he has said.

“It is that silence — in the face of Israel’s overwhelming brutality to this good man and to countless innocent Palestinians — that we all have been challenging month on month. And we must continue to do so.

“Don’t be silent — talk about the amazing Dr Hussam to your friends and whānau.”

Criticising the media for its failure to cover this story, she called on the public to write letters to the editor, spread news on social media — “or submit your own articles”.

Last night I attended a packed meeting in Lyttleton against the takeover attempt by DP World of the Lyttleton Port. This is a local, regional, national, and international issue.

The meeting was organised by New Zealanders for A Democratic Economy. It was chaired by John Minto, a long time campaigner for human rights.

Think evil predator company with a track record in taking over international ports — sackings, enviro hazards and links to Epstein…  and you have DP World in a nutshell.

• READ MORE:  Community, unions meet over Lyttelton Port takeover bid, as decision looms
• Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files
• Top Canadian pension fund halts deals with UAE firm over Epstein ties
• Bribery allegations threaten DP World’s expansion plans in India
• Major multinational port operator paid zero tax in Australia while raking in billions
• Other DP World reports

I have researched the history of DP World and it is accused of being corrupt — and good at keeping the corruption out of sight — but that’s the way with these tax-evading companies.

Who pays for their profits? The people, the taxpayers through rate-hikes and workers, through redundancies. DP World loves replacing people with AI.

Predator companies like this start on the port and move into other areas because ports are a gateway to transport and other industries.

This is a local, regional, national and international issue about power and control.

It is about power being taken out of the hands of people and placed in the hands of predator companies.

Workers made redundant
Last night heard from workers who have been made redundant water side. Men who cared about community.

We heard from Gerard Loader, secretary at the Lyttelton Branch of the Maritime Union of New Zealand and who is also the national vice-president of the union.

Loader presented as a union official, and also as a boy who grew up, married, had children and works in Lyttleton. He recalled the days when Lyttelton was a hive of activity, a harbour full of ships, trucks, trains, seafarers and “wharfies”.

He gave relevant background to the development of the takeover.

In 2023, the Lyttleton Port Company (LPC) appointed a new CEO in Graeme Sumner and chair of the board Barry Bragg.

“Not long after that we started hearing rumours of plans to privatise city assets, with DP world being mentioned more than once,” said Loader.

“So with the support of the greater community we lobbied council and demonstrated at the CCHL AGM achieving our goal of keeping our assets in public control, albeit with a lot of contorted right-leaning faces looking on in disappointment.”

Battle won, but war continues
That battle was won, but the war is far from over, he said.

“Since early 2024 we have been challenging or asking all LPC management, board members, councillors etc about the persistent rumours of DP World wanting to lease the port operations as a way to get around the mandate of keeping the port in public ownership, and to a man they have all denied or deflected the issue saying they know nothing or it is out of their hands, or we cannot interupt the process as we have to follow due diligence etcetera.

“Then to hear the announcement in June of Tonui (3 runanga and DP World) putting in an unsolicited bid to CCHL for the leasing out of port operations for a 30-year contract was a slap in the face to not only the employees at LPC but the people and ratepayers of Christchurch who have basically been lied to for the last two years by everyone, as DP World and Tonui have been negotiating behind closed doors on this, and in the words of LPC CEO Graeme Sumner, the worst kept secret in Canterbury.”

Barry Bragg is chair of LPC board, was on the Ngāi Tahu Property board for seven years, and is the deputy chair of Stevensons Limited who specialise in concrete and construction.”

Loader said the fact that Bragg claimed he “knew nothing about it”, when asked directly at the Christchurch City Council meeting on June 3, raises more questions than it answers.

Whether the powers that be had full knowledge, or they truly knew nothing while a deal of this magnitude was being discussed, as a ratepayer was “deeply concerning”, Loader said.

“Whose interests do they have at heart?”

End of people’s control
He added that if this “deal” proceeds it would be the end of the port being controlled by the people in the interests of Christchurch city and all profits going back to the Canterbury region.

Rather, the port would be controlled by a huge foreign monopoly which would only have their profit margin at the heart of the operation.

His words were sobering. There is no illusion that control has already slipped and deals are being made behind the scenes.

That is typical of Dubai-based DP World.

The broligarchy is alive and kicking and it does not care about the Tangata or the Whenua or the Moana.

We heard from researcher Edward Miller, of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability (CICTAR) who has investigated DP World’s control of Australian ports.

This company evades tax and so rates rise. Rise and rise. The burden on tax payers is massive because the company is all about profit and not about sharing or caring for community.

The port is the first point of take over and not the last.

Need to stop this
We need to stop this. We need to stop this asset sale and others.

We need to ensure our community is heard and heeded, and not made redundant.
Councils and the government work for us. It is not the other way around.

We heard from poet Gary McCormick who said we, the people, have power. We have the power to stop this. We are the voice.

We heard from Māori women who talked about the generations to come. We heard form Māori women who talked about the terrible effect this would have on the environment. A greedy parasite controlling the port.

We heard from Sara Campbell who spoke eloquently and passionately about the toll this will take on our environment.

“We’re living in a rapidly warming world. The last 11 years have been the hottest on record.

“Aotearoa now has the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

“And right here in Whakaraupō, the ecology is under immense pressure. This harbour is home to our nationally vulnerable Hector’s dolphins.”

And yet:

“I truly believe we can stop DP World,” she said.

And the crowd cheered.

“And I believe we can change how the port is run. To a model where we’re actually at the table. Where mana whenua and the unions are strategic partners in decision making.”

No media present
As for me, I will try to publish articles in the media on this but the news media was not there. The newspapers were not present. Radio was not present.

Once the port mattered to media. Now, where is it?

We need to notice this. We need to draw attention to it, we need to join the protest against it. Or it will be too late. And what then?

As Gerard Loader said: “When my grandson asks what I did to stop it, I want to be able to tell him I did everything I could.”

Community for community. Rise people, rise.

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

• Sign the petition Keep Our Port Public to show there is no public mandate for privatisation
• More information on Our Port Public website

The Trump administration has announced a renewed crusade against “far-left terrorism,” which sounds okay if you don’t know that the word “terrorism” only ever means “behavior which goes against the agendas of the Western empire.”

The United States has for example placed sanctions on UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese for calling attention to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, justifying the move by claiming the human rights expert has “expressed support for terrorism”.

In the UK, police have been arresting people on terrorism charges just for holding signs which say “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley
• READ MORE: US wants to globalise fight against far-left terrorism
• US urges global crackdown on ‘far-left terrorism’ – NZ says focus on behaviour rather than labels

The designation has nothing to do with actual acts of terrorism as the average Westerner conceives of that notion. In 2024, the US government removed its $10 million bounty on former Al Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (AKA Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) because he facilitated Washington’s regime change agendas in Syria, where he is now the sitting president.

You can literally be a leader in the most notorious terrorist network on earth and still see that designation disappear into thin air as soon as you start assisting the geostrategic ambitions of the empire.

The US has signalled that it will refocus its so-called counterterrorism efforts on repressing leftwing groups.

In a speech to officials from more than 60 countries on Thursday, secretary of state Marco Rubio said “far-left terror” had been overlooked for too long.

It comes as… pic.twitter.com/hXQ5PZRfX7

— Novara Media (@novaramedia) July 17, 2026

The White House announced on Thursday that it has launched “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism,” under which “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that according to leaked documents from Marco Rubio’s State Department, groups to be targeted under the new marching orders will include “violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors,” as well as “violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks” and “militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements.”

Authoritarian implications
The move is premised on a White House memo known as NSPM-7, a directive that critics have been warning about for months due to its dangerously authoritarian implications and lack of congressional approval. In the words of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, NSPM-7 “directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”

This line strongly echoes the language of a 1967 FBI memo describing the goals of the J Edgar Hoover program COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings.”

Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism – under President Trump’s leadership this @FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate… pic.twitter.com/AIn0aX29Hl

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) July 16, 2026

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political movement in the United States.

The feds never fully stopped running such programmes of course – groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter were known to have been targeted by police surveillance and infiltration. But it’s clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J Edgar Hoover.

“Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism – under President Trump’s leadership this FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate and disrupt organizations engaging in political violence and terrorism,” Patel said on Twitter regarding the latest escalation.

So it seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. As Americans become more and more hostile toward US warmongering, more and more fed up with the state of Israel, more and more convinced that their government doesn’t care about them, and more and more discontented with what unbridled capitalism is doing to their bank accounts, their society, and their world, their rulers are responding with the iron fist of tyranny.

Measures will remain
And what makes all this especially threatening is that you know whatever measures they roll out while the Republicans are running things will remain in place when the Democrats are in power, because as we have discussed here many times before, it is the Democratic Party’s job to prevent leftward movement in the United States.

This will be one of those many, many times the Republicans did something evil and the Democrats just quietly kept it running in the background to protect the interests of the capitalist empire. Because that is their job.

But the fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to.

They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children.

They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing.

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

INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon and Stephanie Tran

A Zionist doctor has claimed that the Australian health regulator CEO Justin Untersteiner “was forced into a massive capitulation with IHRA”.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (AHPRA) recently introduced the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism which puts healthcare workers at risk for criticising Israel.

The Zionist doctor, psychiatrist Dr Doron Samuell, alleges that he was part of a campaign that “exerted intolerable political pressure” on AHPRA to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

• READ MORE: Antisemitic, really? Jewish leader speaks out on Australia’s Royal Commission hypocrisy
• Saige England: Call out the Zionist hypocrisy – genociders are settler colonialists on steroids
• Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

Resisted IHRA for two years
AHPRA, which regulates the conduct of 900,000 Australian healthcare workers, had resisted pressure to adopt the IHRA definition for two years.

However, on June 17, the health regulator shifted its position unexpectedly and without consultation when CEO Justin Untersteiner issued a joint statement with the federal government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, announcing the adoption of the definition and that Segal’s guidance handbook would be used as a tool in handling complaints.

Thousands of health care workers, and many organisations including the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Federation, NSW Civil Liberties Council and Medical Association for Prevention of War have called for AHPRA to reverse its decision and continue to rely on its existing framework in dealing with complaints of racism, including antisemitism.

In response, Israel’s Foreign Ministry pressured the Australian government to “confront antisemitism in healthcare” in a post on X on Sunday.

This investigation paints a deeply troubling picture and should serve as a wake-up call.

We call upon The Australian government to confront antisemitism forcefully.

Every reluctance, every excuse, and every failure to act sends extremists the same message: they can keep pushing…

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) July 12, 2026

AHPRA subjected to ‘intolerable pressure’ from Israel lobby
The “intolerable pressure” claims were made by “Aba Shesh”, a social media pseudonym linked to the Facebook account used by Dr Doron Samuell, a member of the Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance (AZHA).

Dr Samuell’s comments were made in response to a post on “Jews of Melbourne” (JOM) Facebook page drawing members’ attention to a Civil Liberties Defence Centre (CLDC) webinar presented by its chairperson, lawyer Nick Hanna. The webinar was an educational briefing for healthcare workers on the implications of AHPRA’s adoption of the IHRA definition .

A member of the Jews Of Melbourne group predicted there would be

lots of “antisemitism” at the webinar which members could monitor and report to AHPRA.

In response, “Aba Shesh” described Untersteiner as an “unthinking bureaucrat” who “repeatedly minimised the problem until his hand was forced”.

Samuell lamented that Untersteiner “said the right things and even visited a shule but AHPRA sat on their hands, receiving vexatious complaints for two years until we exerted intolerable political pressure on them to act.”

Samuell stated that Untersteiner “was forced into a massive capitulation with IHRA”.

Last year, Samuell claimed he was responsible for the cancellation of a staff forum on Children and War at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

Michael West Media sent detailed questions to Untersteiner and provided him with an opportunity to respond to the comments. Instead of specific answers, AHPRA provided us with a general statement. AHPRA’s full response is below.

MWM also contacted Samuell for comment, he did not provide a response.

APHRA CEO ‘under pressure’
Several healthcare professionals who opposed the change said they met with senior AHPRA officials, including Untersteiner, earlier this year to argue against adopting the IHRA definition.

One doctor, who requested anonymity because of concerns of professional repercussions, said senior leadership were presented with medical evidence of the genocide and concerns that the IHRA definition would be used to silence doctors.

“As well as presenting the overwhelming amount of medical evidence of genocide and the silencing of healthcare workers as an apparatus of genocide, we also focused on the concern of the IHRA definition being used to silence doctors who openly support human rights,” they said.

Jerusalem Definition preferred
The doctor said they proposed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism as an alternate definition.

“We provided an alternative definition on antisemitism, the Jerusalem Definition, should it be necessary to single out one group for a separate definition on discrimination.”

The doctor said Untersteiner told them he had publicly rejected the IHRA definition and discussed pressure the regulator was facing from Israel lobby groups.

“Untersteiner said he has publicly rejected the IHRA definition but when pressed to provide this in writing later, AHPRA did not,” the doctor said.

“[Untersteiner] also expressed some of the personal stress he was under due to the Zionist groups and in particular from doctors like Doron Samuell. It appeared to be genuine and heartfelt.”

MWM put those claims to Untersteiner, who declined to comment.

The doctor expressed concern that AHPRA’s decision to adopt IHRA would encourage vexatious complaints against practitioners, an anxiety shared by thousands of other healthcare workers.

“AHPRA’s statement on the IHRA definition will embolden the Zionists to ramp up their vexatious complaint campaign,” they said.

Path to capitulation
Samuell told the Facebook group that “with my pressure, the Minister issued a directive for Justin to remedy the situation and gave him 6 months to do it” yet, “when he reported back 7+ months later, he was still refusing to define antisemitism”.

In September 2025, health ministers directed APHRA to provide a six monthly report on “Improving the health practitioner response to racism and discrimination, including antisemitism”. AHPRA established a Racism and Discrimination Committee to provide an action plan.

Minister for Health Mark Butler did not respond to questions on the matter.

In February 2026, Untersteiner was pressured by Senator Andrew Bragg in Senate Estimates to adopt the IHRA definition.

“I’m wondering why you haven’t decided to adopt a clear definition of antisemitism. We’ve just had a religious massacre in Australia where antisemitism was a key driver. So I’m wondering why you haven’t adopted one,” Senator Bragg asked.

In response, Untersteiner said the issue was a “live discussion”. However, “the vast majority of practitioners do the right thing and they comply with our codes of conduct” and “in the very few cases where they don’t, we do believe that we’ve got the tools to be able to deal with that effectively.”

The Segal meetings
When pressed further to explain why he had not adopted the IHRA definition, Untersteiner said he had been meeting with Jillian Segal “on a regular basis”.

“I’ve been meeting with the special envoy on a regular basis. I think we’ve been able to work quite well together,” Untersteiner told the Committee.

On 13 April 2026, AHPRA’s Race and Discrimination Committee submitted its report responding to the Ministerial directive. In his posts, Samuell objected to the composition of the committee because it

included a Jewish person who had been critical of Israel.

The report stated that “the National Code of Conduct sets out clear expectations that registered health practitioners will deliver care that is culturally safe and free from discriminatory behaviours.” There was an action plan for strengthening AHPRA’s anti-racism approach but no mention of the IHRA definition.

On April 24, Special Envoy Segal released the Understanding Antisemitism in Australia handbook.

On May 1, the Health Ministers accepted AHPRA’s report and it was published on AHPRA’s website.

APHRA’s usual practice is to publish communiques on its Board meetings shortly after they occur. Communiques have not been published for the May and June meetings.

Call for Untersteiner sacking
AHPRA declined to supply us with copies of those communiques so it is unclear whether the Board approved the use of the IHRA definition in these meetings.

On May 6, Samuell expressed his frustration with AHPRA in a podcast episode published by “The Israel Connexion”.

During the interview, Samuell said that AZHA had called for Untersteiner’s sacking in its submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

“AHPRA has dropped the ball. Now we’re making a submission to the Royal Commission, calling on the Health Minister to sack Justin Untersteiner for the role that he has played in this,” he said.

‘Antagonistic to Israel’
“We’ve outlined in our submission a large number of failures. For example, there are governance problems in AHPRA. There are board members in AHPRA who are on the public record as being antagonistic to Israel,” Samuell said.

“I know from their own staff, many of whom have been in private communications with me, that they are not taking this matter seriously at all. They’ve breached their social contract with us. [Untersteiner] is not the person that can fix this situation.”

Samuell told Israel Connexion that AZHA had encouraged “practitioners and patients in the health sector to make submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism through [AZHA] website” and was “synthesising the submissions into a discussion paper for the Royal Commission” by applying the IHRA definition.

The result is a “whole of sector submission” developed by applying “social theories about what is going on and what should happen to remedy it.”

MWM is not asserting that any of the public allegations against AHPRA are true. In the absence of responses from AHRPA or Samuell on these matters, we are reporting them in the interests of transparency.

Zionist Healthcare Alliance attacks on AHPRA
Samuell is one of several Zionist health workers who represent the Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance (AZHA).

The AZHA was launched in October last year. It describes itself as “Australia’s first dedicated Zionist healthcare advocacy organisation”.

AZHA’s most vocal member is public affairs officer Sharon Stoliar who helped found AZHA last year.

Ten days after the IHRA definition announcement, on June 27, Stoliar was featured in a major report by The Australian titled “How did hospitals become the front line in the antisemitic onslaught?”.

The report accused AHPRA of ignoring an “unprecedented explosion of antisemitism” and said Australian health care workers were amplifying anti-Jewish hate speech” and deliberating neglecting or harming Jewish patients.

Royal Commission hearsay
Stoliar told The Australian that she hoped to give evidence at the Royal Commission.

Stoliar is quoted describing an incident in which a woman in a Sydney hospital was “left to lie in a pool of blood with no pain relief” while her baby screamed in its cot alongside hers.

She has also claimed that an antisemitic health care worker caused a Jewish person to have a “forced abortion”.

No evidence is provided to support these hearsay claims which Stoliar has repeated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12.

The Australian article has taken on a life of its own being regurgitated in various forms in Australian and Israeli media. The Channel 12 broadcast was reposted on Facebook and Instagram by the Zionist Federation of Australia.

Collectively these posts have triggered a large amount of hate against Australian health workers and precipitated the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs tweet this week.

AHPRA’s response
Rather than responding to our questions, AHPRA supplied MWM with a statement similar to one it has sent to thousands of healthcare workers who signed letters expressing opposition to its adoption of the IHRA definition.

AHPRA appears keen to allay the concerns of its registered health care workers. It emphasises that ”there is no place for racism or discrimination in healthcare”, and that it will deal with complaints on an individual basis. An AHPRA spokesperson provided the following explanation for the sudden change:

“Ahpra had initially not adopted the IHRA definition, as we felt there was insufficient clarity between legitimate commentary and debate regarding the policies and actions of the state of Israel and its elected leaders, and antisemitism. However, the Special Envoy on Antisemitism’s handbook is designed to support use of the definition by distinguishing ‘between antisemitism and legitimate political debate, including on the topic of Israel’.

“It is on that basis that Ahpra will use the IHRA definition as a reference tool where relevant, supported by the ASECA handbook, when considering regulatory responses. As a reference tool, the definition is not legally binding. There are no changes to the National Codes or the guidance that supports them.”

AHPRA’s explanation is surprising. The handbook itself exacerbates concerns with the IHRA definition. For example, Segal’s examples suggest that it is antisemitic to say that Israel is a “racist project” or that Israel is “committing genocide”, views that are widely held by numerous international law experts and humanitarian organisations.

The Gaza genocide continues
Daily, the genocide continues. Israel has murdered thousands of healthcare workers in Gaza and devastated its healthcare system.

Last week, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel demanded that Israel release Gaza paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya who has been imprisoned without charge and tortured by Israel for over 18 months.

Australian health care workers are mobilising and have formed a new national coalition. Yesterday, the Australian Healthcare Alliance 4 Palestine, encompassing hundreds of thousands of registered doctors, nurses and dentists, wrote a letter to AHPRA asking it to “provide full transparency regarding the governance, consultation and decision-making processes” that led to the decision to adopt the IHRA definition.

The Alliance said that health practitioners have “an ethical responsibility to advocate for our patients, our colleagues and the healthcare system” and called on AHPRA to rescind its decision.

Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.

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

This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

One of the oldest tropes in journalism is that it should be balanced; that journalists have a responsibility to present all sides of a given issue with equal weight. This view also holds that appearing to be critical of one side and sympathetic to another amounts to “bias”.

That notion of balance sounds ideal. After all, journalists should be neutral observers who favour nobody, so if anybody feels as though their side is not presented with equal measure, the journalist has somehow failed.

That failure was what Jillian Segal accused the ABC of in her evidence to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion last week. In her evidence, the antisemitism envoy lamented that the ABC’s reporting on Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel”.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• The problem of false balance when reporting on science
• Other Gaza media coverage reports

“It’s the perception of the Jewish community feeling constantly that they are being faced with reporting about the Middle East, about Gaza, and about Israel in a way that paints Israel constantly in a negative light,” she said.

For the country’s supporters, that is understandable. As Segal went on to point out, there has been a “disproportionate” number of stories critical of Israel.

And Liberal MP and prominent member of the Jewish community Julian Leeser told ABC Radio National:

I think the public broadcasters actually have to be prepared to address systemic bias against Israel in their reporting, and I think they need to subject themselves to greater transparency mechanisms as outlined by the envoy.

But the term “balance” implies finding equivalence between the two competing positions. Sometimes journalists cover stories where achieving balance amounts to a serious distortion of what is actually taking place.

Jillian Segal wants ‘independent group’ to examine ABC’s Israel coverage  Video: Guardian Australia

The pitfalls of both-sideism
A standard, if lazy, tactic for avoiding accusations of bias is to give equal space to opponents in an issue, presenting them as equally valid.

If you give five minutes to a vaccine researcher, you must give the same time to a sceptic. It is something journalists sometimes dub “both-sideism”.

The media grappled with that challenge in covering climate change. In the early heated stages of the debate, news organisations would often place a climate sceptic next to a climate scientist in the name of “balance”.

By 2018, the BBC’s news director Fran Unsworth had had enough. She circulated a briefing note that acknowledged, “Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often”.

The briefing went on to say, “Manmade climate change exists: if the science proves it we should report it.” And in a section on balance, the note said:

to achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.“

As journalism academic Jonathan Foster of Sheffield University used to tell his students, “If someone tells you it’s raining and another tells you it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the f—ing window and find out which is true.”

Who has the power?
The conflicts between Israel and its neighbours (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran) are not football matches, and journalists are not referees.

But any journalist thinking about how to fairly cover the crises is likely to spend far more time looking at the human cost of Israeli bombs and tanks, than the impact on Israeli civilians.

That is simply because the greater impact of the conflict is felt outside Israel’s borders.

Any reporting that suggests an equivalence of experience between Israelis suffering Hamas rockets, and the Palestinians in Gaza bearing the weight of the Israeli military assault would be plainly disingenuous. Hardliners on both sides are calling for annihilation of the other, but only one side has tanks, fighter jets and control of food, water and medical supplies over the border.

That raises another journalistic cliche: “holding power to account”. It is rooted in the idea that the media’s job is to expose the impact of power on those who have none.

Israel has indisputably been projecting its might well beyond its borders, and correspondents in the region who failed to cover the consequences on ordinary civilians would be rightly criticised.

None of this is to suggest the experience of Israelis or the government’s arguments should be ignored.

But in a world of competing perspectives, the job of journalists is not to make everyone happy. Their job is to accurately and fairly represent the views of everyone involved and on that score, the ABC has been succeeding.

Imperfect, but largely accurate
The national broadcaster has not been perfect of course. The ombudsman found five breaches of editorial standards (out of more than seven thousand complaints).

Its own editorial director Gavin Fang acknowledged they were far too slow to correct a United Nations report that falsely claimed 14,000 children could die of starvation in Gaza within two days.

In her testimony to the Royal Commission, Jillian Segal conceded the government’s broadcast regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, had not “found a great deal of inaccuracy” in the ABC’s reporting.

But she argued she’s trying to achieve “the more complex, nuanced issues of prioritisation, impartiality and objectivity and balance”.

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

Perhaps she is right. But positive stories explicitly designed to cancel out the negative start to look like propaganda. And that is something journalists should never accept.

Peter Greste is professor of journalism at Macquarie University and the executive director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He also serves as an independent journalist on the Australian Press Council. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under Creative Commons.

Late last year, the British government suppressed a report that contained warnings from its intelligence agencies that climate change could drive mass migration and trigger a nuclear war in Asia.

A copy of the report, obtained by The Times, warned of collapsing ecosystems potentially triggering acts of eco-terrorism, and the possibility of NATO being drawn into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

It said: “Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended.”

• READ MORE: Suppressed climate report warned of mass migration and nuclear war
• New Zealand: Defence assessment on climate change and security released
• Palau’s President warns of rising nuclear anxiety in the Pacific and other Chinese missile test reports

In Australia, a 2022 climate change threat assessment by the Office of National Intelligence was described as “terrifying” by Senator David Pocock.

Similarly to the UK, the Albanese government has refused to release the full report.

A 2018 New Zealand Defence Force assessment declared climate change “one of the most significant security threats of our time, and one that is already having adverse impacts both at home and in New Zealand’s neighbourhood.”

New Zealand’s “neighbourhood” — otherwise known as the South Pacific — is on the frontlines of climate change, with low-lying atoll nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati predicted to be uninhabitable by the end of the century.

Pacific in forefront
Pacific Island nations have been at the forefront of efforts to force the world — particularly the rich world — to act.

Last year’s historic advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which found that countries have a legally binding obligation to address climate change, was initiated by Vanuatu.

The contrast between New Zealand and Australia’s reactions to the court ruling and the existential threat faced by our neighbours, versus their response last week to China’s ballistic missile test which landed in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, is instructive.

Vanuatu Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu has criticised both New Zealand and Australia for continuing with fossil fuel exploration and warned they could find themselves in court on the wrong side of the ICJ ruling.

New Zealand is ranked 44th on the Climate Change Performance Index, down from 28th in 2021. Australia is 56th of the 63 countries (plus the European Union) included in the index.

When it comes to dealing with the existential threat of climate change, both countries are laggards.

But when it comes to updating their military hardware for interoperability with US forces in the new Cold War with China, they’re keen to be seen at the front of the pack.

‘Biggest peacetime increase’
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles has boasted that the country is seeing the “biggest peacetime increase in defence spending in our nation’s history”.

The defence budget is projected to hit A$96.6 billion by 2033, or 3 percent of GDP.

New Zealand has committed to doubling its defence spending from the current 1 percent to 2 percent in the next eight years.

Its recent purchase of five US-built MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, costing NZ$2.6 billion, was made with the expressed intention of making New Zealand’s armed forces interoperable with the US military.

Officially, New Zealand’s only military ally is Australia, but with its commitment to interoperability, regular military secondments, and participation in joint exercises, nuclear-free New Zealand is a card-carrying member of the Western alliance. (Former Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to a NATO conference in Madrid in 2022.)

Both Australia and New Zealand are justifying the billions of dollars being spent on high-end killing machines by hyping up the so-called China threat.

Leaders on both sides of the Tasman were quick to pounce on last week’s ballistic missile test by China as evidence of a growing military threat.

Unacceptable, unwelcome
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said it was unacceptable, unwelcome, and concerning.

“This is an intercontinental ballistic missile test, the second that we’ve seen in recent years, having not had one in the region for 40 years, from China,” RNZ reported him saying.

“We are living in a region that is proudly nuclear free … we don’t want to see increasing militarisation in our region.”

What was left unsaid is that, according to The New York Times, the US tests between five and 10 Minuteman missiles every year, and both New Zealand and Australia are ramping up purchases of military hardware — massively increasing the militarisation of the region.

Australia, a signatory of the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, has three nuclear-powered submarines on order at a cost of more than A$300 billion.

If Prime Minister Luxon was truly concerned about the increasing militarisation of the South Pacific, he would not be expressing interest in New Zealand joining Australia and Fiji in the “Ocean of Peace Alliance” announced last week.

Peace needs climate justice
Following the announcement of Fiji’s first-ever military alliance, the Pacific Elders Group — whose membership includes former heads of state — released a strongly worded statement reiterating its position that climate change is the region’s most urgent concern:

“An Ocean of Peace cannot be built on a narrow security agenda. Peace cannot be separated from climate justice or from the forces that produce insecurity in Pacific lives: climate change, fossil fuel dependence, extractive industries, militarisation, nuclear legacies, gendered violence and the denial of self-determination. These are the challenges that any genuine Pacific peace agenda must confront.”

Sadly, New Zealand and Australia’s actions suggest they are more committed to militarisation than climate action.

Last month, the New Zealand Defence Force announced its first Harpoon missile launch from a P-8A Poseidon aircraft during a joint military exercise with the armed forces of the US, Australia, Canada, and Japan in the Philippine Sea.

The two missiles fired — estimated cost between NZ$3 million to NZ$6 million — were supplied to New Zealand by Australia.

Millions of dollars blown on sinking a decommissioned warship that could have gone to, say, providing half a dozen Pacific Island villages with solar panels, rather than ramping up a new Cold War.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

Once again, the Strait of Hormuz is at the centre of the latest escalation in the war between Iran, the United States and their allies, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog The Listening Post.

The ceasefire collapsed just days after millions of Iranians took to the streets last week to pay homage to the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Hundreds of foreign reporters and social media influencers were granted rare access to Iran to cover the funeral, signalling just how carefully Tehran has been calibrating its media messaging.

• READ MORE: How Iran used Ali Khamenei’s funeral as a political and diplomatic tool
• Tehran teemed with Khamenei mourners, but divisions – and demands for change – remain
• Other war on Iran reports

Listening Post presenter Richard Gizbert says what began as a week of mourning in Iran has “turned into the latest flare-up in the war in the Middle East with US President Donald Trump effectively calling the ceasefire dead”.

His programme explores the spectacle and symbolism of Khamenei’s funeral and how coverage of the supreme leader’s funeral exposed the limits of familiar Western narratives about Iran.

Contributors:
HA Hellyer – senior fellow, Royal United Services Institute
Samira Mohyeddin – host, On The Line Media
Negar Mortazavi – host, The Iran Podcast
Alex Vatanka – senior fellow, Middle East Institute

Khamenei’s funeral                          Video: AJ The Listening Post

On our radar
Türkiye has just hosted the NATO summit, and the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the US president Trump, used the event to project an image of unity and strength between Ankara and Washington.

Elettra Scrivo looks at the images, the messaging and how the coverage has shaped this story.

How Big Food sells ultraprocessed food
Ultraprocessed food is a major part of diets worldwide. These industrially formulated foods are often marketed as nutritious despite growing concerns that these products are contributing to a global health crisis.

The Listening Post’s Nicholas Muirhead looks at how Big Food is shaping the way we see and consume ultraprocessed food.

Featuring:
Marion Nestle – professor, New York University
Christopher Snowdon – head of lifestyle economics, Institute of Economic Affairs
Arun Gupta – doctor and nutritionist

COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein

Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week.

I venture to suggest that it will come to be seen that Schwartz gave seminal evidence which the Commissioner is going to find hard to ignore when she is writing her report; evidence supported yesterday by the compelling testimony of Jewish university peace activist Yasmine Johnson.

Until Schwartz gave her evidence, we had seen testimonies given by members of the Jewish community — some of which can only be described as very troubling in terms of evidence — which sometimes bordered on hysterical.

• READ MORE: Saige England: Call out the Zionist hypocrisy – genociders are settler colonialists on steroids
• Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

But, the elephant in the room?

Were the “attacks” described really attacks of an antisemitic nature,

or were they people venting their anger and outrage at Jews seen to be rusted-on, unquestioning supporters of Israel’s egregious actions in Gaza?

Take the example of a university student in Canberra who just yesterday was reported in the Nine media thus: ”Liat told the Commission she had felt “very physically unsafe” during the long encampment at her university campus … when people would laugh and leer at me and say, ‘Look at the baby killer, look at the genocide supporter’”.

No, that is not pleasant, but the fact is — a fact unchallenged aside from the state of Israel itself and the likes of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) — that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed by the state of Israel and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.

Why the rise in antisemitism?
What was more than significant, is that many of those who gave evidence of alleged antisemitism demonstrated absolutely no introspection. Why had there been a rise in anti-semitism since October 7?

Not because Hamas attacked Israel. No, it was, in many cases people showing their anger, yes, in some instances in a totally misguided way, at Israel’s actions in Gaza. Why did some 300,000 people from all walks of life and all ages, march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a foul, wet and windy day?

The palpable anger by a significant part of the Australian community, including many Jews, at what Israel did in Gaza, and continues to do to this day, is reflected in the sober evidence given at the Royal Commission yesterday by Yasmine Johnson, a co-convener for Students for Palestine and a protest organiser.

Following her evidence, Johnson, who is Jewish, told the media

the idea that campus protests “create a dangerous atmosphere, fear for people, is farcical”.

Antisemitism, anti-genocide conflation
“What we’ve heard,” she said “so far is day after day after day of evidence which conflates legitimate anti-genocide, pro-Palestine activism with genuine antisemitism which exists in our society.”

The earlier mentioned witness Liat, and others like her, may feel uncomfortable about what is being shouted out at her as much as she probably sees posters like “Free Palestine” as confronting and antisemitic, but has Liat — who acts as a  spokesperson for the Australasian Union of Jewish Students — either personally or on behalf of her organisation ever publicly accused Israel of being responsible for war crimes in Gaza, even if not genocide? Almost certainly, not!

And that is the rub.

Might this alleged antisemitism just have had something to do with Jews so visibly parading around with Israeli flags draped across their shoulders, waving Israelis flags at solidarity rallies for Israel, Jewish communal leaders excoriating those who called out Israel for engaging in genocide or starving children, and welcoming the Israeli President as their “national leader”?

Really? I thought we were Australians.

The “average” person could be forgiven for concluding that members of the Jewish community were demonstrating that they identified with and supported Israel.

The question to be asked here is why it is that criticising Israel by Jews is said to make the speaker a self-hating Jew, a “kapo” a “Judenrat” or, as in the case of Schwartz, to even be accused on ABC Radio National as being “anti-Jewish?”

They are shameful, offensive and disgraceful epithets. They are intended to be so.

Not to be ignored in the above is that the likes of a Mark Leibler, the ECAJ, AIJAC, the Zionist Federation of Australia and similar groups see Jews who criticise Israel as a no-go area even if they, falsely, assert that Jews are free to openly express their views about Israel.

It’s simply untrue!

There is the expectation from these quarters that all Jews will, as a matter of solidarity, support Israel as the Zionist/Jewish homeland. With this forked-tongue and double-speak it is no wonder that the sort of slurs and insults which Schwartz described at the Royal Commission are rife in the Jewish community.

A climate of fear
Conversely, those in the Jewish community who might otherwise speak out against Israel fear that they will be subjected to all manner of insults and even the break-down of family relationships.

Given the airing of Schwartz’s evidence, one has to also wonder why there has been total silence from the usually vocal Jewish organisations. Should they not be publicly calling out vilification of fellow-Jews, calling for vilification to be stopped and asking for respect for those Jews who are not Zionists, strident or not.

Proof of the “attitude” in the Jewish community to those who are not at one with supporting Israel is clearly demonstrated by the Australian Jewish News which, just last week, pulled a story attacking those in the Jewish community who attacked their fellow Jews with the the sort of offensive epithets directed at Sarah Schwartz.

My Israel question
I can speak personally to how the Jewish community reacts when Israel or the Israel Lobby comes under scrutiny. Back in 2006, Melbourne University Press published my son Antony Loewenstein’s book My Israel Question. The book flew off the shelves.

The response from the so-called powers-that be in the Jewish community — including a Jewish Federal member of  Parliament in Parliament, even exhorting people not to buy the book — bordered on feral.

Even putting aside the death threats to my son and his then partner, as an example of hate mail — which Schwartz has so clearly shown in her evidence — one early so-called correspondent wrote that he hoped that when the Nazis came to Australia that he and his parents would be the first to be marched into the gas chambers.

Unhinged? Yes!

But as Schwartz spelt out in her evidence at the Royal Commission many in the Jewish community see attacking those who do not support Israel 100 percent as legitimate. And if that extends to thuggery, look no further than the Jewish group the Lions of Zion and their “activities” — an organisation supported by the powers that be in the Jewish community.

Thankfully the JCA has provided an ever-growing forum and voice for Jews who will not remain silent given Israel’s genocide in Gaza and breaches of multiple international laws and conventions.

Let’s not forget, while Israel denies what a slew of scholars, human rights organisations and aid and medical agencies have found — including those learned on genocide, some of whom even live in Israel itself — the facts on the ground speak volumes. We have all seen and read about it.

Israel clearly stands guilty as charged!

Following the passing of Qatar’s Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani at 74 on Sunday, his solidarity with the Palestinian people remains one of the defining legacies of his leadership.

He is being remembered not only as a regional statesman, but also as a steadfast ally of the Palestinian people and the only Arab leader to physically break the crippling siege on the Gaza Strip.

In October 2012, Sheikh Hamad visited the embattled Gaza Strip, six years after Israel imposed its crippling international blockade on the territory, following the 2006 Palestinian elections.

• READ MORE: How Sheikh Hamad revolutionised Arab media through Al Jazeera

Accompanied by his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, and a high-level delegation, the emir bypassed the political isolation imposed on the enclave by Western powers and regional actors, leading to a massive official and popular reception.

The head of Hamas’s diaspora office, Khaled Meshaal, told Al Jazeera that the visit to the Strip meant that “Jerusalem, Gaza and Palestine mourn him”.

“He was the first Arab and Muslim leader to visit Gaza, standing by its side with chivalry and magnanimity, as if officially announcing the breaking of the siege in its darkest circumstances,” Meshaal told Al Jazeera.

“He was intelligent, brave and a man of principles.”

‘Special love for Palestine’
Ahmed al-Sheikh, a senior journalist, Arab affairs commentator and former news director at Al Jazeera Arabic Channel, said the Father Emir had ”a special kind of love for Palestine”.

“Has any other leader in the Arab world done that [visit to Gaza], except Hamad bin Khalifa?” al-Sheikh reflected in a recent interview.

”Why did he go to Gaza? It’s because he saw that everyone around Gaza is neglecting it”, he added.

During that landmark visit, Sheikh Hamad announced an increase in Qatar’s reconstruction grant to the enclave from $254 million to $400 million, laying the foundation for vital housing, infrastructure and healthcare projects that benefited thousands of Palestinians.

His commitment to the Palestinian cause predated the blockade on Gaza. In 1999, Sheikh Hamad became the first Gulf leader to visit the Palestinian territories since 1967, meeting with the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat during a critical political impasse.

According to al-Sheikh, the emir viewed the Palestinian struggle through a deeply personal lens. When former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon besieged Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, the emir was profoundly pained. He told his aides that when Sharon attacked the Muqata’a, it felt as though he was attacking Qatar itself.

His connection to Palestine was coupled with a regret that he had never visited Jerusalem before its occupation in 1967, According to al-Sheikh, that prompted him to commission an extensive three-hour documentary on the holy city to capture its history and identity.

Rather than relying solely on international intervention, he believed in the agency of the Palestinian people and that they were the essential spearhead of their movement.

“You will do the primary action and without this action there can be no liberation,” the emir once told al-Sheikh.

Defying regional consensus
This stance put him frequently at odds with the regional consensus. During Israel’s devastating 2008–2009 war on Gaza, deep divisions emerged among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members over how to respond to the crisis.

Sheikh Hamad called for an emergency Arab summit in Doha, proposing a $250 million reconstruction fund and a maritime corridor to bypass the blockade. He famously expressed his disappointment on live television about the lack of an Arab quorum for the emergency meeting.

“God is sufficient for us and he is the best disposer of affairs.”

Some of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure projects before the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023 were the result of financial pledges made by Sheikh Hamad.

Qatar funded the rehabilitation of vital highways and the flagship Sheikh Hamad City in Khan Younis — a $58 million  public housing project with 53 modern apartment buildings for thousands of low-income families.

Additionally, the Sheikh Hamad Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, which officially opened in April 2019, became the territory’s premier facility for amputees and children with hearing impairments.

Israel erased infrastructure
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has systematically erased much of the infrastructure Qatar helped finance during Sheikh Hamad’s leadership. Satellite imagery from May this year confirmed that Hamad City and other areas in southern Gaza have been wiped from the map.

The Sheikh Hamad Hospital managed to resume its vital services last December, despite suffering direct attacks, severe shortages and the broader collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system. Operating the only CT scanner in northern Gaza, the hospital has even opened a new branch in the south to cope with a 225 percent increase in amputation cases.

Sheikh Hamad Hospital’s continued operations during the ongoing genocide in Gaza remain a tangible remnant of the late emir’s unprecedented efforts in the besieged enclave. His support for Gaza will remain for generations to come.

Mohammad Mansour is a senior journalist of Al Jazeera with a particular focus on Gaza, Palestine and Israel. Before joining Al Jazeera, he held editorial positions at A News in Istanbul, Turkey; TRT World; and TRT Arabic in Gaza. Mansour won the 2016 Media Freedom Award for Best TV Report in Gaza, Palestine.

I loathe hypocrisy. I am sure you do too. So let’s state this plainly. The genociders have employed hypocrisy as a defence.

It is the weakest of all defences. It is the wall that crumbles.

It is NOT antisemitic to stand against the state of supremacy and genocide, the Zionist state. It is not anti-semitic to state that the state should be dismantled.

• READ MORE: Antisemitic, really? Jewish leader speaks out on Royal Commission hypocrisy
• Saige England: Praise for Australia’s Jewish Council but NZ’s council is a hasbara propaganda campaign
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

It is not antisemitic to state that every single massacre of Palestinians — their forced exile and the attempted extermination of all Palestinians, is wrong.

It is not antisemitic to demand a different state, one where all Palestinians have the right of return and where the land — from the river to the sea — can be shared.

The vast majority of Zionists in the world are not Jewish, they are born-mad-again people who identify as Christian and who have adopted a violent notion that violence is fine as long as it is directed against Palestinians.

Settler colonialism on steroids. Again.

Starving Indigenous people
Like the history of colonialism everywhere — an Empire killing and starving Indigenous people. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the US, Australia, New Zealand — the Palestinians have been ground down and cast into dust.

The only sensible stance is to stand against the carnage and to say never again means never again for everyone.

I know many Jews who stand against the fascism of Zionism. The Bund was a whole movement of Jews who stood for this.

Once again, and again and again, I call down my Jewish ancestors in standing with them and with all humanitarians who support the rights of Palestinians to live on the land, from the river, to the sea, free of apartheid, free of exile, free of the fear of snipers and bombs.

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

The only positive thing about the Iran war heating up again is that Lindsey Graham won’t be around to enjoy it.

The bloodthirsty South Carolina senator breathed his last on Saturday, succumbing to what his office describes as “a brief and sudden illness” after a political career dedicated to promoting wars, airstrikes and proxy conflicts at every possible opportunity.

People have long poked fun at the hypocrisy of Lindsey Graham living as an obvious closeted gay man in a political party with a virulently anti-LGBTQ platform. I personally have always found Graham’s sexual attraction to men a lot less interesting than his sexual attraction to acts of mass military slaughter.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

Ever since the death of Graham’s dear friend John McCain, nobody on Capitol Hill has been able to match his gleeful enthusiasm for the shredding of human bodies using high-priced war machinery.

Wherever there was any debate about dropping bombs, launching missiles, toppling foreign governments, arming proxy forces, or imposing starvation sanctions, you could always count on Lindsey Graham to be the first and loudest voice arguing in favour of more death and destruction.

Graham has personally taken credit for persuading President Trump to begin the war with Iran. In the months leading up to his unexpected demise, the senator had advocated for direct US military interventionism in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had just returned from a trip to Kyiv promoting the US proxy war against Russia.

He was literally pushing for more war and military expansionism until the very end of his life.

All the world’s worst people are publicly expressing their grief about the loss of their beloved war slut, from Trump to Benjamin Netanyahu to Itamar Ben-Gvir to Tom Cotton to Mike Huckabee. Meanwhile, everyone who’s not a warmongering psychopath is having a splendid day.

Well, at least Lindsey Graham is dead                   Video/audio: Caitlin Johnstone

Of course we’re seeing imperial narrative managers like Piers Morgan wagging their fingers and chiding their audiences not to speak ill of the dead, but the hell with them. We’re not doing that.

JUST IN – Lindsey Graham and Trump pose together with a “Make Iran Great Again” hat, signed by Trump. pic.twitter.com/656ctZp52M

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 5, 2026

Politeness is not more important than Lindsey Graham’s victims. The liberal desire for propriety and nice feelings does not outweigh the importance of naming and shaming Graham’s frenetic scramble to murder as many human beings as he possibly could throughout his evil, miserable life.

Sara and I grieve with the American people over the loss of our dear friend, Senator Lindsey Graham.

In our recent meeting, I said, “Lindsey is a great friend of Israel and a cherished friend of mine. We have no better friend than Lindsey.”

Lindsey understood that the security… pic.twitter.com/JG2mUUAfFT

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) July 12, 2026

Lindsey Graham is dead, and it is good that he is dead. May his omnicidal ideology soon join him in the arms of the cold, cold ground. May the insane, insatiable god he worshipped cease to gain recognition on this planet.

Lindsey Graham is dead. At least that’s one good thing. No matter what else happens today, they can’t take that away from us.

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

By Stephanie Tran in Sydney

Giving evidence to the Royal Commission last week, Australian Antisemitism Envoy Jillian Segal lamented that reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza has “created an impression of great negativity about Israel”.

“It’s the perception of the Jewish community feeling constantly that they are being faced with reporting about the Middle East, about Gaza, and about Israel in a way that paints Israel constantly in a negative light,” she said.

Segal said there was a “disproportionate” number of stories critical of Israel.

• READ MORE: Jillian Segal falsely claimed Gaza death toll is ‘grossly inflated’. Here are the facts
• ABC and SBS reject antisemitism envoy’s call for ‘oversight’ committee to vet Israel coverage
• What ceasefire? People still being killed and Gaza still under siege
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

Sad for everyone
“There are going to be examples on both sides of activities in a war, which all you know is very sad for everyone, involving you know unfortunate loss of life. But it’s the preponderance of the focus … on the behaviour of Israel, as opposed to the behaviour of Hamas.”

Counsel assisting the commission challenged Segal’s criticism of the public broadcasters ABC and SBS, noting that since October 7, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) had not found the ABC or SBS to have breached broadcasting codes in relation to their coverage.

Segal conceded that ACMA “haven’t found a great deal of inaccuracy”.

“I do concede that they haven’t found a great deal of inaccuracy, but it’s the more complex, nuanced issues of prioritisation, impartiality, and objectivity and balance that I’m concerned to achieve,” she said.

Segal argued that the public broadcasters should devote more coverage to “positive stories” about Israel.

“We should find a way where they also run positive stories,” she said.

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

SBS too
Discussing reports that Israel was starving children in Gaza, Segal described them as “a very negative story” and questioned whether broadcasters should seek to balance such reporting with stories portraying Israel more positively.

Segal said that balance was “very complicated” but “if you wanted balance after that negative story should there have been a very positive story about what was positively in the Middle East to feed children?”

She said there should be “scepticism in relation to some information emanating from Gaza” and called on the ABC factcheck UN reports and “not just report it as if it was undoubted fact, the first item and the news”.

Segal also criticised the SBS’s reporting on the death toll in Gaza.

“The statistics have now been reported as having not distinguished between combatants and non-combatants, and therefore were inflated, but my point is that they were put out there as statistics by a Health Ministry, as we understand health industries being objective, organised structures within part of Hamas,” she said.

Monitor public broadcasters, adopt IHRA definition
Segal proposed forming an “independent” committee to monitor the ABC and SBS.

“That it is a committee that is appointed without the community, as long as they are people who are aware of the and understanding of modern day antisemitism and modern day hatreds.”

She said the existing Ombudsman and ACMC were “without teeth” as they do “not have the powers to impose or require reports to be taken offline”.

Segal urged the public broadcasters to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

“It would enable the reporters to better understand the conflation because it would be ‘are you seeking to make the point so much that Israel is different in its fighting at the war to other wars that have been fought by Australia, by America etc.?’ … So it would just help them in understanding it,” she said.

ABC editorial director Gavin Fang said the broadcaster had deliberately chosen not to adopt the definition because of concerns it would undermine their independence.

“The IHRA definition, the examples in the definition in particular, are contested,” Fang said.

“It is important for us to maintain not just our independence, but the perception of independence … adopting a definition that’s contested would not help us with both the perception of independence and our independence more broadly.”

Amanda Wicks, SBS’s director of news and current affairs, said the broadcaster neither “accepts nor rejects” the definition.

Wicks said SBS recognised the IHRA definition as “an important definition recognised by many”, but said the broadcaster did not determine for itself whether conduct was antisemitic.

“We are only ever reporting on antisemitism when it is determined to be such by police, the legal system [or] the community itself,” she said.

“We’re never in a position where something happens [and] we determine as SBS that that is antisemitic.”

The outcome of the US and Israel war against Iran looks likely to come down to a test of wills, says a local expert — with Iran appearing unlikely to be the first to blink.

The fragile ceasefire between the two sides has collapsed, with the US carrying out scores of strikes and Iran hitting back at US-aligned targets in the region.

Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at the University of Otago, told RNZ Morning Report today it was a “precarious situation” in which both sides wanted an agreement that would stop the fighting, but on incompatible terms.

• READ MORE: Concern for renewed war in Iran as US attacks military, civilian targets
• The Gulf tollbooth that demands real recognition – Iran closes the Strait on cue
• Other war on Iran reports

“He said the memorandum between the two sides included a requirement for Iran to “make its best efforts to … ensure the free passage of commercial traffic” through the Strait of Hormuz.

“The Iranians have interpreted that as giving them leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and they believe that was a recognition by the United States,” Dr Patman explained.

“The United States disagrees, I think much of the international community disagrees with that interpretation, but the Iranians take the view that we’re not going back to the status quo.

Illegally attacked by US
“They take the view they were illegally attacked by the United States. That resulted in them asserting themselves over the Strait of Hormuz and also, as we’ve seen, retaliating against the Gulf States.

“But they’re not going to give up what they see as the leverage they obtained as a result of being attacked by the United States and Israel.”

While the US could “apply ever greater amounts of military power”, Dr Patman said its track record using such strategy was “not promising”.

“It was the very thing which gave the Iranians leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and enabled them to attack US bases in Gulf states. So applying more of the same doesn’t look like it’s going to bring the Iranians to heel. And the Iranians believe time is on their side.”

Dr Patman said despite its power — particularly over the UN Security Council — the US made a “profound strategic misjudgment” in attacking Iran, and should not expect any agreement which ends the war to be “optimal”.

“At the outset, it expected the conflict would be over within four to five days. The regime would collapse and Iran could be reshaped perhaps on a democratic basis.

“If anything, that attack has empowered and resuscitated the regime in Iran. And there’s little sign that hardline elements within Iran are going to back down in the near future.”

This story was first published on

Forty-eight hours ago, I wrote: “Iran doesn’t need to close the strait. It needs only to demonstrate, periodically, that it can.”

Today, Iran did.

On Saturday night, the IRGC Navy struck a vessel it says was running an unauthorised route with its tracking systems switched off — “struck and brought to a halt,” in Tehran’s words.

• READ MORE: Iran attacks Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar after US bombings
• Lim Tean: The Hormuz bone – why Iran will not let go
• Other Lim Tean articles

Hours later came the declaration: the Strait of Hormuz is closed “until further notice,” and until “the end of US interference in this region.”

Washington’s response was immediate — a THIRD round of strikes in a week, hitting radars, missile stores, drone launch sites. And still the declaration stands.

Understand what you are watching. This is not a wall going up. This is the tollbooth demanding recognition.

This is Iran’s third closure declaration since February. Each one follows the same grammar: a strike on a “non-compliant” vessel, a proclamation, a spike in oil prices and war risk premiums — and then, underneath the thunder, negotiation.

Safe passage ‘mechanisms’
Even as the IRGC announced the closure, Iranian and Omani ministers were meeting in Muscat to discuss “mechanisms for the safe passage of ships.”

Qatar and Pakistan are working the phones. Oman has floated a draft: free navigation through a southern corridor in Omani waters, while the northern corridor — through Iranian waters — requires Tehran’s prior approval.

Now, your instinct will be to say: fine — then every ship simply takes the free Omani route, and Iran’s leverage evaporates.

Look at the map before you believe that.

The strait is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. There is no southern corridor beyond the reach of Iranian shore batteries, drones and fast boats sitting minutes across the water.

And look at where this month’s strikes actually landed: off Limah. Off Khor Fakkan. Nine nautical miles east of Oman. Every one of them in or near the very waters the proposal calls “free”.

The corridor is not safe because a document says so. It is safe only for as long as Iran chooses not to fire — and Iran has just demonstrated, three times in a week, that it can choose otherwise whenever it likes.

Not freedom of navigation
A passage that exists by the coastal power’s forbearance is not freedom of navigation. It is a licence — revocable at will.

And here is what 30 years in marine insurance taught me: the underwriters in London know this. War risk premiums do not price the legal regime. They price Iranian CAPABILITY — and the capability survives every settlement, every corridor, every ceasefire.

The day Iran wants leverage in the nuclear talks, one projectile anywhere near that “free” corridor resets the entire insurance market overnight. No cover, no cargo, no voyage. The closure enforces itself.

So read the Omani proposal again, because it is the entire game in one sentence. One lane requiring Tehran’s prior approval — and one lane requiring Tehran’s continued restraint.

Either way, Iran’s supervisory role over the world’s most important energy chokepoint gets written into the architecture of the settlement itself: formalised, internationalised, permanent.

Three rounds of American strikes have destroyed boats, radars and launchers. They have not touched THAT.

Every escalation has followed the same sequence: demonstration, declaration, negotiation. The bombs fall, the boats burn, and Iran’s position at the table grows stronger — because its leverage was never the boats. It was the geography.

And geography, as I said, does not negotiate.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

COMMENTARY: By Cathy Peters

In a move that’s been largely unreported in Australia and New Zealand, Hamas announced earlier this week that it would dissolve its governing Emergency Committee with the resignation of its acting leader.

This move has been recognised as an attempt to hasten the transfer of administrative authority to the Trump-appointed Board of Peace’s National Committee for the Management of Gaza (NCAG), a body of Palestinian technocrats, assembled and waiting in Cairo to manage public administration, security, recovery and transition throughout the Gaza Strip as part of the agreed ceasefire plan.

However, despite being established in January this year, the NCAG has not yet been given access to enter Gaza by the Board of Peace or Israel.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism Envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS Israel bias, wants to vet media
• Other Gaza “ceasefire” reports

Trump’s controversial Board of Peace predictably dismissed the Hamas move, stating that the NCAG is not yet in a position to take on this role while Hamas retains control of weapons. Hamas maintains that while Israel is still killing Palestinians, it will not disarm.

Nine months since the Gaza ceasefire and Trump’s 20-point peace plan of October 2025, conditions throughout the Strip have remained unlivable and deadly for Palestinians, with more than 1000 killed by Israeli forces and more than 3500 wounded.

Parents stay awake all night in their tents to stop rats feeding on their children.

The amount of humanitarian aid is far short of what is required, and there is a trickle of medical evacuations despite some 16,500 Palestinians needing urgent medical transfer out of Gaza.

A Board of Inaction
The UN Security Council supported the establishment of the Board of Peace in November last year, noting that it would be temporary and transitional, although Trump subsequently declared it would address other world conflicts beyond Gaza.

The composition of the Board of Peace Executive and the Gaza Executive Board includes a number of Trump’s leadership team, plus other Republican operatives, wealthy US businessmen and real estate magnates, as well as Tony Blair.

• Donald Trump – Chairman for life
• Marco Rubio – US Secretary of State
• Jared Kushner – US presidential advisor and son-in-law
• Steve Witkoff – US Special Envoy to the Middle East
• Tony Blair – Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• Marc Rowan – CEO of Apollo Global Management
• Ajay Banga – President of the World Bank Group
  

The Gaza Executive Board includes all of the above plus various international diplomats and intelligence officials and representatives from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE and more Republican government appointees, Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and former Trump campaign adviser, and Robert Gabriel, US Deputy National Security Advisor.

According to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803, this body has UN support to “set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” until the Palestinian Authority has “satisfactorily reformed”. It also authorised the Board to deploy a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in Gaza; however, this has not occurred.

Israel has moved some of the anti-Hamas Palestinian militias it’s been arming and funding for three years now into the area it has occupied behind the yellow line. These various militias, led by factional gangs, drug lords and criminals, pose additional threats to Hamas disarming and the transition of power to a Palestinian-led reconstruction committee and the ultimate withdrawal of the IDF.

Yellow and Orange Lines

The Israeli-defined ceasefire Yellow Line, according to Israel’s legal NGO Gisha, pushes more than two million people into less than half of the Strip’s territory, exacerbating unbearable overcrowding that is harming public health, including outbreaks of disease and infestation of rats and other pests.

Israel’s seizure of such vast areas also prevents Gaza residents from returning to their homes and lands. Most of Gaza’s agricultural lands lie east of the Yellow Line, meaning they are within areas controlled by Israel. Continued denial of access for farmers to their lands prevents the rehabilitation of vital food sources.

From March 2025, Israel instituted the Orange Line, a line that delineates almost 48 percent of Gaza’s land mass where any international organisations are prohibited from moving without prior coordination with Israeli authorities. Gisha reports that this orange line is now a new border that has expanded the area that Israel now directly controls.

While negotiations have stalled for 9 months on the initial implementation of the ceasefire agreement, the IDF, following on from Netanyahu’s call in May, has now occupied almost 70 percent of Gaza, with the yellow cement perimeter markers defining an ever-shrinking area where 2.1 million war-wounded and dispossessed Palestinians are helplessly surviving.

Remote-controlled machine guns
Everyone in Gaza is constantly monitored by drones, and now occupying the eastern perimeter of this dystopian landscape are 23 massive military cranes equipped with remote-controlled machine guns and high-tech surveillance cameras inside the Israeli IDF-defined Yellow Line.

Gaza journalist Tamar Nahed posted this description of Israel’s latest killing apparatus,

“These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound … it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times.”

In the first week of July, the Board of Peace declared that there was no role for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, which is a continuation of the Israeli ban on this aid organisation, which has supported Palestinians with essential humanitarian and educational aid in Gaza since 1948.

This announcement negates the Charter of the United Nations, international law principles and fundamental human rights standards.

Shelters or camps?
Despite the Board’s apparent refusal to allow the Palestinian committee of bureaucrats (NCAG) into Gaza, the Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom just reported on plans aimed at relocating Palestinian residents into barbed wire fenced designated areas. This will allow the IDF to “deepen its grip on areas outside of the yellow line”.

“Surviving Palestinians will be herded into fenced ‘humanitarian shelters’ policed by foreign forces,” as reported by Israel Hayom on July 2.

Images of a camp that’s been described as a concentration camp have emerged in Tel Al-Sultan, an area near Rafah where a pilot project of “humanitarian shelters” will be established. Civilians will be channelled into Tel Al-Sultan, which was a densely populated area of Rafah from which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ordered to flee in April last year.

This image of stark, freshly flattened land surrounded by barbed wire fences and covered with masses of metal box shelters and no evidence of any permanent cement structures (as directed by Israel) appears to be a horrific precursor to

a very grim future for Palestinians in Gaza.

It recalls Israel Defence Minister Katz’s plan of a year ago of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where the goal was to screen people before they were allowed to enter to ensure they were not Hamas and then refuse any exits except to third countries.

Legal immunity
The Board of Peace convened in Cyprus at the end of June for 3 days to “reset” after “the Iran war has completely shifted the attention in the last several months,” according to an official source. It sought to address the funding shortfalls, logistical delays and security challenges.

One of the more controversial draft resolutions was the Board’s plan to grant legal immunity to its members, contractors, and security forces; therefore

shielding the whole enterprise from potential legal proceedings.

As reported widely, human rights lawyers are highly critical of this proposal, including Palestinian American lawyer and academic, Noura Erakat: “They are basically saying there’s no external oversight, including applicable international law regarding occupation. It’s creating a legal system unto itself.”

At the same time, the IDF has reportedly called for fighting to resume as senior officers in the IDF claim that Hamas’ military wing is rebuilding.

Hamas has maintained that it will only disarm under the auspices of the Palestinian NCAG and when Phase 1 of the ceasefire agreement is achieved, which includes the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed positions, full implementation of humanitarian measures and a complete end to Israel’s military attacks.

The nightmare on the ground in Gaza for Palestinians continues. The machinations of Trump’s Board of Peace appear to be

stymying any chance for genuine reconstruction of Gaza

led by Palestinians for Palestinians. The available evidence at this point is that the 1000-day-plus Israeli genocide in Gaza continues apace behind the veneer of Trump’s “peace” plan and the continuing indifference of world powers

On October 9, 2023, just after the State of Israel began its ongoing genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, Sarah Cotte, a French-Ethiopian student at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London gave a speech at a rally organised by the SOAS Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society.

Her speech was “expressing support for the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against occupation and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state”, as the Defend the SOAS 2 website explains.

The speech was filmed on a phone and shared online, and, in response, the vicious and vindictive pro-Israeli lobbying group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), scouring the internet for dissent, shared the video and tagged the Metropolitan Police.

• READ MORE: How were the Filton 4 sentenced for terrorism when they weren’t convicted of terrorism?
• Other Palestine protest reports

This led, in January 2024, to Sarah being arrested in a dawn raid on her home, on the basis that she had committed a crime under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act for “inviting support for a proscribed organisation”, which is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

It took another 13 months for the Metropolitan Police to formally charge Sarah, and, on the same day, another SOAS student was also arrested on suspicion of an offence under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, although they have not been charged.

Together, however, they are known as “the SOAS 2″.

On June 22, two years and nine months since Sarah made her speech, her trial began at the Old Bailey, with the prosecution alleging that her speech on October 9, 2023 “intentionally or recklessly” encouraged support for Hamas.

Disgraceful broadened proscription
Crucially, although the military wing of Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government in 2001 (ignoring the fact that it is a legitimate resistance movement to illegal occupation and oppression), it was not until December 2021 that then-foreign secretary Priti Patel, an ardent Zionist, broadened the proscription to encompass the whole of Hamas, which, disgracefully, enabled an entire civilian government, and everyone who worked for it, to be regarded as terrorists.

In her closing remarks after the week-long trial, the defence barrister, Margo Munro Kerr, “reminded the jury that Ms Cotte’s speech was completely legal and that protecting solidarity with Palestine is ‘an absolute necessity in a democratic society’”, as the Morning Star described it.

A spokesperson for Defend the SOAS 2 told the newspaper, “This trial has never been about justice; it is about intimidation. The Terrorism Act 2000 is being deployed by a Zionist-supporting Labour government precisely as it was intended: to systematically criminalise anti-imperialists and silence solidarity with liberation movements.

“While Israeli war criminals enter Britain fresh from committing genocide in Gaza without a glance from the police, a young woman is dragged through the courts for speaking the truth.

“Sarah did not break under the prosecution’s pressure, and neither will we.”

On July 8, after failing to reach a verdict, the jury was dismissed, and a retrial was scheduled for September 14.

Sarah told Socialist Worker that, as the newspaper described it, her trial was “part of a broader crackdown on the Palestine movement and our civil liberties”.

‘Repressing’ Palestine movement
As she described it, “The state has no choice but to repress the Palestine movement”, because it “has politicised so many young people in the past two years.”

As the Morning Star added, she “explained the state has a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it is targeting direct actionists such as the Filton 25 activists and the Brize Norton 6, but it is also trying to criminalise activists for speaking out against genocide.”

Speaking outside the court, Sarah told supporters, “We know that we are on the side of justice. We are on the side of liberation. We are on the side of people who fight back, people who strive for a better world, people who want to build a different system.

“The British state is on the side of terrorism, it’s on the side of apartheid, it’s on the side of colonialism, it’s on the side of imperialism.”

As with the case of Moog 4 — activists facing a retrial for direct action against an arms factory supplying weapons for the genocide, after the jury failed to reach a verdict — and as happened most prominently with the Filton 6, activists who took direct action against an Elbit Systems facility in Bristol in August 2024, and were acquitted of the main charge against them in February this year, the government, with the support of complicit lawyers and judges, refuses to accept defeat.

When jurors are unable to convict, or choose not to, on the basis of their consciences, the government keeps hammering away until it gets the result that it wants; in the case of the Filton 6, notoriously, that meant securing a conviction by the jury on lesser charges at the retrial, followed by the judge grafting a “terrorism connection” onto their conviction at the sentencing phase.

This is not justice, and it is to be hoped that it will backfire, with jurors becoming ever more wary of convicting defendants at all, as they recognise that they are not being allowed to exercise their fundamental rights to take decisions based on the merits of the cases before them, but are being manipulated in a toxic politically-biased charade, which is about defending a foreign country committing a genocide, and defending the rights of its arms companies to contribute to, and profit from that genocide.

The activists have true justice on their side; their opponents have only complicity in the most monstrous crimes of our lifetimes.

George Speight — a former coup frontman in Fiji — is calling on the perpetrators of the country’s past political upheavals to confess.

The ex-convict also described the idea of a common identity for the country’s citizens as “flawed” and said iTaukei (Indigenous) views must not be ignored.

Speight made the comments in a submission to Fiji’s Constitutional Review Commission this week, after spending 24 years in a maximum-security jail for treason following the racist 2000 coup.

• READ MORE:  Fiji 2000 coup leader George Speight granted presidential pardon
• Fiji’s Jo Nata reflects on the 2000 coup: ‘We let the racism genie out of the bottle’
• Coup coup land: the press and the putsch in Fiji — David Robie
• FIJI: I was just PR consultant — Jo Nata
• USP 2000 coup student journalism archive
• Other George Speight coup reports

During his submission to the government-backed panel on Thursday, he slammed the 2013 Constitution and said the immunity provision should be removed.

“The clause is unfair… If you want redemption, you have to confess,” he said, adding that Fiji could not achieve genuine reconciliation without first acknowledging past wrongdoing.

Quoting from Proverbs, he said those who admitted their crimes would find mercy, while those who tried to hide would never prosper.

“I have served my time and I don’t feel any malice towards anyone,” he said.

Sweeping immunity
The sweeping immunity provisions have protected those involved in past military and political coups from criminal prosecution and civil liability.

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

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

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

The failed businessman pleaded guilty to treason after the unsuccessful coup and received the death penalty, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.

However, he was granted a presidential pardon and released from prison on 19 September 2024.

Indigenous views
Speight condemned the concept of a common name for the people, an issue that has sparked widespread debate in Fiji.

In April, the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC), the apex indigenous body in Fiji, told the Commission that the term “Fijian” should be exclusively reserved for the iTaukei (indigenous) population.

The GCC’s proposal prompted a backlash from political parties, civil society groups and human rights organisations across the country.

Chaudhry, still the Fiji Labour Party leader, told RNZ Pacific Waves at the time that the GCC’s call was “racially divisive”.

“We [the Labour Party] are opposed to that idea and we’ve made it very clear that there can be only one nationality in the nation,” the veteran politician said.

However, Speight told the commission the idea was fundamentally wrong.

“I understand the principle behind it, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it’s flawed. It makes people second-guess something so special and so unique and God-given, their ethnic identity, unless we fix the justice element,” he said.

“All of the different ethnic groups in our country can’t live together very long, because it’s an unfair society.”

‘Uniqueness encouraged’
“The Bill of Rights is great, it covers everybody, no problem. But each ethnic group has its desire to continue with its uniqueness, and it must be encouraged, but not at the expense of the greater good,” he said.

Speight also told the CRC that iTaukei views, including those of the iTaukei Land Trust Board, should not be ignored.

“Those voices have to be heard, the process of hearing those voices and accommodating the issues brought up must never and forever going forward be labelled as racist anymore because they’re not, with respect.”

“Because iTaukei, when they get up and speak, it has been a common practice to label it all as racist, and that’s not the case. No one should feel threatened, no one should feel edited, no one should feel uncertain, because level heads will prevail,” Speight said.

“Those that push the agenda that iTaukei issues are not good for the future of this country and should not be addressed specifically, I ask that they reconsider and work together with the iTaukei community.”

Speight also told the Commission that although the government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a “necessary arm of the process of moving forward”, he had chosen not to appear before it.

‘Doesn’t have teeth’
“I just feel that it doesn’t have the teeth or the mandate to go all the way to actually fix things… until [the immunity clause is removed], truth and reconciliation in my mind is premature,” he said.

“I’m grateful to be here, grateful for the opportunity of the good lord in heaven, and I’m grateful to the government today, that saw fit to release me.”

The Rabuka-led coalition government wants to amend the 2013 Constitution before the upcoming general elections, having set up the independent commission in March to consult widely on the issue.

This story was first published on

A “lock out” incident in Honiara last year barring Pacific journalists from an Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese press conference is among several events “undercutting” media freedom that have led to a new campaign by the Australian journalists’ union MEAA.

The incident happened during the Pacific Islands Forum summit in the Solomon Islands in September 2025 and sparked widespread media condemnation.

Albanese’s political team barred local journalists reporting from Pacific outlets from the conference, only allowing Australian journalists access.

“As Prime Minister Albanese entered the room, the door was immediately locked,” reported the Solomon Star newspaper at the time. “Only journalists from Australia were granted access denying regional and local media outlets from participating or asking questions.”

Now this incident and others in Australia “undercutting press freedom and the public’s right to know by restricting access to and targeting journalists who they don’t like” has resulted in a pushback campaign from the MEAA.

The campaign brief with guidelines states:
There is a growing trend of politicians undercutting press freedom and the public’s right to know by restricting access to and targeting journalists who they don’t like.

In 2025, Anthony Albanese gave a press conference in the Solomon Islands. His team barred local journalists reporting from Pacific outlets from the conference, only allowing Australian journalists access.

In early 2026, One Nation candidate in the byelection for the Victorian state seat of Nepean, Darren Hercus, refused to speak to a reporter who works for the ABC due to disagreeing with the broadcaster’s coverage.

During the Farrer byelection in May, One Nation barred another ABC journalist from a press conference.

After threatening to defund the ABC and shut down the SBS, Pauline Hanson verbally abused Guardian Australia journalist Sarah Martin on several occasions including on a live broadcast of her National Press Club address.

Local Councils, Hawkesbury City Council in NSW and Mornington Peninsula Shire Council in Victoria have declared blacklists on journalists working for local papers The Hawkesbury Gazette and Somerville Times & Peninsula Local. This act, which has gone largely unchallenged, has left communities without the local council reporting and scrutiny they deserve and rely on.

It is up to us to hold the line
We talk a lot about the importance of freedom of the press to democracy and to the public’s right to know. We also talk about it as a workplace right for journalists to be able to safely do our jobs.

The truth is, no one will give us these rights or protect them on our behalf. Employers, politicians, and courts will always be susceptible to other interests and influences. It’s the responsibility and power of working journalists alone to protect press freedom and public interest journalism.

When one of us is attacked with impunity, it sets a new standard of behaviour that will have impacted us all. That is why we must work together to draw a line and collectively hold it.

How we can hold the line
When you go to a press conference for someone known to be hostile to press freedom:

Speak to your colleagues from other workplaces in the press pack about what threats might come your way and how you can have each other’s backs. Offer support and ask for it too.

When a colleague following a line of questioning is abused, threatened or stonewalled by someone seeking to avoid valid scrutiny:

Don’t let it slide.

Pick up their question and pursue it until it is answered.

Ask the spokesperson/talent why they are avoiding scrutiny on the topic.

Ask them why they think it is acceptable to abuse a journalist at work.

When colleagues are barred from press conferences:
Call for them to be let in.

Get agreement among the press pack to lower cameras and collectively turn your backs on the talent until they agree to basic press freedom principles.

If the group isn’t ready to do this action due to fear of employer retribution, call the barred journalist and facilitate their line of questioning. Debrief with the group about how we can build up worker strength to withstand employer and politician divide-and-conquer tactics.

After an incident occurs:
Debrief with affected colleagues around you.

Call your union delegate, organiser or MEAA Member Central.

If abuse or harassment has occurred, speak to the host or venue about it. Under Workplace Health and Safety legislation, many of these venues share an obligation to mitigate risks to the health and safety of workers and other people in the venue. In some jurisdictions, unions have a right to prosecute for breaches of these obligations.

Campaign republished from Australia’s Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance website.

Former US Vice-President Mike Pence wants Donald Trump to “finish the job” in the Strait of Hormuz.

After 130 days of war that failed to reopen it for a single day, a shipping lawyer must explain to the Pence who actually rules the Strait.

It isn’t CENTCOM. It is a committee room in London.

• READ MORE: US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Vessels transit Hormuz despite renewed fighting between US and Iran
• Other War on Iran reports

Mike Pence declared this week: “If the Iran deal is over, President Trump should unleash the Armed Forces of the United States to finish the job: destroy their nuclear and missile programmes, end support for terrorist proxies and restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Finish the job. Consider the phrase. It implies the job was ever within America’s power to finish — that somewhere in the arsenals of the United States there exists a munition capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

There isn’t. There never was. The past 130 days have proven it beyond any argument, and the fact that Pence has not absorbed the lesson tells you how little the American political class understands about the war it started — and how catastrophically ill-advised Trump has been by the men around him.

What the bombs couldn’t do
Let us recall the record, because the record is merciless.

On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched their grand aerial campaign against Iran. Washington called it Operation Epic Fury. Iran answered by closing the Strait.

The United States then imposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, struck hundreds of targets, and deployed the full theatrical repertoire of American power. Thirteen American service members came home in coffins. More than 7000 people died across the region.

And the Strait? The Strait remained closed.

Tanker traffic through the world’s most vital energy chokepoint collapsed by more than 90 percent. Some 360 vessels sat stranded on either side of the passage.

Eight of the world’s largest container lines abandoned the Gulf entirely and sent their ships around the Cape of Good Hope, as if Suez and Hormuz had never been cut, as if we had returned to the age of sail.

That is the “job” Pence wishes to finish. Four months of the most intensive American military operations since Iraq did not restore freedom of navigation for a single day. Only a negotiated settlement — the Islamabad Memorandum of June 17, brokered by Pakistan, not won by CENTCOM — briefly cracked the Strait open.

And when that truce collapsed this week, with Iran striking commercial vessels and Trump declaring the ceasefire over, the Strait slammed shut again within hours.

The bombs opened nothing. The diplomats opened it briefly. The bombs are now guaranteeing it stays closed. This is the arithmetic Pence cannot count.

The judge who actually rules the strait
Here is what Pence, and evidently Trump’s advisers, have never understood: the Strait of Hormuz is not governed from Washington, or even from Tehran. It is governed from London, from the unglamorous committee rooms of the marine insurance market.

I spent decades in international shipping law, across Iran, Indonesia, Ukraine and half the maritime world, and I can tell you that no force on earth moves a merchant vessel that its insurers have abandoned.

Every commercial ship afloat carries three layers of insurance. There is Hull and Machinery cover — H&M — insuring the vessel itself, an asset worth $100 million or more for a modern VLCC. There is Protection and Indemnity cover — P&I — insuring against third-party liabilities: pollution, crew death and injury, wreck removal, cargo claims.

And there is Cargo insurance, covering the value of the goods themselves — and a laden supertanker’s crude can today be worth nearly as much as the ship that carries it.

All three carry war risk exclusions. War, mines, drones, missiles — none of it is covered under standard terms. To sail into a zone of conflict, an owner must purchase separate War risk cover, and that cover is switched on and off by the Joint War Committee of the London market, which maintains the list of designated high-risk areas.

When the JWC lists an area, premiums explode, cover becomes voyage-by-voyage, renewable in seven-day windows, cancellable on notice.

When underwriters lose confidence entirely, cover simply evaporates — and a ship without insurance does not sail. Its lenders forbid it. Its charterers refuse it. Its flag state warns against it.

Now observe what actually happened in this war. Within 48 hours of the February strikes — before Iran had laid a single mine, before the IRGC had struck a single tanker — the war risk market had already shut the Strait. Insurers terminated existing policies. The Joint War Committee designated the entire Persian Gulf.

Premiums that stood at 0.25 percent of hull value surged past 1 percent, then to several percent — for a single transit. On a $150 million VLCC, that is millions of dollars per voyage, before the cargo is even insured.

Daily charter rates for supertankers quadrupled toward $800,000.

The insurance market closed the Strait before Iran’s navy did
The commercial shutdown preceded the physical blockade. That single fact demolishes Pence’s entire thesis. You cannot bomb your way to freedom of navigation, because freedom of navigation is not a military condition. It is a commercial one.

It exists when a Lloyd’s underwriter is willing to write a policy at a price a shipowner can bear. No B-2 strike has ever changed an actuarial table in the attacking power’s favour. Every strike makes the table worse.

The market never believed the peace
And here is the detail that should end this debate permanently. Even during the June truce — even after Trump stood at Versailles proclaiming “Ships of the World, start your engines” — the war risk designation never came off.

The Joint War Committee did not delist the Gulf. Premiums remained at multiples of their pre-war level. Underwriters kept writing cover voyage by voyage, week by week, ready to withdraw at the first drone.

The men who price risk for a living looked at Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding and rendered their verdict: they did not believe it. July 8 proved them right. The market understood what the White House did not — that a ceasefire built on deferred questions, contested toll clauses and mutual bad faith was a pause, not a peace.

Now, with the MOU dead, any prospect of the designation lifting is dead with it. The Strait’s status as a war zone is entrenched for the foreseeable future.

Mike Pence proposes to fix this with more air strikes. Understand what that means in practice: every American bomb that falls on Iran adds basis points to a war risk premium, extends the JWC’s listed area, and pushes more tonnage onto the long route around Africa.

Even if the United States Navy physically escorted every tanker — an operational fantasy in waters saturated with Iranian drones, missiles and mines — the underwriters would still price the corridor as a battlefield, because it would be one.

Washington already tacitly admitted this when it directed the Development Finance Corporation to stand up a $40 billion reinsurance backstop, turning the American taxpayer into the marine insurer of last resort. When your own government must insure the ships because the market will not, you have conceded that the market does not believe your military assurances.

There is no clearer confession of strategic failure.

The victory America threw way
The tragedy — and I use the word deliberately — is that America had its exit in March. In the first weeks of the war, Trump declared that Iran’s military had been destroyed and the Strait was open.

The obvious move, the move a Bismarck or a Nixon would have made, was to declare victory and walk away. Announce that the nuclear facilities lay in ruins, that the objective was achieved, and that the Strait of Hormuz — through which barely a trickle of America’s own oil passes — was henceforth the problem of those who actually depend on it: China, which draws over 40 percent of its seaborne crude through the passage, India, Japan, Korea, Europe.

Let Beijing negotiate with Tehran over tolls. Let Asia underwrite the convoys. America, the world’s largest oil producer, could have watched from across two oceans.

Instead, Washington chained its prestige to a waterway it does not need and cannot control, and handed Iran the greatest strategic gift imaginable: a permanent instrument of leverage over the global economy that costs Tehran almost nothing to wield.

Iran does not need to win a naval battle. It needs only to keep the actuaries nervous — a drone here, a mine there, a seized tanker when the mood takes it. Its Persian Gulf Strait Authority now sells passage to favoured nations at seven-figure fees, exercising precisely the sovereignty over the Strait that its negotiators promised it would never surrender.

The Strait, as Iran’s chief negotiator said plainly, will not return to pre-war conditions. He was telling the truth. Washington simply refused to hear it.

The lesson Pence will never learn
This is what the collapse of the old order looks like in practice — what I have called the Legitimacy Principle. American power can destroy, but it can no longer compel. It can level a nuclear facility, but it cannot make a Greek shipowner send a $150 million vessel and 25 souls through a minefield.

It can blockade Iranian ports, but it cannot force a Lloyd’s syndicate to write a policy it knows will lose money. The instruments that actually govern the world’s arteries — insurance markets, charter rates, the quiet risk calculus of men in London and Singapore and Piraeus — do not answer to CENTCOM.

Mike Pence looks at the Strait of Hormuz and sees a target list. A shipping lawyer looks at it and sees a war risk clause. The clause has beaten the target list for 130 days, and it will beat it for a 130 more.

“Finish the job” is not a strategy. It is the sound of a man who has learned nothing, advising a president who was told nothing, about a war that neither of them can win.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

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

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

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

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

Despite advice from wiser heads, US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth swallowed the bait from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and launched a miserably conceived, poorly executed and catastrophic war on Iran earlier this year.

Trump is no FDR and Hegseth is no Carl von Clausewitz; it’s more like Dumb and Dumber Went to War.

These are the same people New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines’ leaders are betting the family farms on.  Weep, my beloved country.

• READ MORE: Is the United States prepared for a war with China?
• US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Other war on Iran reports

The Iran lesson: the practical limits of US power
For people in the Asia-Pacific region, the failure of the US-Israeli war on Iran should seriously bring into question long-standing alignments with the US. If the contest between the US and China ever goes kinetic, it is highly likely the US and its allies will be defeated.

The consequences for all the people of Asia-Pacific, all the way down to New Zealand, will be immense.

If the two behemoths refrain from striking the enemy’s mainland, the heavy blows will fall on allies like the Philippines, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand.  I think that was part of the signalling when China fired a nuclear-capable ICBM into the Pacific last week.

This was immediately after Australia signed a defence pact with Fiji, and New Zealand announced it was joining the US-led Project Arcadia — a Five Eyes programme designed to build an AI-enabled, integrated digital battlespace command system. In other words, much deeper integration with the US war machine.

In December 2025 someone in the US establishment leaked to The New York Times “The Overmatch Brief” — a secret Pentagon summary of years of US war-gaming that showed the Chinese outgunned the US in all the areas that will count in a conventional war.

Whoever that person was, I suspect they were trying to avert war, trying to stop the kind of imbecilic decision Trump made just months later in the attack on Iran.

At the heart of the problem for the US and its allies is the West’s steady decline in manufacturing capacity. Modern wars are, as strategists said in the Second World War, about who can get the most stuff to the battlefield.

China is now the factory of the world and, if faced with a war, it can rapidly ramp up production of all the weapons of war to a level that is beyond the ability of the West to respond.

The leaked Overmatch Brief recognised that America’s preference is for high-value weapon systems like aircraft carriers and the performance-plagued F-35 jets that are likely to be overrun by vast numbers of Chinese weapons systems produced at a fraction of the cost.

Faced with China’s synchronised opening salvos of hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and anti-satellite warfare, US forces could face immediate sensor blindness and possibly a crippling blow to key assets within days.

Dr Andreas Krieg of King’s College London is a leading Gulf expert who I follow closely. He spoke recently on Middle East Eye’s “Unapologetic” about the war on Iran: “I think it has undone the American empire in a way that I don’t think the American empire will bounce back.

“It is probably the most seismic shift in regional power we have seen in the past 30 years or so.”

In all likelihood, the US-Israeli war on Iran has been paused, not ended, but certain home truths are clear.

Thanks to Trump and Hegseth we have seen the practical limits of US power. Short of scaling up and bringing in 500,000 to 1 million troops, and the full weight of the US navy, army and airforce, Iran cannot be defeated.

Success, if possible, would likely take years, by which time global energy would be wrecked for a generation, triggering an economic calamity.

Setting aside the illegality, immorality and depravity of such a campaign, what is clear is we are witnessing the end of US global hegemony and the slow, violent birth of a multipolar world order.

If long-besieged Iran — the world’s 51st-ranked economy — was able to force the Americans to sue for peace, what are the prospects of the US getting an ass-whopping from a China that has the military and the manufacturing power, the home advantage and, above all, the existential need to see off the Western empire?

As with the Gulf states which recently sided with the US, reparations demanded — in this instance by China — for such a war could be staggering for America’s Pacific allies.

A peer-on-peer war is a different beast
There are important differences between the US attack on Iran and a peer-on-peer war with China. The Iranian strategy was to hit US bases, hit Israel and escalate horizontally by attacking US allies in the Gulf.

Iran had to absorb tens of thousands of strikes without replying in kind (say, sinking a warship).  Sinking the US fleets will be the first order of business if war breaks out with China.

Any attack by the US on the Chinese mainland will almost certainly be immediately answered by at least reciprocal strikes on the US mainland. Heaven help any allies (that’s us) who paint a target on their backs and join the Americans.

Empty shelves and the innovation question
New Cold War warriors like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington underscore the importance of technological innovation in winning wars. Fair point. America has impressive capabilities in this space but China is a fast-follower and, increasingly, a leader.

One example: China has built the DF-27, the world’s first intercontinental anti-ship ballistic missile, a carrier-killer that can hunt its prey for 8000km.

In its report  “Is the United States Prepared for a War with China?” (2026), CSIS evaluated US military capacity after the clear overreach of the war on Iran. Along with numerous other military analysts, CSIS highlighted the rapid expenditure of hard-to-replace missiles, interceptors and other munitions that, along with commitments to the Gaza genocide (not their term) and the war in Russia and Ukraine, have left the shelves perilously low on supplies for America’s next war.

The reality is US defence is run first and foremost for the benefit of a private sector that is hugely overpriced and slow-to-deliver. It will take years to get the stockpile of precision cruise missiles (like the SM-6, SM-3 IB, JASSM, and Tomahawk) up to anything like a level to fight a superpower-on-superpower war.

Should this surprise anyone? The military-industrial capacity of China now dwarfs Uncle Sam’s. Guess who can produce the most long-range drones, naval drones, interceptors and whatever weapon of war you could choose?

China today accounts for about half of all global shipping production by tonnage — much of it can quickly be converted to wartime production. The US builds less than 2 percent and is woefully slow. The Americans continue to invest heavily in aircraft carriers (nine more are on the drawing board), each costing in excess of US$10 billion — despite hypersonic missiles ensuring any that are within thousands of kilometres of a war zone will almost certainly be sunk by a swarm of missiles.

China’s deep structural resilience, its mature leadership, and its careful marshalling of its resources, makes it the likely victor in a war no one should start and possibly no one can decisively win. War is madness. Diplomacy and moderation are the cure.

For all the reasons above, the current defence settings in both Australia and New Zealand are wrong-headed and wedded to a world that is rapidly disappearing into the rearview mirror.  The specific perils our leaders are placing us in is the subject of my next article.

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

“They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people.

There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” Trump said after bombing Iran yesterday and and again today — and threatening to tear up the MOU.

The pussy-grabbing “Leader of the Free World” has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilisations becoming daily occurrences.

What has largely been left unreported after Trump’s outburst at the NATO Summit in Ankara is the elegant response from the Iranians.

• READ MORE: Tehran hits Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar after deadly US strikes
• Millions attend funeral prayers for Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and family
• Other war on Iran reports

Iran’s Fars News Agency reported Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi dismissing Trump’s insulting remarks. He stressed that Tehran does not answer vulgarity with vulgarity, but with action.

FM: Iran Not to Answer Vulgarity with Vulgarity, But with Actionhttps://t.co/iFneZILzw2 pic.twitter.com/vyy3T2wfSY

— Fars News Agency (@EnglishFars) July 8, 2026

“Addressing the Civilised and Courageous Nation of Iran with derogatory language does not diminish its Greatness,” Araqchi said. He added that Iranians were renowned for their “civility, culture, and strong moral values”.

I can vouch for that. I have visited Iran a couple of times, most recently in 2018, and have friendships with Iranians today. Some are anti-government, some are pro-government; all are intelligent, courteous people.

Travelling through Iran it is impossible not to notice that good manners and generosity are deeply embedded in Iranian culture.

And then there’s the Americans.

Best-in-class days gone
I remember attending the APEC summit in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 with the New Zealand delegation. At the time the American diplomats were considered best-in-class, to be emulated. Those days are long gone.

When Trump said in an earlier threat over the Strait of Hormuz: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country” his diplomats made no efforts to soften the edges.

Trump threatened to end the entire Iranian civilisation overnight and the collective West did not demur. No class.

The West is now led by a senile version of Sammy The Bull Gravano, the New York mobster — violent, uncultured and believing that whacking someone is the solution to every problem.

Trump’s outbursts may not simply be a reflection of his lack of moral education but are likely symptomatic of his serious cognitive decline. Dementia experts cite a sudden increase in swearing or crude language as a neurological symptom.

The pussy-grabbing Leader of the Free World has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilizations becoming daily occurrences.

While Trump rants, Tehran’s sophisticated diplomatic corps — packed with PhDs who understand the nuances of international law far better than the real estate agents Trump sends in to bat for the USA — have quietly outmaneuvered the Americans in purely diplomatic terms.

The reason for Trump’s potty-mouthed tantrum is clear: he’s not getting away with murder.

The Iranians are not letting the Americans and Israelis get away with breaching the Memorandum of Understanding.

Tehran safeguarding sovereignty
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baqaei stated that the United States has violated the framework of the Islamabad Accord signed by the two countries, stressing that Tehran will firmly safeguard its national interests and sovereignty.

It is impossible to read the text of the MOU and not see that Iran is on firm ground.  Article One of the signed MOU reads:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final Deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.”

Pacta sunt servanda — “agreements must be kept” — has been a bedrock of international law since before the Roman Empire.  American Exceptionalism has, until now, given itself an exception to the rule. No more, one hopes.

Israel’s war and war crimes in Southern Lebanon have continued since the US signed the MOU.  Iran is imposing a new rule on the Middle East: the rules apply to everyone, including the US and Israel.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

This is a story about what has been taken and what can be saved.  I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing Dr Emalani Case, a Hawai’ian (Kānaka Maoli) academic and activist about the cultural, political and environmental impact of RIMPAC 2026 on Hawai’i.

We also discussed the wider implication of the surge in US-led militarism in the Pacific, its dangers for all Pacific nations, and what a better vision of our future might look like.

Dr Emalani Case is a senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. She has written extensively on Indigenous rights, environmental impacts, and decolonial movements across Oceania.

I see that you’re named after Queen Emma.

She was the godmother of my great grandmother. She loved her people and cared for their health. She was instrumental in creating the Queen’s Hospital on Oʻahu and worked to create spaces of safety, health and genuine security.If I could make some link between RIMPAC and her —  RIMPAC is not about the health of the people; it’s not about our safety; and it’s not about our future.

RIMPAC is representative of the militarisation of our islands. There’s always this claim that it is for our benefit, for our protection and for the security of Hawai’i and the region, but beginning with the military-backed overthrow of the kingdom, the military has always been there for America’s imperial interests.

The PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an environmentally and culturally sensitive manner.  Is it? What makes you stand up to RIMPAC?  

You can’t say that you are aligned with the interests of the people or even with the environment when you’re based on destruction and violence.

I’ve experienced militarism and really felt it in visceral ways. When you grow up in Hawai’i, the military becomes normalised. It’s in your face all the time. It actually wasn’t until I moved away from Hawai’i that I realised, “Oh, it’s actually odd to see helicopters every day, and it’s an odd thing to see tanks driving through your community.”

Growing up in Waimea, which is about 40 miles from Pōhakuloa, one of the biggest military training facilities in the Hawai’ian archipelago, we could hear and feel when they were doing live target bombing there.

I grew up with parents who were activists in their own right, always fighting for our language, our way.  My mom was part of opening a Hawai’ian language preschool in my town and my dad was always fighting for our rights to continued access to our land, to be able to hunt and harvest, and fish.

So I grew up with that, and I grew up experiencing militarism and observing the violence. That led me to naturally stand against RIMPAC.

Tell us more about the rhetoric that the military are here to protect you — and us.

There’s a myth that the military is here to protect us. I always ask: who’s here to protect us from the military?

They see us as being sacrificeable and dismissible. When you start to confront this notion that we are supposed to be patriotic American citizens, that it’s our duty to give up our land and it’s our duty to sacrifice our places … that can be quite confronting for people.

Militarism shouldn’t be normalised, it is highly destructive. We need to unravel and challenge military rhetoric, because it is so strong.

I had a lot of family members around me who had already started to push back against that. We have a Hawai’ian Renaissance, this huge reawakening of political consciousness that started in the 1970s around the time of the bombing of Kaho‘olawe, one of our islands [for Vietnam war live firing training]. So I was born in the 80s, and I grew up with that reawakening, that renaissance, that revitalisation of language and culture, and dance.

It’s beautiful and it’s strong. We’ve got a really strong nation of people who are still learning, still unraveling, and still dismantling these normalised ideas, this colonial rhetoric.

What else do people need to understand about the negative impact massive events like RIMPAC have on the environment?

If you take Pōhakuloa — as just one example — you have these long stretches of black lava. It might look empty but under that lava is a massive aquifer. If you bomb on top of that and contaminate it with the chemicals that then seep into the soil, there’s major environmental damage.

If you repeatedly bomb a place, the threat to the aquifer is serious.

The logo for RIMPAC looks like a tourist advertisement for a tropical paradise.

That image of Hawai’i as a tourist paradise is strategic. The tourism industry is working as a mask for all of this other violence that’s happening here.

RIMPAC is part of this alliance of nations that ultimately might do crazy things like start a war on China? How worried should we be?

We have to confront these things like RIMPAC that are pulling us together in really dangerous, violent ways. It means confronting how militarism in one place actually shapes and even bolsters militarism in other places across the Pacific.

When these countries do decide to come together and wage war on China, that’s going to impact all of us.

There’s an image of the future that’s a very dark one but there’s also a positive one, that the Pacific can be an ocean of peace. Tell us, how you would like to see things shape up?

I think for anybody who does this work, there has to be a vision of something positive and beautiful. Otherwise, why do we do all of this? My vision for the Pacific is, of course, not just the absence of conflict.

As Pacific peoples, we have responsibilities to engage in some kind of decolonial dreaming and envisioning — as Linda Tuhiwai Smith says: to think beyond the absence of something, and to think about what our futures actually look like, and feels like, and smells like in a future that is demilitarised.

I dream I wake up to silence because I’m too used to waking up to chaos. I want that silence in that moment to breathe and just hear nothing but birds or laughter or all the things that should be there. What peace is to me is waking up in a peaceful environment and having the energy to truly care for people. That brings us back to Queen Emalani.

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

On June 10, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya appeared on a screen before Israel’s Supreme Court via video link. He looked gaunt, visibly emaciated, and his hands and feet were bound.

It was one of the few times the public had seen the doctor since Israeli soldiers took him from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza nearly 18 months ago, where he had served as director.

He has been held without charge for more than 500 days, with little known about his condition.

• READ MORE: Fears mounting for arbitrarily detained Palestinian Dr Hussam Abu Safiya amid reports his life is in grave danger
• ‘They brought me here to kill me’
• ‘This is the end’: From inside an underground Israeli detention centre
• A ‘genocidal project’ – Dr Abu-Sittah on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system
• Other Dr Hussam Abu Safiya reports

After the court hearing, Abu Safiya’s lawyer delivered a message from the doctor to the public: “I am a pediatrician, providing medical care to patients, the wounded, and the vulnerable in Gaza.

“I carried out my work in accordance with international law and humanitarian principles. My detention is unjust and arbitrary.”

According to the lawyer, Nasser Odeh, the court hearing followed an appeal filed by Abu Safiya’s legal team calling for his immediate release, after an earlier District Court decision had renewed his detention on 28 April 2026.

Israeli authorities must immediately release the arbitrarily detained Palestinian paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya amidst reports from a lawyer who visited him that there is an imminent threat to his life as a result of torture and other…

— Amnesty MENA (@AmnestyMENA) July 6, 2026

The Supreme Court came back with a rejection of Abu Safiya’s appeal. He remains in solitary confinement in Nafha Prison, to which he had been sent earlier in June as the date of his Supreme Court appearance drew near.

No indictment filed
No formal indictment has been filed against Dr Abu Safiya to date, as he is being held under Israel’s so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law,” according to Nasser Odeh.

The law allows Israel to indefinitely detain Palestinians without having to file charges against them, subject to judicial review by the District Court every six months.

“Abu Safiya is one of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza currently being held in Israeli detention,” Odeh told Mondoweiss. “If there were actual charges against them, or evidence supporting the allegations made by the Israeli prosecution, indictments would have been filed and evidence presented, as is the case with any other detainee.”

The lawyer added that Dr Abu Safiya’s continued detention without the filing of formal charges demonstrated that his imprisonment was unjustified.

To make it more difficult to challenge his detention, Odeh said that Dr Abu Safiya not only continued to be isolated from other detainees but was also cut off from his legal team, making it difficult to obtain verified information about his health condition.

Despite the efforts to suppress information pertaining to Dr Abu Safiya, Mondoweiss has obtained testimony from recently released Palestinian detainees who said they spent time with the doctor in prison before he was moved to solitary confinement.

The ex-detainees, all of whom were released in March this year, said that Dr Abu Safiya was subjected to physical torture, beatings, humiliation, and degrading treatment. They also say that they spent their final days in prison with the doctor.

“We saw him weighing no more than 40 kilograms,” Ahmad Qaddas, 34, alleged. Qaddas had been detained from the Jabaila refugee camp in Gaza in December 2025, and previously knew Dr Abu Safiya as one of north Gaza’s most prominent doctors and public figures.

We are deeply alarmed by the reports that there is an imminent threat to Dr. #HussamAbuSafiya’s life as a result of torture and other ill treatment he has been suffering while in Israeli custody. Israeli authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Dr. Abu Safiya.… pic.twitter.com/sNVTL4eQTB

— Amnesty International (@amnesty) July 6, 2026

Unable to respond
Qaddas claimed that he had spent six days with Abu Safiya shortly before being released.

“I could not believe my eyes when I saw Dr Hussam,” Qaddas told Mondoweiss. “His weight, his thinness, his health, his face, his hands, his feet, his entire body — I could not believe what I saw.”

Qaddas also claimed that Dr Abu Safiya was minimally communicative, unable to respond to interactions.

“He became so weak that he could barely speak,” Qaddas said. “He had to repeat each word he said at least four times before managing to pronounce it. Even when he ate, he vomited it back up. He always appeared exhausted and barely talked.”

Qaddas also said that the prisoners wore the standard gray prison uniform and appeared relatively clean, but that Abu Safiya “looked filthy” by contrast.

The testimonies from the detainees were the first details to emerge concerning Dr Abu Safiya’s condition since reports of his torture first emerged in January 2025, a month after his arrest, as relayed by released prisoners who had been held at the notorious Sde Teiman torture camp with the doctor.

Each of the prisoners said they spent a limited period of time with the doctor, although the details of when and where they were held remain unclear.

Days and hours shackled
“We had no way of distinguishing one day from another inside the prison,” Rami Abu Amira, 32, who said he spent six days with Abu Safiya, told Mondoweiss. “We spent days and hours shackled and blindfolded, with no sense of how much time had passed.”

Abu Amira was a resident of Jabalia refugee camp, where he was arrested during an invasion of his area in December 2024. He said detainees often relied on other prisoners to learn where they were being held.

“When the opportunity arose, we would ask other detainees where we were. Some would say Sde Teiman. Others would say we’re in Ofer, or another prison,” he recounted.

“Those brief exchanges were the only way we could confirm that we were being held in a detention facility somewhere.”

Dr Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, corroborated the substance of the prisoners’ testimonies based on his knowledge of the doctor’s condition, affirming that their descriptions of how he was treated fit with his conditions.

All interviewed former detainees described the doctor being repeatedly subjected to beatings, torture, interrogation, shackling, and food deprivation — conditions which many Palestinian detainees report being subjected to across the board, but which in the case of Dr Abu Safiya were allegedly applied even more harshly.

They said that the doctor was clearly experiencing a deterioration in his health, and that they interacted with him as much as they were allowed to, even though any detainee who attempted to help him was allegedly beaten.

‘Soldiers placed their boots on his chest and forced him to insult himself’
Rami Abu Amira said that detainees, including Dr Abu Safiya, were kept shackled by their hands and feet for an entire week, without their restraints being removed even for eating or using the bathroom.

Their restraints would only be removed for 10 minutes every 3 days to shower, before being shackled again. “Occasionally, our restraints would also be removed so we could eat,” Abu Amira added.

Ahmad Qaddas emphasised that Abu Safiya “was constantly asking for medical treatment,” noting his advanced age. “Whenever he would ask for treatment, a doctor from the prison would come by and give him a single blood pressure pill.”

Nasser Odeh confirmed Qaddas’s testimony, asserting that Dr Abu Safiya continued to suffer from chronic health conditions that have been exacerbated by his systematic abuse and mistreatment.

The doctor’s lawyer said that Dr Abu Safiya suffered from high blood pressure, for which he required regular medication, as well as from other health issues affecting his back, eyes, and neck. One of the most serious concerns is what Odeh described as a policy of “deliberate medical neglect” by prison authorities, which had deprived Dr Abu Safiya of access to essential medications and treatment.

“We previously submitted a legal petition to the prison authorities,” Odeh said. “We were requesting that the detention facility’s physician examine Dr Abu Safiya and that his blood pressure medication be restored.”

Ahmad Qaddas also said that “soldiers would wrap him in a blanket and move him from one place to another, while soldiers placed their boots on his chest, and forced him to insult himself and call himself a donkey.”

“He would insult himself and cry as he did it,” Qaddas said, adding that the point was to humiliate him “in front of all the prisoners”.

The degrading treatment often crossed into torture and physical assault, the detainees added, alleging that they could hear Dr Abu Safiya screaming while he was being interrogated nearby.

“When we heard his screams, we first feared for ourselves,” Qaddas recounted. “Then we grieved for what Dr Hussam Abu Safiya was enduring.”

First image of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from his court hearing currently taking place before the Israeli military court in occupied Jerusalem.

The image shows Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in a state of severe exhaustion and clear physical deterioration after more than a year of detention… pic.twitter.com/0nCpp6N25O

— Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya د.حسام أبو صفية (@HussamAbuSafiya) June 10, 2026

Beatings, dog attacks, and food deprivation
Rami Abu Amira alleged that he witnessed some of these moments firsthand when Israeli soldiers moved the doctor from the prison section to interrogation, or when they returned him to his cell.

“Dr Abu Safiya was tortured. They stripped his clothes, dragged him across the ground, slammed him into walls, and attacked him with dogs,” he said. At other times, he added, he would only hear the doctor’s screams, but would later see him after the interrogation session when prisoners were released from their cells for brief periods of yard time.

Abu Amira also said that he witnessed soldiers raiding Abu Safiya’s cell at night as he slept, waking him up by throwing stun grenades beneath the bunk bed before storming his cell and taking him away. He would disappear for a day before being returned at night, or the following day, Abu Amira recounted.

Ahmad Qaddas said that Israeli soldiers would regularly unleash dogs on him to attack and pin him to the ground.

“At that moment, he would cry like a child from fear and exhaustion,” Qaddas said, adding that the dogs would claw at him with their paws and nails.

He described how Dr Abu Safiya would sit for long hours in prison, unable to speak to anyone because he had neither the energy nor the ability to talk.

“When we spoke to him, he could not answer, and we ourselves would be tortured for approaching him,” Qaddas said. These ranged from beatings, having dogs set on them, being denied food, or being sent to solitary confinement, he detailed.

‘We feared being tortured’
“I wanted to help him and serve him in whatever he needed, but we could not. We feared being tortured ourselves.”

He explained that when prisoners were transferred from one place to another while shackled by their hands and feet, soldiers would beat prisoners on their legs, causing them to fall onto their knees.

But with Dr Abu Safiya, Qaddas said he saw the doctor totally collapse when hit, bumping his head on the ground from the fall. “He was that weak,” Qaddas explained. “But despite that, the soldiers kept beating him without mercy.”

He noted that although he himself was a man in his 30s, when he was beaten, he felt that he might die from the severity of the abuse, while “Dr Hussam was an older man suffering from illness.”

“Now, when I remember what happened before my eyes in prison, I feel like crying from the cruelty of the scenes I witnessed and the torture inflicted on the doctor,” Qaddas said.

Breaking a symbol
The picture the ex-detainees paint is one in which every moment of Dr Abu Safiya’s life in prison is geared toward torture and degrading treatment. “They singled him out for torture and humiliation more than the other prisoners,” Qaddas noted.

According to the ex-detainees’ testimonies, doctors were the most tortured prisoners in the facility. For Qaddas, this was because the Israeli army intended to “break their convictions,” explaining how doctors in Gaza had repeatedly been a thorn in the side of Israeli ground invasions by refusing the army’s evacuation orders throughout the war.

Healthcare workers — and the health and community infrastructure they represented — became synonymous with the refusal to comply with Israeli expulsion orders.

During the Israeli invasion of northern Gaza in late 2024, Dr Abu Safiya refused to evacuate Kamal Adwan Hospital, turning the medical compound into a last refuge of civilians and becoming a symbol of north Gaza’s defiance of the Israeli army’s invasion.

Dr Abu Safiya quickly became the face of that steadfastness, even in how he surrendered to the army, walking toward two armored tanks with nothing but his white coat amid the rubble.

During an earlier invasion of northern Gaza in late 2023, Dr Adnan al-Bursh of al-Awda Hospital played a similar role. He was arrested on 19 December 2023, alongside other doctors and displaced civilians.

Death announced
Later, his death was announced in Ofer Prison in mid-April 2024. According to testimony obtained by Sky News via the Israeli rights group HaMoked, al-Bursh died shortly after being brought into Section 23 of Ofer Prison, outside Ramallah.

The prison guards had reportedly brought al-Bursh into the section “in a deplorable state,” with “injuries around his body,” which was naked from the waist down.

“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there,” one source told Sky News, adding that one of the prisoners helped him afterward and took him to one of the rooms, where he died shortly thereafter.

To this day, Dr Al-Bursh’s body remains withheld by Israeli authorities. He stands as an example of the severe torture endured by Palestinian doctors who refused to abandon their posts and leave their patients to their fate, choosing instead to carry out their duties until they were arrested or killed.

Dr Abu Safiya’s fellow prisoners fear he is on the same trajectory.

“We heard doctors inside the prison repeatedly wishing for death because of the torture they endured,” Qaddas said. “If there isn’t an urgent intervention to save Dr Hussam, he will inevitably die inside the prison.”

Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Gaza correspondent for Mondoweiss and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter/X at @Tareqshajjaj.

Since President Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory tour for “ending” the Israeli war on Gaza last October, followed by a UN Security Council endorsement of his Gaza plan, negotiations over Gaza’s future have been stuck in a diplomatic netherworld.

While Hamas handed over all of its captives and ceased its military operations, Israel has repeatedly violated the deal, killing more than 1000 Palestinians, restricting aid and movement, and expanding the areas it occupies in Gaza.

With media attention focused on Iran and Lebanon, Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” continues pushing a 15-point “roadmap,” first presented in April, that appears aimed at transforming a limited ceasefire into a broader political settlement based on the disarming of the Palestinian resistance and the abandoning of the struggle for Palestinian national liberation.

• READ MORE: Internal documents show Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ moving to crush Palestinian self-determination
• Trump’s Board of Peace plans to grant itself sweeping immunity, documents show
• Other Board of Peace reports

Drop Site News has obtained two documents from the recent round of negotiations over Gaza’s future:

• Palestinian negotiators’ amendments to the Board of Peace’s proposed roadmap, submitted on June 13; and
• Response delivered late last month by the Board’s “High Representative,” Nickolay Mladenov.

Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad have reported on the documents here and a summary from their X post is below:

Nickolay Mladenov, Bulgaria’s former defence and foreign minister, who served as a visiting fellow at a pro-Israel think tank founded by AIPAC veterans, has generally avoided identifying Israel when discussing ceasefire violations.

Although the October 2025 agreement obliges both Hamas and Israel to halt “all military operations,” and despite Israel’s daily violations in Gaza, Mladenov’s revised roadmap states that “Hamas and the Palestinian factions shall immediately cease all military activities.”

‘Not to assign blame’
A Board of Peace official defended the approach, telling Drop Site News that the body’s role was “not to assign blame” but to ensure commitments were implemented.

One senior Hamas official, however, told Drop Site that Mladenov’s roadmap sought to impose under the threat of renewed war, ongoing killings, and humanitarian catastrophe, “the surrender that Netanyahu failed to achieve through war”.

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem added that while Palestinian amendments were welcomed by mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, Mladenov “continues to approach the file from a perspective close to the Israeli position”.

In their June 13 response, Hamas and other Palestinian factions proposed a gradual process for the registration and storage of heavy weapons to proceed in parallel with Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and be contingent on the implementation of key steps: the entry of the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), deployment of the International Stabilisation Force (ISF), and dismantling of Israel-backed armed militias in the Strip.

The Palestinian proposal is limited to “heavy weapons” and would be under the joint supervision of the NCAG and Palestinian factions.

In his response, however, Mladenov expanded the framework into a process to “store and decommission” weapons, broadening the scope beyond heavy weapons to include weapons depots, tunnels, military production facilities, and all weapons stored within them.

Crucially, his version adds a condition stating that once the process was complete, Palestinian resistance factions would no longer “hold, store, control or have access to any weapons”.

Buffer force separating Israelis
Hamas’s draft envisioned the ISF primarily as a buffer force separating Israeli troops from areas administered by the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), monitoring ceasefire compliance, and protecting the delivery of essential humanitarian supplies.

While Mladenov retained these functions, he also assigned the ISF a role in training Palestinian police and “support[ing] the decommissioning process.”

On withdrawal, Hamas proposed a phased Israeli pullout “until Israeli forces are outside the borders of the Gaza Strip”, with the ISF taking positions in vacated areas, and said weapons steps would proceed in parallel with verified withdrawal stages.

Mladenov’s response instead limited Israeli withdrawal to “Gaza’s perimeter” and made it conditional on “verified progress” in the weapons decommissioning process.

Hamas has formally agreed to relinquish governing authority in Gaza to the NCAG, a technocratic body composed of non-partisan Palestinian experts. However, Israel has continued to block the committee from entering Gaza and has demanded Hamas’s disarmament as a precondition.

In Mladenov’s revised document, the NCAG’s entry and assumption of duties are made conditional on Palestinian acceptance of the broader “roadmap” and completion of the second phase’s timeline and implementation mechanisms, particularly on disarmament.

Palestinian negotiators have emphasised that the NCAG should function as a transitional governing authority, stating that it would have “full independence” and be empowered to “fulfill all legal obligations and commitments arising from the current administration of the Gaza Strip”.

Reframed as ‘administration’
Mladenov’s draft removes that language, limiting the NCAG instead to financial liabilities incurred only on or after it assumes control, and reframing it as an administrative body under the Board of Peace.

In their draft, Palestinian negotiators have argued that any resolution of the weapons issue must be embedded in a broader process guaranteeing the Palestinian people’s right to establish a state and exercise self-determination.

But the Board’s draft, by contrast, states only that disarmament “shall create conditions for a credible pathway.”

On governance, Palestinian negotiators have proposed reunifying Gaza and the West Bank, with the Board overseeing an orderly transfer of governance to the NCAG, which would ultimately hand power to the Palestinian Authority as part of a process “leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

They also set a 2027 end date for the Board’s mandate.

Mladenov’s draft omits these elements entirely, makes no reference to the Palestinian Authority, and instead limits the arrangement to Hamas and other factions handing over authority to the NCAG.

Republished from the Drop Site News X feed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has issued a stark warning in its annual report.

The central bank for central banks warned that the current AI investment boom is unsustainable.

The five largest “hyperscaler” tech firms plan to spend more than a trillion dollars on AI-related capital expenditure from 2025 through 2026. This spending is outpacing their earnings and free cash flow, forcing some to issue debt.

“Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust… should hyperscalers slow or halt the aggressive pace of capex deployment, many borrowers across the supply chain could struggle to replace lost revenue and service their debt.”

• READ MORE: ‘We are in a bubble’: Experts warn of historic AI bust risk
• Other financial bubble reports

When the BIS — the only central bank to warn before the 2008 crash — sounds the alarm, we should listen. The Bank of England, European Central Bank, and Monetary Authority of Singapore have since echoed similar concerns.

Financial bubbles have become the norm since the late 1970s, when the US dollar left the gold standard and financialisation took hold. Household net worth began expanding faster than GDP, creating cycles of bubbles and busts.

Yet the current bubble dwarfs all previous ones in history, as illustrated in this graphic from the US Federal Reserve.

First came the Dot-com bubble, then the housing bubble of 2008. A credit crunch in 2019 was poised to trigger another recession, but was submerged by the covid-19 crisis and the unprecedented monetary response.

The result is what can only be described as the “bubble of everything”.

• Equities: US stock market capitalisation is now 230 percent of GDP — twice the long-term average. In early June, stocks were selling at about 40 times average corporate earnings over the previous decade, a level seen only at the peak of the Dot-com bubble.
• Private credit: The $3 trillion non-bank private credit “shadow market,” which exploded over the last decade, is under severe stress.
• AI mania: A trillion-dollar spending wave on AI, chips, and data centers is a real buildout wrapped in a speculative frenzy. This circular spending by tech giants props up the bubble, a risk mainstream media has begun to highlight.

The associated wealth accumulation is historically unprecedented. A new billionaire oligarchy has emerged, deeply reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. It is fully merged with the military-industrial complex, dependent on permanent war and genocide for survival.

The tech wing of this class seeks to surveil, control, and monetise every facet of human life.

Fraud is standard operating procedure, from the Trump family’s alleged looting of state resources to the SpaceX listing.

For the SpaceX IPO, Nasdaq and FTSE Russell rewrote their rules to fast-track the company into major indexes after just days of trading. This forced retirement funds to buy a tiny 4 percent float of available shares, artificially inflating the price and creating a trillionaire in Elon Musk overnight — exposing workers’ pensions to immense risk.

This concentrated power is staggering: the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) now account for over 30 percent of the S&P 500, double their weight a decade ago. Tech makes up over 50 percent of the entire Nasdaq.

As the market saw through the SpaceX scheme, its shares fell 24 percent, and Musk lost his trillionaire status — temporarily. When the broader crash hits, pension funds globally will suffer. The longer the mania continues, the more savings will be sucked into these overvalued indexes.

As Marxist economist Gary Wilson explained, Wall Street has priced in profits that may never materialise. The bosses’ response is familiar: cut jobs, attack unions, demand subsidies, and chase war contracts.

The real AI buildout is buried inside a speculative mania. The technology may survive the bubble; these stock prices will not.

“The losses will come as layoffs, frozen hiring and closed factories… and through the 401(k)s and pension funds workers were pushed into… a forced ticket to a casino they neither own nor control.

“The workers who never shared in the boom will be told to sacrifice when the bubble breaks.”

This financial bubble is just one facet of a broader polycrisis. Capitalism has no road forward to solve these interconnected failures.

1. Grotesque inequality: Billionaire wealth jumped 16 percent in 2025 alone, reaching a historic $18.3 trillion. In New Zealand, four people now hold more wealth than 1.8 million citizens combined, while over 900,000 face food insecurity. oxfam.org.nz
2. Permanent war: The ongoing war against Iran has devastated global energy markets, spiking fuel and fertiliser prices. Over 50 percent of the profits from recent oil shocks went to the top 1 percent of Americans; the bottom half received just 1 percent.
3. Looming famine: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens cascading food shocks. As fertiliser prices spike 20-60 percent, the greatest risk is not immediate shortage but collapsing future harvests, leading to higher prices and starvation months later.
4. Debt vortex:
   • Advanced economies: Government debt (100-130 percent of GDP in the US/Europe, 200 percent in Japan) is becoming unmanageable as interest rates rise from historic lows.
   • Developing world: External debt exceeds $11 trillion, with more than 50 nations in distress. Many now spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education, trapped in a neocolonial debt cycle.
5. Climate collapse: Global warming is killing thousands in heatwaves, closing schools, and destroying crops. Political “adaptation” plans are a surrender, substituting leadership with fantasy to avoid the emergency-scale mobilisation actually required.

A major capitalist crisis is nearly certain. As always, the heaviest price will be paid by the working class through escalating unemployment and austerity.

This will radicalise people. Our duty as socialists is to offer solutions that point toward the ruling class — our real enemy — and resist the ruling class’s strategy to divide us by scapegoating racial, religious, or sexual minorities.

As Rosa Luxemburg stated, the historical choice under capitalism is “socialism or barbarism.” That choice is re-emerging as socialism or modern-day fascism.

It is no accident that these are the poles of politics globally today. Far-right parties flirting with fascism are mass movements again across Europe.

Yet, hearteningly, popular support for socialism is the majority opinion among young people in the US and UK. The Democratic Socialists of America are becoming a mass party inside the belly of the beast.

The road forks ahead. One path leads to division, austerity, and barbarism. The other, built by a united working class, leads to socialism.

Mike Treen is a retired trade unionist and political commentator. This article was first published at his Substack @miketreen860764 and is republished with the author’s permission.

Pro-Palestine and anti-war protesters gathered at the US Consulate in downtown Auckland today to mark July 4 — but they were not celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, they were condemning “liberation with bombs”.

Several speakers criticised US global and military policies in this the 144th week of continuous rallies in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau.

One of them, a twice-displaced refugee from Afghanistan who has grown up in West Auckland and works as a healthcare provider, spoke of the devastation of America’s war, invasion and two-decade occupation of her country.

• READ MORE: America250: How the US heatwave will affect Fourth of July celebrations
• Chris Hedges: Requiem for America on the Fourth of July
• The Black Agenda report – an alternative view of the origins of July 4th
• Other July 4 reports

“Today, on the 4th of July, we are told to celebrate freedom. But today, we stand here to tell the truth — American freedom has always been built on the bones of the colonised,” Bibi Amena told the crowd.

“In October 2001, the US — backed by the United Kingdom — launched a bombing campaign against my home country Afghanistan. It was the start of a 20-year occupation,” she said.

“They sold it to the world as ‘self-defence’. Counter-terrorism. Then it evolved — as it always does — into nation-building, spreading democracy, and women’s liberation.”

These were the “token words of every colonialist project”.

Amena said she was “ashamed” to say that “New Zealand — under Helen Clark, a leader I have long respected — was also pulled into the conflict”.

NZ troops deployed
Over 20 years, under both Labour and National, New Zealand had deployed more than 3500 troops to Afghanistan, which she described as shameful.

“They [the US] showed us images of girls riding bicycles in Kabul. Democracy. Female generals. They told us we were liberating them,” Amena said.

“But let me tell you what they didn’t show you.

“They didn’t show you the weddings that were bombed. The hospitals. The bridges and power plants. The densely packed homes of sleeping families.

“They didn’t tell you that from 2001 to 2002 alone, the US dropped more than 1200 cluster bombs — containing almost a quarter of a million bomblets.

“These are indiscriminate. They do not distinguish between a soldier and a child.

“And when they fail to explode — as many do — they become landmines. They lie in the soil for decades, killing civilians long after the cameras leave. In Laos, in Vietnam, in Iraq, the contamination is still there today.

‘MOAB’ dropped
On April 13, 2017, the US dropped the MOAB — the so-called “Mother of All Bombs” — on Nangarhar Province. The most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat.

“Former President Hamid Karzai called it an ‘inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons’, Amena said.

“And then the night raids.”

A BBC investigation in 2022 [BBC Panorama: “I Saw War Crimes” report] had revealed testimonies from former soldiers describing war crimes as “common practice” during their night raids.

In December 2009, in Narang village, 10 Afghan civilians were dragged from their beds and shot in the head or chest. Most of them were students aged 12 to 18.

In September 2019, in Helmand, a raid killed a couple and five of their six children. Only a two-month-old baby girl survived — injured and orphaned.

In another raid, Amena said, a family who had lost three grandchildren was given a parcel of rice, a can of oil, and some sugar as “compensation”.

“And then there was the Khataba massacre. February 2010. US Army Rangers raided a home where a family was celebrating a newborn child.

Civilians killed
“They killed five civilians — two men, a teenage girl, and two pregnant women. They were bound, gagged, and shot dead.

“The Pentagon investigated and concluded the soldiers had followed the rules of engagement. No disciplinary action.

“At first they called it ‘honour killing’. And they blamed the Taliban. But the truth eventually comes out.

“Now, the opium.

“During the US occupation, Afghanistan had produced more than 80 percent of the world’s opium. Within a year of the Taliban takeover and their ban on poppy cultivation, production dropped by 95 percent.”

Amena said it was estimated that up to 4 million Afghans had been addicted to heroin. That was “nearly the population of New Zealand”.

“The streets of Kabul looked like a zombie movie [under US occupation] — men and women, families and loved ones, withering away.

“And what did America do? They sent troops to guard the opium farms. When asked about their direct involvement in the drug trade, they said the opium would be trafficked to countries like Iran and Russia — enemies they wanted to weaken.”

Poppy for export
She spoke of a 2026 interview when CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou confirmed that a DEA official had told him Afghans were allowed to cultivate poppy specifically for export to Russia and Iran — “to weaken their societies”.

“This was not a war on terror. This was a war on the Afghan people. And it was fueled by profit, and by drugs.”

Amena asked what about women’s liberation?

“At the end of 20 years, according to the Central Statistics Organisation, 84 percent of Afghan women were illiterate. And only 2 percent had access to higher education. The rest were left behind.

“The elites — the collaborators — were paraded on television, given visas, and evacuated. The rest? The widows, the orphans, the mothers of the deep south who endured decades of night raids and bombings — they were left to starve under crippling US sanctions.

Amena said this was not “liberation”. It was “colonialism”.

She stressed that Afghanistan was just one country in a long list of those impacted.

New war of aggression
“And now — less than five years after the withdrawal from Afghanistan — the US is at it again. Starting a new war of aggression against the great people of Iran,” she said.

“So today — on the 4th of July — we say no. We say never again. Not in our name. Not with our taxes. Not with our silence.”

Amena said she had brought a young girl’s shoe with her — “for the 168 children killed in Minab, Iran. I want you to look at it, and remember the 168 little girls, murdered by the US in their classrooms.”

Other speakers critical of the July 4 US anniversary included Eugene Velasco, spokesperson of the Filipino movement BAYAN Aotearoa New Zealand; Adnan Swaid, a Palestinian freedom activist and a Nakba victim; Sapna Samant, a progressive Indian activist; Diana Phillips of Americans Abroad Against the War, and Dr Barry Lee, a longtime peace activist who researched a thesis on the Auckland Progressive Youth Movement during the US war against Vietnam.

ANALYSIS: By Hossam Shaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denying the genocide committed in Gaza requires wilful disregard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMMENTARY: By Chris Hedges

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitised term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy in America.

It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans.

• READ MORE: America250 versus Freedom 250: What to know about the US semiquincentennial
• Other Chris Hedges reports

It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless.

Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist.

The victims of neoliberal deindustrialisation, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the US in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Celebrated by the disenfranchised
Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the 12 richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions.

It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalised or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularised by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier.

A scam – but it worked
It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible.

Social justice, Harvey writes in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism, exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual.

It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’”

Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

Lack of a story unbearable
“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind.

“Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad.

“The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardise the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30 to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalised. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials.

A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe.

Palestine Action jailings
A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as “terrorists”, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offences.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes.

“And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function.

Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left”. I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalised or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomised by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit.

A nation where the government is privatised. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

Whether Israelis will ever comprehend the irreparable damage inflicted upon their country’s reputation by their UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, is a moot point. The damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.

Danon, however, uses a peculiar approach to defending Israel within international institutions: he relies on bullying, intimidation, and an overt attempt to silence anyone who dares to challenge the official Israeli narrative — particularly women leaders.

Yet, what makes his behavior most outrageous is his deployment of these abrasive tactics to suppress an issue that demands the utmost sensitivity: the systemic use of sexual violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Palestinians mark 1000 days since Israel began full-scale assault on Gaza
• Other war on Gaza reports

The confrontation took place during a UN General Assembly session convened to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Senior UN officials were presenting harrowing findings documenting sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.

True to form, Danon refused to engage with the substance of the reports.

For Israeli diplomacy, the enemy is never merely the armed adversary; it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.

The immediate target of Danon’s wrath was Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Instead of reflecting on the grim findings, Danon demanded

Patten’s resignation.

Accused over ‘obsession’
He accused her and the broader international community of harbouring an “obsession” with targeting Israel.

When Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, attempted to intervene on a point of order per established protocol, Danon unleashed a vitriolic verbal assault. Refusing to yield, he shouted over her, ordering her to “be quiet” and drowning out the chamber with his outbursts.

“Shame on you. You are part of this obsession,” Danon bellowed.

While such unruly behavior should have resulted in Danon’s immediate removal from the chamber, the diplomatic asymmetry of the UN prevailed. It was Frazier who found herself trying to de-escalate, politely clarifying that her procedural request was “not personal.”

Danon shot back with typical defiance: “You will not be allowed to bully us.”

Herein lies the supreme irony of Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the UN and international law. Israel stands as one of the most egregious, serial violators of international law in modern history — a decades-long pattern of behavior left unpunished by Western vetoes, which ultimately emboldened it to carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Yet, Israeli officials persistently claim the mantle of the ultimate victim, alleging they are the targets of antisemitism, unfair bias, and now, “bullying” by the very institutions they defy.

Mountain of evidence
But the mountain of evidence cannot be shouted away. According to an extensive report issued by Patten’s office, there are verified patterns of systemic abuse, sexual degradation, and psychological torture weaponised against Palestinian men, women, and children in Israeli detention camps like Sde Teiman.

The weight of this evidence reached such an undeniable threshold that the UN Secretary-General’s office formally added Israel to the global “List of Shame” — the blacklist of states committing grave violations against children in armed conflict.

None of this exposure is enough to convince Danon or the broader Israeli political establishment that Israel does not possess a sovereign right to violate international law. In their view, merely pointing out these crimes constitutes an act of aggression.

This systemic denial extends to every facet of the conflict. A comprehensive UN investigation recently concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza as a core component of its military campaign.

The numbers are staggering: Between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2025, an estimated 20,179 Palestinian children were killed — about 30 percent of all Palestinian deaths.

Children ‘deliberately targeted’
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” stated commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar, noting that Israeli authorities have systematically continued to commit the crime of genocide.

While these findings provide another layer of ironclad legal proof regarding genocidal intent, the true significance of the report lies in its exposure of the rationale behind targeting youth.

Typically, the disproportionate slaughter of children and women is dismissed by Western apologists as “collateral damage”.

The UN inquiry shattered this defence, offering a far more consequential conclusion: the targeting of Gaza’s children is part of a calculated strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

As Muralidhar bluntly summarized: “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.”

It remains a profound disappointment that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — often swift to indict war crimes committed elsewhere — continue to move at a glacial pace regarding Israel. Tragically, the catastrophe continues unabated because there is still no meaningful international mechanism willing to enforce sanctions or employ genuine pressure to halt it.

This is precisely why Danny Danon wants the world to be quiet. His outbursts are not merely directed at UN diplomats; they are directed at global civil society, ordinary citizens, and anyone refusing to look away.

Demands absolute silence
Israel demands absolute silence while Palestinians are starved, raped, and murdered. According to its twisted logic, committing these atrocities is an inherent right, and objecting to them is an act of malice.

If this logic is allowed to prevail, it becomes the blueprint for every future aggressor who wishes to kill, rape, and starve a population for geopolitical gain. Palestinians and Lebanese are already forced to inhabit this dystopian reality.

Our collective responsibility is clear: we must refuse to be quiet. We must speak out, ensuring our voices drown out the shouts of Danon and his peers, so that murder and systemic violence are never normalised as tools of military necessity.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, Before the Flood, was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include Our Vision for Liberation, My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Giving evidence before Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer, said attacks from pro-Israel groups sought to delegitimise Jewish people who criticise Israel.

“They rest on the idea that Jewish identity is inherently tied to Israel, and therefore Jewish people who don’t support Israel or who criticise Israel are not really Jewish and are traitors,” she told the commission last Thursday.

Schwartz said she had been referred to as a “self-hating Jew”, “Hitler’s Jew”, “kapo” and “Judenrat”, and had been depicted using Holocaust imagery, including “on a train to concentration camps” and with the yellow Star of David imposed on Jews under Nazi rule.

• READ MORE: ‘Unconstitutional’ – NSW court strikes down Minns’ draconian anti-protest laws
• Other Bondi Commission reports

Holocaust weaponised
She said the atrocities of the Holocaust were a motivation for her Palestine solidarity work and the weaponisation by pro-Israel accounts of Holocaust imagery was “incredibly disturbing”.

“I was taught that never again meant never again for anyone, and that’s why I do the work that I do,” Schwartz said.

“To have the symbols of the Holocaust and Nazi imagery and Jewish persecution used against me has been incredibly disturbing and distressing, and I think it

sends a chilling message to other Jewish people when they want to speak out.

Schwartz said the stereotype that all Jewish people are politically aligned with Israel “causes immense harm”.

“I speak … almost every day to Jewish people who contact me and who are terrified of speaking out, because they know that if they speak their political convictions, they face the risk of a similar sort of abuse and vilification and targeting that I have experienced.”

Murdoch media coverage fuelled abuse
Schwartz told the commission that reporting by The Australian undermined her safety and ultimately led her to abandon a police application intended to protect her from ongoing harassment.

She recounted an incident in March 2025 after police applied for a personal safety intervention order (PSIO) on her behalf against lawyer Zara Cooper, who targeted Schwartz on Instagram under the pseudonym “@clammy_fraud”.

Schwartz said she first learned of the application through a journalist from The Australian, who contacted her to say the newspaper was preparing a story.

“I informed him I hadn’t been informed of the nature of the PSIO,” she said.

“When I asked him if he could provide me with a copy, he said he couldn’t provide me with a copy … because I didn’t know its contents, I also couldn’t really respond to a lot of it, because it was a police application.”

Schwartz said the following day’s front-page article ($) incorrectly suggested she, rather than police, had initiated the proceedings in an attempt to suppress free speech.

Free speech for me, not for thee
She told the commission that The Australian subsequently published further articles about the case, including reproducing images and slurs that formed part of the material relied upon by police in seeking the intervention order.

“What was most distressing to me is The Australian chose to republish some of the offensive imagery that was the basis on which police applied for the PSIO,” she said.

“[The Australian] republished content that took my image and placed it on a train to concentration camps, content calling me a kapo and other various slurs.”

Schwartz said the coverage convinced her that pursuing legal protection would expose her to further public attention and place her at greater risk.

“It became very clear to me after that coverage that this was becoming a media circus,” she said.

“Having reported these matters to police … was actually something that was

going to make me less safe because of the media coverage.

She subsequently told police she no longer wished to proceed with the intervention order, and the application was withdrawn. She has since been reluctant to report further incidents because she fears doing so would attract similar publicity.

“It’s become very clear to me that, because of the media interest in me as a person, but particularly because of News Corp’s targeting of me, it’s not going to be safe for me to engage in reporting,” she said.

She also expressed concern that republishing the abusive material normalised antisemitic attacks against Jewish critics of Israel.

“I think that media reporting really normalises the use of these terms against other Jewish people … people see that coverage and think that it is legitimate to call a Jewish person Nazi-aligned or to place our face on a train to concentration camps.”

Being pro-Palestine is not antisemitism
Schwartz dispelled suggestions that pro-Palestinian activism is a significant driver of antisemitism, stating that, despite attempts to portray Palestine solidarity spaces as hostile to Jews, that had not reflected her own experience.

“I know that there is a lot of public discourse … that suggests that human rights spaces and Palestine solidarity spaces, in particular, are spaces that might be hostile to Jewish people,” she said.

That hasn’t been my experience at all.

Instead, Schwartz said she had received “many messages of support and clear condemnations of antisemitism” from Muslim colleagues following the Bondi terror attack on 14 December 2025.

Government response
Schwartz criticised the government’s responses to antisemitism, which have disproportionately focused on the Palestine solidarity movement, including the banning of protest slogans.

“I think that government responses, which locate the source of antisemitism within the Palestine solidarity movement, suggest for Jewish people who are also part of that movement that either we’re not really Jewish or that we are somehow against Jewish people in our own communities.”

Asked what measures would most effectively combat antisemitism, Schwartz said governments should prioritise addressing far-right extremism and

avoid conflating antisemitism with the Palestine solidarity movement.

“It’s really important for us to take the threat of far-right extremism really seriously … we know that it’s rising and it’s becoming more mainstream,” she said.

“It is critically important that governments and institutions don’t adopt policies in response to antisemitism that engage in that form of conflation itself that suggests that antisemitism is coming from the Palestine solidarity movement.”

She also called for progressive Jewish organisations to be included in policymaking on antisemitism.

“It’s really important that organisations such as the Jewish Council and other progressive Jewish organisations actually have a seat at the table” she said.

“It shows the broader community that

the Jewish community, like every community, has a diversity of opinions.

For four decades, the West presented Iran’s regional strategy as the work of a rogue state exporting revolution and chaos. They never told you about the CIA coup that destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953.

They never told you that America armed the man who gassed Iranian soldiers. They never showed you the map — the ring of American military bases on every border, the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the Israeli aircraft that bombed Iranian assets with impunity and assassinated Iranian scientists on Iranian soil.

Iran built the Axis of Resistance and the Mosaic Defence as its answer to that encirclement.

• READ MORE: ‘Technical’ talks under way in Doha as Tehran demands action
• Other Lim Tean articles

Now, with the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess the full doctrine — what it achieved, where it was tested to its limits, and what it tells us about the future of Iranian sovereignty.

This is the story they spent decades trying to prevent you from understanding.

The fortress and the forward shield: How Iran built the architecture of survival
Look at a map.

Not the map the Western press shows you — the one that marks Iran in the colour reserved for rogue states, surrounded by the clean borders of American allies and reasonable nations.

I want you to look at the real map. The strategic map below.

This is the map that every Iranian general, every Iranian strategic planner, every Iranian Supreme Leader has looked at every morning for the past four decades.

What the map shows is not an aggressive power projecting menace outward. It shows a nation under siege — encircled, threatened, and facing an existential choice that empires have always forced upon those they cannot fully control: submit, or build the architecture of survival.

Iran chose to build.

What follows is the story of how — and why. And now, in the wake of the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess that architecture under the most severe test it has ever faced.

1. The doctrine born from betrayal
To understand Iranian grand strategy, you must first understand what Iran learned — not from ideology, not from theology, but from history. From its own history, written in blood and betrayal.

Lesson One came in 1953. Iran had a democracy. A real one — a Parliament, a free press, a Prime Minister of genuine popular legitimacy who had committed the unforgivable act of returning Iran’s oil to its own people.

The West destroyed it. Not with armies, but with money, propaganda, and hired mobs. The CIA and MI6 removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed a pliant Shah who would keep Iranian oil flowing to London and Washington.

The lesson Iran drew was stark and permanent: the West does not want Iran strong, sovereign, or self-determining. It wants Iran “manageable”.

Lesson Two came in the 1980s. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 with the tacit blessing of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran in 1979 as a strategic opportunity.

For eight years, Iran bled. Perhaps one million lives. And when Iranian forces began pushing back, Washington made its choice. It provided Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions. It supplied the precursor chemicals for the weapons Saddam used to gas Iranian soldiers on the battlefield — mustard gas, tabun, sarin — in one of the most extensively documented war crimes of the modern era.

American officials knew. They continued regardless.

The lesson Iran drew from those eight years was equally stark: when your existence is threatened, no one will come. Not the United Nations. Not international law. Not the conventions against chemical weapons. No one.

These two lessons — the 1953 betrayal and the 1980s abandonment — are the foundation of everything that follows. They are not ideology. They are experience. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed: the life of the law — and we might add, the life of strategy — is not logic. It is experience.

Iran’s grand strategy is the experience of a nation that has been betrayed, encircled, and attacked — and has drawn the only rational conclusions available to a sovereign state determined to survive.

2. The encirclement — what Iran actually sees
Before we examine what Iran built, we must understand what Iran faces. Because the architecture of Iranian strategy makes no sense without the map — the real map, not the sanitised version.

To Iran’s east, American forces spent two decades in Afghanistan — on Iran’s longest land border. To Iran’s west, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein but replaced him with a country that became host to the largest American embassy on earth, a vast network of military bases, and tens of thousands of American troops — sitting on Iran’s western doorstep.

In the Persian Gulf — Iran’s southern maritime frontier — the United States Fifth Fleet operates from Bahrain, a permanent naval presence of carrier groups, destroyers, and the full apparatus of American maritime power.

At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, America maintained the largest US air installation in the entire Middle East — a facility capable of projecting devastating airpower across the region within hours.

In Kuwait. In the UAE. Across the Arabian Peninsula, American bases formed a constellation of military power that, viewed from Tehran, looked less like a defensive alliance and more like a slowly tightening noose.

This is not Iranian paranoia. This is Iranian geography.

Any strategic planner in any country — American, British, Chinese, Indian — looking at that map would draw the same conclusion. Iran had been encircled with a precision that left nothing to chance.

The message was unambiguous: the United States had positioned itself to strangle Iran economically through Gulf control, to strike Iran from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do so from bases close enough to minimise warning time and maximise devastation.

Iran looked at this map. And Iran made a decision.

If the Americans intend to make the Persian Gulf an American lake, Iran will ensure that lake has a price. If American power is to sit on every border, every border will become a potential front. If encirclement is the American strategy, Iran’s answer will be to make that encirclement so costly to act upon that it becomes, in practice, a cage with open bars — present but unusable.

The Axis of Resistance was not born of religious fervour or ideological ambition. It was born of that map.

3. The Israeli dimension — the undeclared nuclear power that bombs its neighbours
And then there is Israel.

The Western framing of the Iran-Israel confrontation presents it as Iranian aggression against a peaceful democratic state. This is such a complete inversion of the actual sequence of events that it requires dismantling with some care.

Israel is, by the near-universal assessment of the international intelligence community, a nuclear power. It possesses an estimated 90 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has never submitted to international inspection.

It maintains what is called a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying what the entire world knows to be true. And it directs its considerable diplomatic energy toward ensuring that no other state in its region acquires the same deterrent capability it has quietly accumulated for itself.

This is the context in which Iran’s nuclear programme must be understood. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Its programme operated under international scrutiny that Israel’s never has.

And yet it was Iran that was presented as the existential threat, Iran that was sanctioned, Iran that was threatened with military strikes — and ultimately, Iran that was bombed.

But the nuclear dimension was only the beginning. Israeli planes repeatedly struck Iranian assets in Syria — military installations, weapons convoys, advisers — hundreds of strikes over a decade, conducted with complete impunity.

Israeli intelligence assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil. In April 2024, Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus — sovereign Iranian territory under the Vienna Convention — killing senior commanders.

In July 2024, Israeli intelligence assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran itself.

In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and America followed with Operation Midnight Hammer — the first direct US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, targeting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Then, on February 28, 2026, came the full assault: Operation Epic Fury, a joint US-Israeli campaign of nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iran’s missiles, air defences, military infrastructure, and leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Dozens of senior officials perished. Iran’s nuclear programme was severely degraded.

The doctrine that Iran had constructed across four decades — forward defence through the Axis of Resistance, interior resilience through the Mosaic Defence — was now facing its ultimate test.

Hezbollah had served as Iran’s most elegant strategic instrument — a deterrent positioned on Israel’s northern border, ensuring that any strike on Iran carried automatic, unavoidable cost.

For 30 years, it worked. Every Israeli military planner understood that attacking Natanz meant absorbing tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets into northern Israel simultaneously. That deterrent logic held — until 2024, when Israel called the bluff.

Yet even after Nasrallah’s assassination and the degradation of Hezbollah’s arsenal, the organisation demonstrated remarkable residual fighting capacity. When IDF ground forces attempted to push into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah gave them a drubbing — inflicting casualties, destroying armoured vehicles, and forcing repeated tactical withdrawals that exposed the limits of Israeli conventional military power on the ground.

The shield had been damaged. It had not been broken.

4. The Axis of Resistance — architecture of Forward Defence
With the American encirclement and Israeli threat understood, the Axis of Resistance reveals itself not as an Iranian imperial project but as a coherent strategic architecture built on a single organising principle: make the cost of attacking Iran prohibitive, by ensuring that any attack triggers consequences across the entire region simultaneously.

The components of that architecture were distinct in character but unified in purpose.

Hezbollah was Iran’s most sophisticated instrument — battle-hardened, institutionally deep, politically embedded in Lebanese society, and at its peak possessing an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles.

It is not a militia in the casual sense. It is a military organisation with combat experience forged across four decades, in Lebanon’s civil war, the Syrian conflict, and multiple wars against one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world.

Despite the severe degradation it suffered in 2024 and 2025, Hezbollah remains a potent force — as the IDF discovered when its ground forces pushed into southern Lebanon and were met with fierce resistance, tactical ambushes, and anti-armour fire that forced repeated withdrawals.

Iran’s first line of forward defence has been bloodied but not destroyed.

Hamas was a different and more complicated case — Palestinian in origin, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition rather than Shia political theology. But Iran adopted the Palestinian cause with strategic intelligence, recognising that support for Palestinian resistance gave Tehran something invaluable: moral legitimacy across the entire Muslim world, Sunni and Shia alike.

Supporting Hamas cost Iran relatively little. It purchased Iran enormous influence and the one thing that money and missiles cannot buy — the genuine sympathy of the Arab street.

The Houthis of Yemen were the most recent and surprising component. Not originally an Iranian creation, they were driven into Tehran’s strategic embrace by the Saudi-led war in Yemen — backed by American weapons, logistics, and political cover.

The Houthis’ capacity to threaten Red Sea shipping and strike deep into the Gulf transformed them from a local insurgency into a regional strategic asset of considerable importance. Their intervention following October 7, 2023 demonstrated reach that surprised even optimistic Iranian planners — and their continued operations through the 2026 war demonstrated a resilience that confounded repeated predictions of their swift neutralisation.

The Iraqi militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces and their various components — completed the architecture. Born from the chaos of the American invasion and consolidated during the fight against ISIS, these forces represented Iran’s most direct penetration of a neighbouring state’s security structure, giving Tehran influence over the country on its western border through which any American ground offensive would necessarily pass.

Together, these components formed what Iranian strategists called the “ring of fire” — a constellation of armed, motivated, battle-tested forces positioned around Iran’s primary adversaries. Not an empire. A defensive perimeter, constructed outside Iran’s borders precisely because Iran’s borders had proven, twice in living memory, to be insufficient protection against the ambitions of external powers.

5. The Mosaic Defence — making Iran unconquerable
Forward defence alone — however sophisticated — was always only half of Iran’s strategic architecture. Iranian planners understood that the outer ring could be degraded. Proxies could be weakened. Forward positions could be overrun. The question that preoccupied Iran’s military establishment for four decades was this: if the forward shield fails, what then?

The answer was the Mosaic Defence.

The concept is as elegant as it is ruthless. Iran deliberately, systematically, and over decades decentralised its entire military infrastructure across all 31 of its provinces. Missile arsenals were not concentrated in single facilities but dispersed across hundreds of sites — underground, mountainside, desert — spread across a country the size of Western Europe.

Command and control was distributed rather than centralised, designed to survive the decapitation strikes that destroyed Iraq’s military capacity in 1991 and Libya’s in 2011. Defence industries were deliberately dispersed so that no single strike, however precise, could eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce and deploy weapons.

The underground dimension was particularly significant. Iran invested enormously in what it called its “missile cities” — vast subterranean complexes buried deep enough to survive all but the most specialised munitions. The 2026 campaign tested this directly.

Despite nearly 900 strikes in the opening 12 hours and CENTCOM ultimately claiming over 11,000 targets struck across the entire war, a preliminary US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment — leaked and characterised by the Trump administration as “political” — concluded that Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the strikes began and that the underground facilities had not been collapsed.

The CIA subsequently disputed this, claiming severe damage that would take years to rebuild. The truth, as is so often the case in the fog of war, likely lies somewhere between these assessments.

What is beyond dispute is this: the logic Iran applied — the logic of a student of history who had watched what happened to states that presented centralised targets — proved partially vindicated. The 31-province dispersal model meant that even 11,000 strikes could not deliver a clean, decisive blow. Iran was damaged. Iran was not defeated.

Centralisation is a vulnerability. Dispersal is survival.

The Mosaic Defence and the Axis of Resistance were never separate strategies. They were two halves of a single, integrated doctrine. Attack Iran’s periphery — and the Axis activates. Penetrate to the interior — and the Mosaic ensures there is no clean, decisive blow to be struck. The 2026 war demonstrated both the power and the limits of that doctrine.

6. The 2026 War — the ultimate test
Intellectual honesty requires confronting what Operation Epic Fury achieved — and what it did not.

What it achieved was substantial. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes — a decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership of historic proportions. Dozens of senior IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and regime officials perished. Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure was severely degraded. Its air defences were systematically dismantled. Its navy was effectively destroyed.

The Iranian economy, already strangled by decades of sanctions, went into free fall. Its currency collapsed. Protests that had begun in December 2025 spread across the country as the regime’s authority visibly cracked.

What it did not achieve is equally instructive.

Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile — the IAEA had confirmed 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent purity before the war, sufficient for multiple weapons if further enriched — could not be fully accounted for.

Two military campaigns left that stockpile harder, not easier, to locate. Iran had anticipated decapitation. Within 30 minutes of the opening strikes, Iranian forces launched simultaneous retaliatory attacks across multiple fronts without waiting for centralised authorisation — precisely the pre-delegated response architecture that the Mosaic Defence doctrine had prescribed.

The regime was headless. The military machine kept fighting.

Iran’s response was devastating to the American strategic position in the region. It closed the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply passes — triggering a global energy shock and fuel crises across Asia.

It struck American bases across the Gulf simultaneously: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. It bombarded Israel with over 525 ballistic missiles. It struck oil infrastructure across the Arabian Peninsula. Thirteen American service members were killed. The regional war that Iran’s forward defence doctrine had always promised to trigger — the promise that had deterred attack for thirty years — was fulfilled.

The ceasefire that followed told its own story. After 40 days of sustained combat, with both sides exhausted and the global economy convulsing, Pakistan brokered a conditional truce on April 8, 2026.

The highest-level direct US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution followed — JD Vance meeting Iranian counterparts in Islamabad. On June 17, 2026, Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian signed the Islamabad Memorandum, with Trump signing at the Palace of Versailles, establishing a 60-day framework for further negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

Read that again. The United States of America — which had launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and declared regime change as its explicit objective — ended up negotiating. Not dictating. Negotiating. With the Islamic Republic it had sought to destroy.

The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — son of Ali — approved the memorandum, noting he had “a different view” but accepted it in the national interest. Iran committed to reaffirming it would not develop nuclear weapons. The US committed to lifting sanctions and removing forces from Iran’s proximity after a final deal.

Iran’s nuclear programme — battered but not eliminated — remained. Its missile programme was explicitly declared off the table for negotiations by Tehran. And critically, Iran extracted from the world’s most powerful military the one concession that no amount of technical language could conceal: America negotiated.

That fact is irreversible. And every adversary of American power on earth has filed it carefully for future reference.

7. The Strategic Verdict — doctrine under fire
Here is what four decades of Iranian grand strategy achieved, assessed without sentiment.
The Axis of Resistance was degraded — Hamas devastated in Gaza, Hezbollah bloodied in Lebanon, Iranian assets struck across Syria. The Mosaic Defence was tested as never before — 11,000 targets struck, nuclear facilities damaged, leadership decapitated.

The forward shield failed to deter the ultimate assault it was designed to prevent.
And yet. Iran survived.

The Islamic Republic — written off by analysts for decades, subjected to the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, struck by two rounds of devastating military campaigns — survived. Its military kept fighting after its Supreme Leader was killed. Its enriched uranium could not be fully accounted for. Its proxies continued operating. The Strait of Hormuz became a weapon that brought the global economy to its knees.

And ultimately, America came to the table.

This is not the outcome of a state that built the wrong strategic doctrine. This is the outcome of a state that built remarkable strategic resilience — imperfect, costly, and tested to its absolute limits — but resilience nonetheless.

The Mosaic Defence’s dispersal across 31 provinces meant no clean killing blow. The pre-delegated command authority meant no paralysis after decapitation. The Houthis’ continued Red Sea operations meant the economic pressure never relented. The Iraqi militias provided Iran with leverage in negotiations.

And the nuclear stockpile — unaccounted for, potentially dispersed before the strikes — remained the ultimate trump card that no military campaign could eliminate with certainty.
What Iran demonstrated in 2026 was not the invincibility its doctrine promised. What it demonstrated was something perhaps more important: the cost of attacking Iran is catastrophic, even in victory.

America got its strikes. It killed Khamenei. It damaged the nuclear programme. It triggered regime change of a kind — though Mojtaba Khamenei is hardly the pro-Western successor Washington imagined.

And what did it get for all of that? A fragile ceasefire, a 60-day negotiating framework, an unaccounted nuclear stockpile, a Strait of Hormuz that remains contested, a global energy shock, thirteen dead Americans, and a region convulsed by war.

Mosaddegh was destroyed because Iran was weak — because it had no forward shield, no interior fortress, no capacity to make its destruction costly. The Iran of 2026 is not that Iran.

The wound of 1953 was the education. The architecture of survival — tested, battered, partially broken — was the graduation.

The lesson of Iran’s grand strategy is ultimately this: a nation that cannot be cheaply destroyed cannot be permanently dominated. Even after the most severe bombings, Iran extracted a negotiation. Even after decapitation, its military kept fighting. Even after 11,000 strikes, its nuclear stockpile remained unaccounted for.

That is not the record of a doctrine that failed. It is the record of a doctrine that made Iran’s destruction more costly than any power was ultimately willing to pay.

In a future article, I will examine Iran’s nuclear programme — not through the lens of Western proliferation anxiety, but through the strategic logic of a state that watched what happened to countries that disarmed, and has now watched what happened to itself when it did not yet possess the ultimate deterrent.

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.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULWP) has accused the Indonesian military of shooting and wounding two teenagers in Titigi village, Intan Jaya, and causing other casualties on Monday.

The pair have been identified as 18-year-old Duad Hagismijau and Kiko Hagismijau, 16, and they are now being treated in hospital, alleges a statement by the ULMWP.

The statement said the two teenagers were working on building St Francis Xavier Titigi Catholic Church in their village when the attack began.

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More than 2000 villagers have been displaced by this “latest display of colonial violence”, adding to more than 122,000 internal refugees spread throughout West Papua, the statement said.

“Intan Jaya is a warzone. The Titigi assault was followed by further drone attacks on Danggoa village — already the site of a previous drone-executed civilian killing — and Dangomba village in Hitadipa district,” said interim ULMWP president Benny Wenda.

Wenda also stressed the important historical date today, which marks 1 July 1971 — the 55th anniversary of the declaration of independence by the OPM (Free West Papua Movement) at Markas Victoria.

“This historic declaration, the second in the history of West Papua, was a critical moment in our struggle — a powerful rejection of Indonesian colonisation and the Act of No Choice that enabled it,” Wenda said.

“As enshrined in our constitution, the ULMWP recognises all such declarations as legitimate.”

‘Ongoing brutality’
Wenda said the “ongoing Indonesian brutality” reminded Papuans why they must “uphold the spirit of 1971”.

Also on Monday, the TNI (Indonesian military) was alleged to have opened fire on two Papuan civilians near a military base by the Dogabu river, in Hitadipa, the ULMWP statement said.

One of them, a minor named Sandibega Agimbau, was reportedly hit by an Asoka mortar shell. The other, a shepherd called Edianus Agimbau, suffered gunshot injuries and later died of his wounds.

His last words were that “I cannot walk any further”.

Later that day, the military claimed yet another victim, this time in Tolikara Regency, the ULMWP statement said.

A man named Krona Penggu was shot and killed by Indonesian soldiers near the Tolikara border.

“The ULMWP demands that Indonesia immediately withdraws its colonial military from Intan Jaya and across the highlands, in order to allow refugees to return to their homes,” Wenda said.

“They must also immediately cease using drones to drop bombs on Papuan civilians, a direct contravention of international law.”

Indonesian authorities have so far made no comment.

“Why is it that African teams and Middle Eastern teams have to answer for what their governments are doing but European teams don’t?” South African comedian Trevor Noah asked recently during a World Cup watch party.

He was reacting to the questions Western journalists had lobbed at Iranian players following their games. But the question goes far beyond Iran.

It speaks to a familiar hierarchy in global journalism: Some players are allowed to be athletes. Others are turned into ambassadors, defendants and moral exhibits.

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The World Cup is often sold as the place where football rises above politics. This has always been a canard. Politics, and hypocrisy, have always been part of the sport.

Teams have boycotted or been banned from the competition because of the policies of their governments. Russia is banned for its invasion of Ukraine. South Africa was eventually banned for apartheid.

Israel, however, gets to play in qualifiers despite occupying Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, bombing Iran, and despite findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN experts that it is committing genocide in Gaza and maintaining a system of apartheid at home and in the occupied territories.

The United States, too, has never been banned despite its many wars of aggression.

Full of politics
Nor is the World Cup unique. International cultural and sporting competitions are full of politics and hypocrisies dressed up as principle. Just look at the controversies around Israel’s participation in Eurovision.

Noah’s question is an indictment of a journalism that likes to imagine itself as challenging power but often mirrors its assumptions. Much ink was spilled over the propriety of Russia and Qatar hosting the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, given the policies of those governments.

Yet there has been far less interrogation of the propriety of the US hosting this tournament while it attacks Iran and Venezuela, deports asylum seekers, and blocks or restricts the travel of tournament officials, players and fans.

The selective accountability that runs through the institutions — who is banned, who is allowed to host — runs through the press box too. So it should not surprise us that some political questions are reserved for some teams and not others.

Ahead of their match against Egypt in Seattle, branded locally as a “Pride Match”, Iran and Egypt were both asked about LGBTQ rights. A FIFA official even read a statement saying Iran wished to answer only questions about the game. Still, the media persisted. Egyptian officials also shielded their players from similar questions.

Again, the point is not that LGBTQ rights, war, repression, discrimination, apartheid or genocide are unimportant. They are profoundly important. Journalists should ask difficult questions. But difficult questions should not become a ritual reserved for some passports only.

American players are not routinely asked to account for US bombings, border policy, racism, police violence or support for Israel. English players are not habitually asked about British arms exports or colonial legacy. French players are not expected to answer for military interventions in Africa. German players are not pressed on Berlin’s crushing of pro-Palestinian protests.

Not a confession
And when European teams have been pulled into politics — the OneLove armbands and the German squad covering their mouths for a team photo at Qatar 2022, England taking a knee at Euro 2020 — it was a protest they chose to make, not a confession demanded of them before they were allowed to speak.

No reporter required them to denounce their governments as the price of discussing a match.

Western footballers are treated as individuals who happen to represent a country. Players from Iran, Egypt, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Senegal or Ghana are more easily turned into representatives of regimes.

For many players from the Global South, the tournament press conference becomes an ideological checkpoint. Before they are allowed to talk about tactics, injuries or the opposition’s midfield, they are asked to explain their governments, their societies, their religions, their laws and their wars.

Sound familiar?

Remember Palestinian interviewees being required to condemn Hamas at the start of any interview before they could speak of the genocide in Gaza? The purpose was not clarification. It was classification.

It established the moral hierarchy before the conversation could begin: Israel good, Hamas bad. Palestinian suffering could be heard only after passing through the checkpoint of Western approval.

World Cup pressers
The same logic is visible in these World Cup pressers. The Iranians must condemn Iran. The Egyptians must condemn Egypt. Africans must prove they understand the West’s moral vocabulary before they can be trusted to speak. But Americans will not be asked to condemn the United States, nor the English the UK.

This is the real answer to Noah’s question. The issue is not whether politics belongs in sport. It always has. The issue is who is made to carry politics, and who is allowed to simply play.

Western media is not merely asking questions. It is enforcing a story long carried by Western governments and institutions: the West is the measure of morality, and the rest of the world must constantly answer for itself.

Patrick Gathara is senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.